One of my hobbies while I was in the Navy Reserve was Scuba Diving.  In fact when I was later in Michigan I had a Scuba Diving store for a few months under the Name of Aqua Living.  While I was in Georgia my friend Murray Hamilton and I did some recreational diving and also did some body recovery work in conjunction with the Naval Reserve. As you will read, Murray died on one of our cave dives. It was a terrible event and I was very depressed for some time. He had five children.  Fortunately his wife did not stay single for too long and life went on.

I am enclosing a portion of the chapter of Jim Dugan's book " Man under the sea." It tells the story of the dive in Radium Springs Caverns.

Page 252

MAN UNDER THE SEA

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS IN A CAVE

Jon Lindbergh's sang‑froid. overcame the dangers of Bower Cave, but two young naval reservists of Macon, Georgia, were not so lucky. Lieutenant Murray Anderson and electronics man Donald Gerue began free diving in 1954. By this time the do‑it‑yourself craze had reached diving apparatus and Anderson built his own fifty dollar lung from a surplus Air Force oxygen demand regulator. The aviation regulator was designed for breathing in very low pressures of the substratosphere, not in the rapidly increasing pressures of the water. Nonetheless, hundreds of these regulators were built into diving lungs from plans in home workshop magazines. Several died wearing them. Gerue used a manufactured compressed‑air lung, which provided a breathing supply for a half hour in shallow water.

The two had a fine initiation in the sea at St. Mark's Light off the Florida coast, and had built up a team experience of four months, when Anderson's wife, Betty, said she had heard of inner caverns under Radium Springs, near Albany, Georgia, the papershell pecan and peanut capital of the world. The Creek Indians had called it Blue Springs, but when, some years ago, the papers came out with the news of Madame Curie's elixir, local land agents decided what they had in the springs was radium. A hotel and bathing beach give on a circular pond which has an islet in the middle. A tributary of the Flint River rises out of Radium Springs. "A fashionable resort has grown up around the entire area and so there was a great deal of interest in our diving there." Gerue told the story of Radium Springs to his friend, Professor Delvin Covey, of Wesleyan College, Macon, for this book.

"We made our first trip to the springs during March, 1955," Gerue began. "Between then and May 14 we made seven trips. On our first dive we went only as far as the end of the first corridor. The first part of the descent is made through a boil in the pool, about twenty‑eight feet deep. "The boil is all rock with about four feet of silt on the floor. The silt looked hard packed and sandy but changed and became cloudy at the slightest movement. As we swam, our fins stirred up clouds so that we could not see what was behind, but the visibility ahead was good. The rocks are very sharp and light brown in color.

"We saw only rock bass and some small, fresh water eels in the way of animal life. As far as we could tell there was no vegetation, but there must have been some sort of fungus growth on the rocks; for any abrasions made by hitting them began to swell almost immediately and soon became infected. "At the bottom of the boil there is the entrance of a passage which declines at about a forty‑five degree angle. This passage‑way is about thirty feet long and six feet in diameter. It reaches, at the end of the decline, a depth of fifty feet. We had to stop at the end of the passage on our first dive, because we had no lights; and all natural light stops at that point. In all we made about sixty dives and always went down together. Each time we explored slightly farther than we had gone on previous dives. "When we went for our last dive Murray and I were using the same

Page 254

MAN UNDER THE SEA

equipment we had used from the first. His homemade open circuit breathing apparatus holds forty‑four cubic feet of air, which is a sufficient supply for about twelve or fifteen minutes at the depth to which he had gone. However, it has no air reserve, and this flaw may have been the cause of his death. "Our additional equipment consisted of Navy battle lanterns, a depth gauge, divers' knives and weighted belts. We were using a Cornelius three stage compressor and had also three, three hundred‑cubic‑feet tanks of compressed air. I was wearing a Pirelli short rubber suit and fins, but Murray wore only swimming trunks and fins.

"I made the first dive that day and can report only my own impressions and observations, since Murray's dives cost him his life. "When I reached the lowest point in the passage, I turned left at a fifty degree angle into another, longer corridor. The entrance was a two foot hole. Just inside I found a large cement building block which apparently had been dropped when the springs were being built. From this point on I had no natural light and had to rely on my lantern. I realized I was the first human who had gone this far, and the corridor itself is at least one hundred feet long. At first I experienced a great feeling of being alone, without sound and light. The whole cave seemed to overwhelm me. My feelings were mixed, though fear, tempered with caution, predominated. I was alone in this primeval atmosphere. I was struck by the immensity of the corridor, but at the same time I stood in awe at the raw, untouched beauty of the clear water and the distance. Here, truly, was of the deep!

"It was my impression that this corridor was not a natural but was caused by some cataclysmic action many hundreds of years ago.; The rocks are generally of the same composition as those on the first passage and are extremely jagged. As much as I could tell by artificial light they are light brown in color, flecked with white and black. They are quite; porous and absorbed all air bubbles almost immediately. The roof in this passage is about forty feet high.

"The depth at the end of the corridor is seventy feet, and it appeared to me that this is the deepest spot in the whole cave. At this point there is a large, egg‑shaped chamber on the left. Just at the left side of the entrance: I found a large, jagged rock. I tied off my rope here and went back to tell: Murray what I had found. To this point I had used about one hundred and seventy feet of the rope. I had been down in the cave about twenty minutes

"On shore I sat talking with Murray for about a half hour while I rested and had my air supply replenished. Again I decided to go ahead and Murray to follow when my silt had settled enough for him to see. at the tie‑off for about fifteen minutes, but he didn't come down

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS IN A CAVE

255 saw his light at the end of the corridor, however. When I went back up for more air, he told me the silt hadn't cleared enough and so he had gone back. By this time the sun was about ready to set. I went hack into the cave to untie the rope so we could go home.

"Along the passageways the water seemed to be flowing at the rate of one knot. In the small passage openings and in the chamber the flow got up to about four knots, and I had to pull myself along on the rocks. After about twenty‑five minutes of looking around, I turned to go out, taking the rope with me. Just then I saw a light coming into the corridor and waited at the rock. Though I didn't know why Murray had changed his mind about coming into the cave, I was not concerned about it. He looked around at me as he swam past, and I made some remark about the size of the cave. He nodded assent and swam on into the chamber at the left. By this time I had had to turn on my reserve supply of air, so I flashed my light to signal that I was leaving. I cannot be sure he was aware I was leaving. However, he must have known that it was time for my air to be running out. I lay the rope down inside the chamber and followed it back out.

"I waited outside for about two minutes and said to some of the boys there that Murray should be coming out. Already I had a premonition of something wrong. Within another five minutes I went back. In the long corridor the water was very cloudy with silt, and I could see no more than six inches ahead. I followed the rope along the corridor, calling, but Murray did not answer. My air gave out and I had to hurry back to the surface again. It took about five minutes to refill the lung, and I went back down to the rock where I had made my tie‑off.

"I held onto the rope, swimming in every direction and calling for Murray. Again my air was giving out, and I had to get out. The boys on the bank had felt my tug at the rope and thought I wanted more slack, so they fed it to me. Then I knew that I, too, stood every chance of being lost. I had to fight down a growing fear and panic. I finally had to sit on the floor, taking in a bit of rope at a time until I found out which way it led. When I came out I had spent a total of two and a half hours at a depth of seventy feet in 68° water and could not go down again. I was cold, tired, and frightened; and I knew that Murray was dead.

"We called two Navy divers from Charleston, South Carolina, and they found Murray at about 6:3o the next morning, on their first dive, about six feet from the end of the rape and in approximately the place where I had last seen him. I must have gone past him several times, but could not see him because the water was so cloudy from the silt he had kicked up."