I’ll admit, I do find cave diving romantic in a number of ways. It’s hard not to. Particularly back in the 1990s, when I was exploring the cave systems of Northern Florida, up in Manatee Springs and Wakulla Springs, which had never been done before, I would stop every now and then and look around, and try to just absorb the raw energy that I felt in those environments. I would think about the timescales, tens of millions of years, and how odd it is to be in the middle of a massive black chamber 10,000 meters away from any other human life in a place that no eyes have ever witnessed, that very little life has ever seen. I feel very plugged in to a raw form of nature that is hard to get in other ways. It’s a combined adrenaline rush, but also a poetic kind of connection to human history.
In those Wakulla caves, we were working to connect the passages beneath the springs of Tallahassee. We would dive down there looking for a connection, looking for a way to the other side, knowing that this all must fit together somehow, repeatedly. We would have to do it over and over.
There was one moment when I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I didn’t know why, I could just feel it in my gut. And then in the distance, I could see the light come through the water. We were eight hours from the other side of the cave. That was probably one of my favorite moments of my life.
I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. With some luck, I managed to make it out, even when I made those mistakes. I lost some friends along the way who weren’t so lucky.
I’ve never been with somebody when they died, but unfortunately, I’ve had to do a body recovery. It was one of my better friends. I was about three or four hours away at the time, and he and a group were doing a dive through a very difficult passage. When they came back to find me, I was the only one who could get down there to get him. It was so hard to do, trudging down for those hours, knowing it would be the last time I would see my friend, and in the worst circumstances. Bringing his body back with me felt was even longer.
That was a long time ago now, in around 1999. I’ve lost around a half dozen friends, great friends, along the way, and it had a strong impact on me. You never know what’s going to happen down there. I could have a heart attack and die, sure, but most of the deaths down there are wholly preventable. It’s people being careless, crossing the line or being too casual. That leads to death, even if you’re experienced. Those kinds of lessons push me to help others and try to stop these things from happening again.
The most scared I’ve ever been is a near-fatality very early on in my diving life. I was with a girl, I took her down into the caves, as a date. I wanted to impress her, I guess, and that was the best way I knew how. Trust me, you can’t think anything about this I’m not already thinking.
I was very comfortable with my diving, but she was pretty new, and I wasn’t ready for that. I brought her in, and I was paying very much attention to myself, and was very proud of that, checking my buoyancy and all of that, very pleased with myself and my expertise in front of my date, and suddenly it hit me, ‘what am I doing, I’m not watching her closely’. I knew she was ok because I was holding her hand, but I wasn’t paying attention to how she was kicking, because she was just destroying the visibility line behind us. It’s now possible that we couldn’t find our way back to the surface. We could die down here, and it was totally my fault.
Fortunately, with some presence of mind, I stayed focused, somehow got us back and we survived it. It was scary. I’m an instructor, the one who’s supposed to know a lot about diving and I put another person I’m with before myself and I still got myself in that situation. In that moment I saw the responsibility to change things, and that ended up being one of the pivotal moments that led me to create better standards.
We built a new system of rules—we created the ‘Doing It Right’ system of diving, which is now the standard across the world. We built the rules, how to avoid the mistakes that my dear friends made, that I almost made myself, in the most dire standards, because we were the first ones to know the rules needed to be there in the first place.
I still miss my friends. Even now I think about them and am so glad there’s a place like Deep Dive Dubai where people can not only experience the best of this, but to learn how to do things properly in a safe environment. Diving is a much better place now. I wish we hadn’t needed to make those mistakes to get here, we’re here now, and that’s what matters.
Jarrod Jablonski, Director, Deep Dive Dubai, and legendary cave explorer
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