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RESCUED!

Steve Gerrard stirred his coffee slowly as a lazy Sunday morning in 1991 began at Spring Systems Dive Center in Luraville, Florida: "cave country" for those in the know. He still had some time to kill before his cave diving class would begin and he turned the pages of the Sunday paper with growing boredom. Just after 9:00 AM, the phone range and right away he knew this was not going to be a typical weekend. The caller was Vivian Indriago from Venezuela. Gerrard remembers, "She was distraught. A good friend of hers, Gustavo Badillo, was lost in an underwater cave. He'd already been missing over 12 hours and it was hard to hold much hope that he'd be found alive." Gustavo and a diving partner, Eduardo Wallis, had decided to dive the Riito de Acarite cave in search of a legendary underground lake reported by earlier British explorers in 1973. This river cave would be rated as extremely hazardous by even the top cave diving professionals. The entrance is gained from the base of a mountain surrounded by dense, virtually impenetrable jungle at nearly 2500 feet elevation. The bottom is fine mud silt rendering visibility limited under the best conditions and water temperatures hover at about the mid-6o's F. The setting was challenging enough and the two buddies were well experienced divers (Gustavo was credentialed as an instructor), but neither were formally trained as cave divers. This fundamental requirement had been ignored and now one man was missing and presumed dead. Gerrard quickly listened to enough details of the dive to assess the situation. "Both divers had entered the water at 8:00 PM Saturday night without a guideline from outside the cave, but carrying a 100 foot spool of thick rope. They were each using a single 80 tank, one regulator, no alternate... More »