2000 – 2003
CAVEDIVER.COM ran for over twenty years in its original form. This is what was worth carrying forward — the writing, the surveys, and the first-hand accounts.
Articles
R. D. Milhollin's first-hand account of a two-person push to the upstream sump in Crockett County — twelve hours underground, knee-deep mud, and a zero-visibility dive on a 13 cf cylinder that ran dry on surfacing.
Full text · contributed to CAVEDIVER.COM
Robert Laird's notes on the cave itself — fault or joint-plane character, chert walls, the Fire Hydrant restriction, 85 °F water inside against a near-zero-visibility lake outside, and why the quoted depths keep changing.
Full text · author's original warnings retained
Topographic material at 2,500, 1,000 and 250-foot scales, a 3D relief view of the reservoir, Robert Laird's 1996 survey sketch, and a photograph of the spring as a working site before the Amistad impoundment.
Recovered from the original server — 52 image assets in total. The key plates now appear in the Goodenough notes.
Cycle and float charging specifications for sealed lead-acid packs — limit initial current to 0.20C, charge to 2.45 V per cell at 68 °F, hold until current drops to roughly 0.01C, then disconnect or switch to float at 2.25–2.30 V per cell.
Preserved as a record of pre-LED practice. Do not apply it to lithium chemistry.
Held back pending permission
These appeared on the original site but were written or published by third parties. They are described here rather than reproduced until rights are confirmed.
The Texas Magazine profile of Tom Iliffe — reported by Todd Ackerman with photography by Tim Stamm, published 10 September 1998. Roughly 19,000 characters of newspaper copy, reproduced in full on the old site.
Needs permission from the Chronicle, or replacement with a short excerpt and a link.
Irvine's first-person account of an 18,000-foot penetration at 285 ffw during the Woodville Karst Plain Project era at Wakulla — vivid, profane, and entirely his own writing.
Needs the author's or his estate's permission.
Not text but a scanned page from Underwater Speleology, December 1976 — among the earliest Texas cave diving records held here.
Needs permission from the NSS Cave Diving Section.
Everything in this section is preserved as a record of what was written at the time. Equipment practice, particularly in lighting, battery chemistry and sidemount configuration, has changed substantially since. Do not treat a 2002 technical note as instruction for equipment you intend to take into a cave.
About the original site
The first CAVEDIVER.COM was built in Visual Page 2.0 in 2000, in the HTML of the day — table layouts, framesets, a Flash animation on the front page, and a resource index that eventually ran to seventeen headings across sixty-odd pages.
It was, and this was always the point, a place to park information. Divers sent in what they had learned, it went up with a date attached, and readers were trusted to weigh it. Very little of the modern web still works that way.
The rebuild keeps the material and the disclaimers, drops the frames and the Flash, and makes the whole thing readable on a phone — which is where most people will now find it.
The original site carried material from divers across the Texas and Gulf Coast community, credited on the pages where it appeared. Equipment notes, trip reports, surveys and photographs were sent in by people who simply wanted the information to exist somewhere.
Among them was Chuck Noe, who founded GulfTex Scuba in July 1993 as the Houston area's first technical dive facility, dived with the Woodville Karst Plain Project in Florida and the Yucatán, and became a founding member and director of the Goodenough Springs Exploration Project — which is still working the spring these pages document.
Photographs, diagrams and written material © 2000–2026 Robert Laird unless otherwise credited. Not for use, duplication or distribution without express permission of the author.