Revisiting a Tragic Incident at Indian Spring, Florida

Indian Spring lies about 450 feet south of SR 267 (Bloxham Cutoff) and 3/4 mile west of the entrance to Edward Ball Wakulla Springs State Park in Wakulla County, south of Tallahassee, Florida. It rests just over 1.5 miles northwest of the main spring vent of Wakulla Springs. The former YMCA Camp Indian Spring once surrounded this enchanting karst feature. The YMCA used it as a recreation area for summer camps.

Fairly recently (July 2021), however, someone bought Indian Spring and the surrounding land and renamed it Sherlock Spring. The current trend of renaming widely known and established geographic features to something other than their traditional names baffles me. This relabeling often confuses long-time residents and visitors who have known these places by their conventional labels for decades.

The native peoples in the region, such as the Apalachee and their Creek/Seminole successors, obviously did not call it Indian Spring. The latter name appears in the Florida Geological Survey's Springs of Florida Bulletin as Indian Spring in 1947. In over half a century living in this region, I've only heard it called Indian Spring. A trip to the Florida DEP's surveying and mapping section in Tallahassee may reveal even earlier uses of that name.

 Indian Spring has a basin with a diameter of 185 ft. A large limestone cavern lies on the north side of its vent is the opening through which water flows. After passing through a tight section (called Squaws) beyond the cavern (that part of the cave lit from surface light), the cave splits into upstream and downstream passages 500 feet into it. The depths of this grotto reach up to 315 feet. It holds about 2.25 miles of underwater tunnels that have been explored and mapped by divers.

The spring water generally remains clear with a greenish tint. Algae often float in clumps around the spring pool and run. Its shallow run is 50 ft wide and flows 0.7 miles southeast into Sally Ward Spring, just inside Wakulla Springs State Park's main entrance.

Casey McKinlay, who directed the Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP) from September 2003 to July 2025, informed me that they're videoing and making a detailed cave map there. They've surveyed this cave as far as they can. On the other hand, dye-trace studies have revealed that water from Indian Spring ultimately reaches Wakulla Springs. The explored passages of the nearby Wakulla Cave system (currently America's longest known underwater cave at about 45 miles) bypass Indian Spring by only a few hundred feet to the east. 

Tragically, Indian Spring is where Parker Turner, the man who founded the WKPP, died in a heartbreaking accident (caused by a rare underwater landslide) on November 17, 1991. Here's how fellow WKPP exploration diver and charter member Bill Gavin remembered it  (I've slightly edited Bill's account for brevity and clarity). His initial account of the dive was published in 1991 in the NACD Journal Vol. 23, No. 4.

 Our dive at Indian Spring was the first in a series of planned exploration dives proposed nearly two years earlier. Because of the cave's unique profile and the extreme depths of our exploration, we used specialized decompression tables generated by Dr. R.W. Hamilton. 

The dive went almost exactly according to plan. The deep section known as the "Wakulla Room" was explored in three directions. None of these yielded any evidence of a tunnel or of strong flow. We began our exit 63 minutes into the dive. At this time, I had 2300 psig (pounds per square inch gauge) in my double 104s (tanks), and Parker had the same or slightly less. We reached our Nitrox bottles at the top of the room in 2 to 3 minutes, began breathing them, and did not use our doubles again until we encountered the obstruction known as the "Squaws Restriction." After picking up our second stage bottle during the exit, Parker signaled to me that his Diver Propulsion Vehicle seemed to be running slowly. So, I began towing him and increased my scooter's speed to full. We were only about 1500 feet from the spring entrance, so this didn't seem like a serious problem.

 There is a distinctive arrow marker on the line at the upstream/downstream junction. As this arrow came into view, I remember estimating our bottom time at 105-110 minutes. We made the left turn at this arrow and immediately noticed that visibility in the cave had dropped. Billowing clouds of silt obscured the floor entirely, but the line remained in clear water near the ceiling. As we approached the entrance, visibility worsened. Finally, we had to stop using the DPV and finned out while keeping physical line contact. Where I thought the restriction should be, the line vanished in the sand at the bottom of the cave. We began pulling the line up, but soon reached a point where it was buried too deeply. Visibility in this area was one foot or less. I heard Parker shout into his regulator, "What's this?" We backed out of the low area and removed our stage bottles and scooters. Then, the second bottle I had been breathing from during the exit ran out of gas. Recognizing that the situation would not be resolved quickly, I switched to my doubles immediately, which still had about 2000 psig of gas. There were two parallel lines in the cave at this point. We tried following each of them, but neither could be jerked out of the sediment.

I secured the line from the safety reel we had carried to the end of the permanent line (where it was buried) and tried to find a way out. The restriction appeared to be entirely blocked by silt and perhaps rock. The visibility was so poor that we could not determine exactly where we were or what had happened. However, I tried to follow the flow. After finding no way around the blockage, I began to doubt our exact location. It seemed as though we must have made a mistake. While Parker continued to search, I swam about 300 feet back into the cave until I saw the upstream/downstream arrow marker. Although this marker is distinctive, I had to stare at it for a few seconds to convince myself that I knew where we were. I swam back to the point where we had left our bottles and scooters. Parker was waiting there.

 I am not sure how many attempts we made to retrieve the buried line, but at least 45 minutes passed while we tried in vain to find the exit. At one point, Parker showed me his pressure gauge, which indicated approximately 400 psig of gas remaining in his doubles. He wrote on his slate, "What do we do?" I knew he was hoping I had some idea, but the only thing I could think to write back was "Hold on. I'll go look." 

I held onto my reel and swept my light left and right. Finding no exit, I decided to return to the stage bottles, which at least had a little more gas left. I had been gone for less than five minutes. When I returned to the bottles, Parker was not there. I found my second-stage bottle, which held about 600 psig. I began breathing it while trying to come up with a plan. After about 4 minutes, it ran out of gas, and I switched back to my doubles, which held less than 300 psig. With no other alternative, I decided to make one last effort to find an opening. In doing so, I noticed that another line connected to the permanent line. I followed it without understanding how it had gotten there. I reached a point where the cave seemed to open up, and I saw something hanging at the periphery of my vision.

As I swam under the object, it faintly occurred to me that it was the second stage of a scuba regulator. By now, my doubles were almost empty, and the regulator caught on my manifold as I passed. I rolled to my left to free it. At this point, I looked up and saw the permanent line rising sharply. I knew I had cleared the restriction and raced toward our decompression bottles, which were hanging at 100 feet. I almost held my breath then. I unclipped the second stage and began breathing from my first decompression bottle. Parker was not at the tanks, and I realized then that he had drowned.

 The regulator that caught on my manifold was attached to his doubles (tanks). He had removed and dragged them through the tiny opening. I had no idea where Parker was, and the visibility was still less than two feet. Numbly, I waited for support divers to find me. In the chaos that followed, many lines were laid throughout that portion of the cavern by our support divers trying to find Parker's body. Despite their efforts, he was not found until the next morning, when visibility increased to about 10 feet. It had been 60 feet or better when we began our dive.

 During the four hours of decompression that followed, our support crew gradually brought me up to speed on the situation. Without their efforts, I think I would have gone mad wondering what had happened. For a long time, I did not know whether the entire entrance to the cave had collapsed or if anyone else was missing. I also had no idea what kind of decompression to follow. Though I fully expected to suffer the bends, I left the water with no apparent symptoms. The fact that we were shallower than expected during our deep exploration saved me from that malady.

 After reviewing the incident repeatedly, we were able to deduce what likely happened during those final minutes. While waiting for me, Parker must have decided to take his tanks off and try to squeeze through the blockage. Running short on gas, he probably figured he couldn't wait any longer. He clipped his safety spool on the permanent line, dragged his tanks behind, and slipped through the blockage. Perhaps in doing so, he caused the sand to shift enough that I could pass through a few minutes later with my doubles still on. After making it through the restriction, he ran out of gas just 30 feet short of our decompression tanks. When he passed out, he dropped his doubles and floated to the ceiling about 15 to 20 feet above. His tanks landed on the permanent line and hung there. The line from the safety spool was tangled around his tanks. Whether this contributed to his death is impossible to know. It would have been difficult to place a line while dragging tanks and fighting the extreme positive buoyancy of his drysuit.

 Miraculously, this combination of events—the safety line tangling on his tanks, which then caught on the permanent line, and placing the line from his spool in the only location large enough for a diver in doubles to squeeze through—allowed me to escape. I believe that even one minute more would have prevented me from ever reaching the decompression bottles. 

It remains unclear what caused the collapse in Indian. The noticeable physical event was the unstable debris cone sliding down, filling the eye of a needle restriction with sand and silt. At about the same time, surface personnel noted a drop in the water level in Indian’s basin of approximately one foot and a reversal of the spring run at the surface. Within 30 minutes, the water had dropped and returned to its normal level. Perhaps 100,000 gallons of water had rushed into the cave, and several tons of sediment had moved downhill many yards. The rush of water into the cave was large enough and long enough to affect visibility 500 feet from the entrance. [Several other aquatic cave systems in the Woodville Karst Plain experienced the same flow reversal on that day as the one that occurred in Indian Spring.]

 I will not try to describe the effect this accident has had on myself or Parker's many friends and family. To say that we have lost a good friend, that we will miss him, and that his place in our lives can never be filled is all true and also inadequate. Grief is a personal emotion, difficult to fathom, and, for me, not easily shared. To the many friends who have helped me through this, I offer thanks, the depth of which only they can understand. In all times to follow, whether diving together or in moments shared on other pursuits or when far apart, I will not forget any of you.

Bill Gavin was a veteran underwater cave explorer and one of the pioneers of the use of mixed gases for cave and technical diving. This innovation greatly enhanced diver safety and enabled deeper, longer dives. As a professional engineer for the United States Navy, he also developed the Gavin scooter (or DPV). It resulted in a significant improvement over the commercially available ones at the time. It revolutionized underwater mobility for divers. Sadly, Bill Gavin passed away in November of 2024. Still, his contributions continue to help shape the practices and technologies used in underwater exploration today.

 

Aside from the heartbreaking accident revealed by Mr. Gavin, Indian Spring is one of many aquatic gems found within Florida's incomparable Woodville Karst Plain. I'm most grateful to the WKPP for allowing me to make several dives into Indian Spring. Aside from the terrible accident detailed by Mr. Gavin, Indian is one of many aquatic jewels found within this incredible underground wonderland.

 

article compiled by Mike Wisenbaker
February 2026