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Texas. A Sunday night in February, nineteen eighty-four.

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Two divers meet in a flooded chamber, deep in a cave. The water here is a little clearer than in the chambers below.

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One of them signals to the other.

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Where's Hayne?

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The other points back down the tunnel.

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Hayne is probably still working with his survey tape. Or putting his tank back on.

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Up to that moment, there has been no signal, no sign at all, that anything is wrong.

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This is Caving Stories: Cave Diving. True stories from flooded caves, told from the record.

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Today, Jacob's Well, in the Texas Hill Country.

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By nineteen eighty-four, its lower chambers had killed nine divers.

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Jacob's Well is in Hays County, Texas, just outside the town of Wimberley, in the bed of a creek called Cypress Creek.

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From above, it is a round hole in the creek bed, about twelve feet across, full of clear water.

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It is a spring, fed from below by the Trinity Aquifer.

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In nineteen twenty-four, the water was measured coming out of it at a hundred and seventy gallons every second, and rising six feet into the air.

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Today, in a dry year, the flow can stop altogether. It did in two thousand, in two thousand eight, in two thousand eleven, in two thousand thirteen, and in two thousand twenty-two.

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Below the hole, the well drops straight down for about thirty feet.

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Then it turns, and becomes a cave: a series of chambers full of silt, one below another, separated by narrow restrictions.

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Divers have since mapped about four thousand five hundred feet of it. Its deepest point is about a hundred and thirty-seven feet down.

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Between nineteen sixty-four and nineteen eighty-four, nine people died in it. Eight men, and one woman.

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They were open-water divers, without the techniques or the equipment for a cave.

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In March of nineteen eighty-four, a local diver named Johnny Ripps, a former highway patrolman who had dived the well several times and helped bring bodies out of it, wrote an article for the Wimberley newspaper.

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He wanted people who did not dive to know what the cave was like.

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In the first chamber, he wrote, the depth gauge reads twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five feet, as the thin slivers of sunlight disappear behind you.

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At the bottom of the second chamber, fifty-five feet.

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Your lights reach out through the darkness and stop, he wrote, as if someone had cut them with a knife.

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In the third chamber there are fossil shells in the walls. An albino catfish. A crayfish. And leaves from the trees above, lying on the floor of the cave.

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When there is no current, he wrote, that is when the well is most dangerous.

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Any silt a diver stirs up stays where it is, and the clear water turns murky.

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He and his partners took off their fins, so as not to stir up more.

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At about seventy-five feet, a large boulder sits on the floor and seems to block the way.

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Behind it the ceiling comes down, and the passage narrows into the fourth chamber: a small, narrow room with a high ceiling.

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It looks like the end of the cave.

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But at the bottom of it is a small opening, big enough for one person at a time.

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To get through, you have to take off your tank, and push it ahead of you.

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Of the nine deaths in the well, five had come in the five years before that article.

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Ripps wrote about one day in nineteen seventy-nine.

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Two divers had gone into the well and had not come back. A recovery team went in to look for them.

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At about forty feet, he found one of the recovery divers, Don Dibble, sitting motionless, staring into the darkness.

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Dibble had had a near-fatal accident during the dive. He was in severe pain and almost helpless.

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But he was alive.

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The two divers they had been searching for that day had gone deeper into the cave than any diver had gone before.

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Five years later, they had still never been recovered.

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One of the divers who went in on the twenty-sixth of February, nineteen eighty-four, wrote down what happened. His report was reprinted that spring by the Cave Diving Section of the National Speleological Society.

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His name was Danny Self. He and John Hillcox were independent scuba instructors.

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The third man was Hayne Russell, a veteran caver, and a cave diver.

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They went in at about ten to eight on a Sunday evening.

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Each wore a full wetsuit and carried a single tank of eighty cubic feet, with a regulator and a spare second stage, and a depth and pressure gauge. Each had two or three lights.

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They took a spare tank as well.

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They had no buoyancy jackets.

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The passages, Self wrote, were too narrow for them.

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They met in the first chamber, at twenty-five feet.

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From there they ran a safety line straight down to the start of the third chamber, at fifty-five feet.

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Then a new line, along the length of the third chamber, and halfway into the fourth, at about eighty-five feet.

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At the fourth chamber, Hayne and John took off their tanks.

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Hayne led the way through the narrow opening into the fifth chamber, pushing his tank ahead of him, and laying a new safety line as he went.

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John followed him, taking photographs.

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Danny stayed behind in the fourth chamber. He had two jobs.

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One was to look after the lines.

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The other was to bring out an old tank that had been left down there, apparently by the two divers who had drowned in nineteen seventy-nine.

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He looked around the fourth chamber, which he judged to be about ten feet high. Then he took off his own tank, and squeezed through the opening after the others.

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He was surprised how narrow the fifth chamber was. He put it at about two feet high.

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And the water was getting cloudier.

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He found the old tank, tied a piece of line to it, and turned to follow the safety line out.

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Halfway back, he got caught in the line he had just tied to the old tank.

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He could go no further.

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He took a deep breath, untangled himself, and got back into the fourth chamber.

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Further in, Hayne Russell had tied off his safety line halfway along the fifth chamber.

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To it he tied a survey tape, a measuring tape a hundred feet long, to take the length and the width of the lower chambers.

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Then he went on, into the sixth chamber, and beyond it.

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John followed the line and the tape into the sixth chamber.

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By now he could not see well enough to take photographs.

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But it seemed big to him, big enough to stand up in, with a muddy floor instead of the rock of the chambers above.

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Hayne came back to the sixth chamber, and signalled to John that it was time to go.

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John led the way out, following the line.

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At the opening, the old tank was stuck. John worked it loose and pushed, while Danny pulled from the other side.

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Then Danny turned and headed out of the fourth chamber, carrying the old tank.

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John came out of the fifth.

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And Hayne, Self wrote, was right behind him.

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In the third chamber, where the water was a little clearer, Danny and John met up.

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Danny signalled: where's Hayne?

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John pointed back down the tunnel.

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They both assumed he was working with the survey tape, or putting his tank back on.

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There had been no signal, Self wrote, and no indication that anything might be wrong.

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So, expecting Hayne to catch up, they moved up to a shallower depth, to begin their decompression stop.

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About halfway through it, they began to worry.

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They could not go back down.

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They were too low on air, Self wrote, and they had no bottom time left.

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They surfaced.

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The next day, a dive team from Wimberley went in.

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They found Hayne Russell at the beginning of the fifth chamber, lying on his safety line.

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His mask was in place. His tank was by his side.

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That is the whole of the record.

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It does not say why Hayne Russell died, and it does not guess.

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When the Cave Diving Section reprinted the two articles, it added a note: neither of them was written by a caver, or by a trained cave diver.

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The record shows what the divers had, and how they worked.

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Three men, a single tank each, no buoyancy jackets because of the passages, and their tanks taken off to pass the narrowest point.

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A safety line laid in pieces, from chamber to chamber.

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Silt that turned the water cloudy as they worked.

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And a man last seen right behind his partner.

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Cave divers learn five rules, written down in nineteen seventy-nine from the study of how divers die in caves.

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Training. A continuous guide line to open water. A depth limit. A third of your air to go in, a third to come out, a third held back. And three lights.

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Jacob's Well is still there, in the bed of Cypress Creek.

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Today it is the center of a nature area run by Hays County.

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The sources for every fact in this episode are in the show notes.

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This has been Caving Stories: Cave Diving.

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Thank you for listening.