Exploring Uncharted Caves

SEBRING - Mike Edmonston is determined to solve the mystery raised by a photo sent to him by his father. It shows two large sea caves opening just above the low-tide waterline on the rocky shore of a small, uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Panama.

It's what you can't see in the photo that fascinates him.

The absence of a cave diver's safety line anchored at either opening tells him chances are nobody's ever dove into the caves. For sure, Edmonston knows that nobody has ever charted or named, much less filmed, those remote underwater caves.

That's going to change early next year when he and wife, Beth, both certified cave divers, explore that unknown underwater world.

"We don't know if the caves go in 10 feet or 10,000 feet," he said. "But we're going to find out."

Scuba diver John McDaniel of Avon Park will be with them as their surface support, and so will a film crew from Sidemount Productions Inc. Edmonston launched the company in 1993 to produce television ads for auto dealers and now is turning it toward underwater exploration filming.

For more than a year, the Edmonstons and their 16-year-old son, William Dresselt, who live outside Sebring, have been cave diving in northern Florida.

Mike now plans to take his adventure sport to a new level, by exploring, mapping, naming and filming as many of the uncharted underwater caves around the world, in fresh and salt water, as he can.

"I've been in some (cave) systems where only four or five other divers have been, but I've never named a new (cave) system yet," he said about the Panama trip.

If his plans work out, charting these unmapped sea caves will become several episodes on "Adventure Diver," a 30-minute weekly television show he plans to syndicate.

No matter what, though, Edmonston, 39, says he plans to keep diving into uncharted, underwater caves.

"It's the true last frontier of exploration, other than outer space," he said. "It's like going to the moon. Where else on this planet could you go where nobody else has ever gone before?"

'Live, Eat And Breathe Diving'

Edmonston began diving at age 6 off Fort Lauderdale, became a certified scuba diver at 11 and at 16 was among four divers who lived several days in a Florida Atlantic University laboratory anchored at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean for research on "mari-culture," the science of farming on the sea floor.

Through his six years in the Navy, four aboard a nuclear submarine, he took advantage of traveling the world by scuba diving in places from Scotland to Ecuador and Alaska.

"We live, eat and breathe diving," he said about his family. "If we get don't get into the water a couple times a week,", he added with a laugh, "we start to get 'twitchy.'"

Sidemount Productions get its name from the gas tanks Edmonston uses while exploring the tight nooks and crannies of some underwater caves.

"Our tanks are mounted on our side so that we can get into areas that are too small to fit through with tanks on your back," he explained at his Skipper Road home. "At times, we'll even disconnect the tanks from our harness and push them through a hole ahead of us, and then pull ourselves through."

Other people may call this type of diving "extreme," but Edmonston doesn't.

"It's not a sport and it's not extreme," he said. "It's completely planned and calculated. I'd call it a
thinking man's passion."

While he calls cave diving, particularly in uncharted areas, "the easiest way to die underwater -- it's as serious as it gets," he adds: "We do things very planned. There is no hot rodding. there is no let's just do it and jump in. It's completely 180 degrees from extreme sports. It's completely calculated down to the smallest detail . . . for safety."

New Ventures Planned

Edmonston was certified as a cave diver by, ands still trains under, instructor Steve Forman of Winter Haven, whom he calls one of the most respected cave divers in Florida.

Within two years, Edmonston plans to earn certification as a cave diving instructor. He was certified as a scuba instructor a year ago and then earned certification to teach archeological diving. Two weeks ago, at a three-day seminar at Marathon Key, he also became certified to teach Heritage Awareness diving, which covers the rules and procedures for volunteer divers working with professional archaeologists

Teaming up with two other instructors, both certified to teach technical diving, he runs Technical Scuba Diving Center. The school has about 30 students around the state of Florida and several in Wisconsin, where Edmonston goes ice diving.

"We go beyond the basic recreational diving limits," he said. In mid December, Edmonston plans to open a dive shop at 3901 Kenilworth Ave., across from Sebring High School.

So far, through underwater photography, Edmonston has made two discoveries, with Bahaman exploration diver Tim Higgs, at the Far Side blue hole at Abaco in the Bahamas. They caught on film the first catfish ever seen in the Bahamas, and discovered the bones and roost of an as yet unidentified, predatory birds that lived thousands of years ago, during an Ice Age when this cave, now filled with water to a depth of 300 feet, was above ground.

Edmonston is thrilled by the statistic that only about 3 percent of the world's ocean bottoms, and only a small portion of the Earth's fresh and salt water cave systems, have been charted.

"We're never going to know everything about these underwater worlds," he said. "It's too complex and too huge. But we can discover as much as we can and be happy with our research."