Two Divers Were Trapped 300 Feet Inside a Flooded Cave in Florida With 40 Minutes of Air Left. I’m the Man They Call When the Rescue Is Probably Already Too Late

I’ve thought about the next sixty seconds every day since.

I clipped Marcus to the guideline and put his hand on it. I pointed toward the blue glow far ahead, the way out. I held up five fingers, then a fist. *Fifty feet. Go.*

He looked at me with those huge eyes.

Then he went.

I swam into the side passage.

I got Owen out of the crack. I put my backup regulator in his mouth. I purged it. Air bubbles went into his mouth and came out of his nose.

Nothing.

I held his face in my hands and pressed on his chest. Underwater, in the dark, it doesn’t work the way it does on television.

Nothing.

And then he coughed.

A tiny, terrible cough, into my regulator, and his eyes opened.

We came out of the Devil’s Eye together forty-four minutes after I went in. Lou was already in the water, halfway down, holding a full tank for me. I had about three breaths left in mine.

Marcus was on the dock with the paramedics. Owen’s sister was screaming.

The helicopter took Owen to Gainesville. He spent nine days in the ICU with pneumonia and a brain scan that everybody was afraid of. It came back clean.

His family’s health insurance company denied part of the bill, because cave diving without certification was an “excluded hazardous activity.” The dive shop community in High Springs raised the money in two weeks. Nobody asked them to.

Owen came to see me in March. He walked into my shop, sat down across from me and put a certification application on the counter.

“I want to learn,” he said. “The right way.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be the guy who goes in,” he said. “Next time.”

I looked at him for a long moment.

Then I picked up a pen.

“First lesson,” I said. “You don’t go in for the cave. You go in for the way out.”

He wrote it on his hand.

He still has it. Tattooed, now.

So do I.