"Baby Jessica" Down the Well

So Matt and I caved (hardy har har) and got a Go Pro a little while ago. While it has already come in handy for a few other things, and its time lapse mode should be really fun for when the house starts getting erected, the major motivation to get one came from the well report that said we had caves underground at 110`! Today, we finally decided to see what was down there.

My dad picked up a few flashlights at Harbor Freight that were so cheap it wouldn't matter if they don't made it through our experiment. He rigged up a little contraption with weights, a holder for the flashlights, a mount for the GoPro, and a "guide" made out of 2-liter bottles.

Matt holding "Baby Jessica".

We popped off the cap from the well, and lowered in the camera system (known as Baby Jessica) with much anticipation and no clue whether this would work. I was able to preview the video on my phone for a short time thanks to the GoPro's WiFi, but once the camera went underwater I lost signal, so the rest would remain a mystery until we got the camera out and could hook it up to a computer. Was it even going to work? Would there be enough light from the flashlights to see anything? Is there really anything down there?

Well, here it is: the world premiere video of the mysterious contents of our well:

The first 45 seconds are just the shaft put down the drilled hole, with the bright spot being water. Underwater, you'll see some gunk that we're not sure about; probably either precipitate or an iron bacteria (which is common in water wells and, according to our literature, is harmless). At 2:06 the pipe ends and you'll witness varying limestone formations. Some crazy stuff starts appearing at 2:50, and then we suspect the noted caves begin at 3:06! We hit bottom at 3:40 (but I left the rest of the video on there too because it's kind of interesting to see the water dripping off when the camera re-emerges).

Amazing!!! It was pretty scary to drop Baby Jessica down what seemed to be an endless hole in the ground with no idea what's down there or whether it would all make it back up successfully. But it worked perfectly! And the video is absolutely fascinating. It was really exciting to view the video for the first time and discover what's deep underground. Now that we have a better idea of what's down there and we know the setup works, we will probably stage the whole thing again with the camera mounted sideways so that we can try to see more of the caves!