The Lost Sea! Tales of Ben Sands..

Sailors who travel seas wouldn’t mind another sea on the world map, but what if by magic one whole sea disappeared! No fellow environmentalists! Am not talking about the fast disappearing Dead Sea! That is a concern but anyway, here am talking about a sea, which has been lost off the map of world seas! Really?? Really!!

What if I told you a story? Of curious children! Well all children are curious! But if I tell you about this boy who was way too curious for a 13 year old! He climbed down into a cave, and walked nearly a quarter of a mile and entered a small rabbit sized hole and discovered that there was water in the cave! But with his tiny lantern, yes! He was carrying a small lantern! Psst the story is really old…Long long ago types! J Ok now our bonny boy! He realized that he had found something so unique and wanted everyone to know about this discovery of his! But how much water was around him! He could not see much! So what did he do! Made wet clay balls from the mud fisted out from the shallow waters of this very water body and began flinging it across the expanse of water…all he heard was a plop, plop and plop!! The clay balls never managed to find any wall on any side! The clever boy concluded that it was indeed a very big water body that he had stumbled upon! Excited with his discovery, he raced back home and told everyone in the village about it! None believed because all villagers thought they knew the ‘moonshine place’ well! #alert whiskey lovers!! Moonshine!! http://www.olesmokymoonshine.com/about/  

But finally this boy’s father agreed to accompany him to ratify the boy’s find! And what disaster! The cave and its entrance totally disappeared! After chiding the boy to stop dreaming, the boy’s father was off on his way! The boy grew up, believing that he did indeed see that water body underground and there was water below those caves!! He withered and became an old man all 70 years of age! And one fine day, some people came knocking on his door! Was he that little boy who said there was water in the cave? Ah! Yes! And yes indeed there was water! Rediscovered around 1965, that boy was honored for his find and that cave which has the water body, was named after him! He was Ben Sands! J And what had he discovered! Well something really unique! Deep inside a mountain near Sweetwater in East Tennessee is a remarkable body of water known as The Lost Sea. http://www.thelostsea.com/history.html

Listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as America’s largest underground lake, the Lost Sea is part of an extensive and historic cave system called Craighead Caverns.  So 300 feet below ground, there indeed is this Lost Sea! 800 feet long by 220 feet wide! Even to date, only 13 acres of this Sea are mapped, and the most expert divers have searched this place only to get a faint idea that there are more caves, cave rooms filled with water, how many, how much water, the actual depth of this entire water body is still a mystery! With the deepest points of this water body as deep as 70 feet and water and the room which holds it, constantly at 58 degree Fahrenheit, bejeweled paths with Anthodites http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthodite, Lost Sea is indeed a bucket-list place to be! And an experience worth each penny they charge!! J And yes! How do I know all this? We went there to find it out ourselves! What is the more fun part! Near blind rainbow trout (a fish variety) which leaps out of this water to eat food! Part of an experiment being carried out by the team researching the Lost Sea, these fish were introduced into the Lost sea a few years ago, and the research about how these fish thrive 300 feet below ground level in a water body completely devoid of sunlight.

 All this exciting information and the bits of silence in between the noise of water gently lapping around our boat, which ferried us across the biggest water rooms of the sea, as tall as 35 feet above the water level and 70 feet deep water below…

And then there was the wide eyed baby A nestled at my bosom, sensing the difference of this place! Different sensations piling up her tiny self, as she saw ma-sha ma-asha (fish) and pa-pa-pa (water)

A sense of wonderment filled us up and so did a sense of admiration for that teenage boy, whose curiosity led the world and eventually us to this place!

Such wonders of the world! A big satisfied tick on my bucket list this visit! J