LOCATION: (lat. 28°08'26.9" N., long. 82°46'20.3" W.)
Hidden Lake Sink is located in Tarpon Springs,FL, in the Northeast corner of Hidden Lake, directly behind the house at 1103 Ashland Ave.
DESCRIPTION:
The sink is completely submerged in the Northwest corner of a large lake. The lake is almost surounded by houses but has a heavily wooded buffer area that surely contributes to the dark tannic water. The sink is hourglass shaped and probably a good 100' across at rim, the undercut starts around 15-20 ft down. There are still a few places to put in a boat around the lake but they are quickly disappearing as more houses are built. The last time I dove there, I chose to ask the owner of the house in front the sink if I could cut across his yard. He seemed to be quite diver friendly and allowed us to jump off his dock.
DIVELOG:
After doing a giant stride off Scott's dock we kicked out over the sink and dropped an anchor attached to a float ball to use as a down line. We descended the line to the rim of the sink, where the anchor & line disappeared straight down a 1 foot wide solution tube... we had missed the sink. Not wanting to haul it back up, we dropped over the rim and followed the undercut a few feet...sure enough, there was our anchor line emerging from a hole in the ceiling. We followed it down to the silt at a depth of 80 ft and tied off a reel to do a sweep around the sink. The bottom is fairly level all the way across and as we made our way around, I realized that this was basically a round hole with really shitty vis (tannic). The sides of the sink are nice hard limerock and look very capable of supporting huge domed caverns but I couldn't find a hint of any going passage. That's not surprising given that we must have been pretty high up from the true bottom of the sink where most cave passages begin. The fact that there's no visible mound indicates that this sink has been there for a long time and has filled in over the year's. I shoved a 10' stick along with my two foot arm into the silt bottom and found no resistance, it just kept going. The size of this sink leads me to believe that something substantial lies below, I'm sure that dredging would reveal a passage or two.
