Kent Maupin had often spoken of making a penetration into the notorious last chamber of Jacob’s Well. Up to a certain point, the well—whose entrance is a small crevice at the bottom of Cypress Creek filled with clear groundwater rising from the Edwards Aquifer—was a safe enough dive, but it was beyond this point that Maupin wanted to go.
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He wanted to see for himself how far the submerged cave went, what it led to. The eyewitness reports of the few divers who had made it back that far were contradictory: some said that the final passage led to nothing; others that it opened into a vast room, a cave diver’s El Dorado; others that it dropped straight into the aquifer itself. At twenty, Maupin was an experienced diver.
He was an assistant instructor and a part-time employee at a Pasadena dive shop, and he knew that over the years four divers had drowned in the section of the well he wanted to explore. Any dive that far back in the cave was a serious risk and required meticulous planning and highly specialized equipment.
Maupin and a friend of his, a twenty-year-old student at San Jacinto College named Mark Brashier, had gone up to Wimberley with a diving group from Pasadena and camped out at Jacob's Well, which is a few miles from town on the property of a financially distressed resort development named Woodcreek.
Just after midnight on September 9, Maupin and Brashier and a few others made a dive into the well, swimming down until they reached the final squeeze that had claimed so many lives. Maupin and Brashier had no backup lights, no safety line. They were apparently simply seized by an impulse to go further. Maupin took off his tank, backed into the tight passage, and pulled the tank through behind him. Brashier did the same.
Joe Moye, one of the divers who had gone down with them, saw Brashier just as he was disappearing into the tunnel. Moye was stunned; nobody had discussed this with him. He flashed his light back and forth, trying to get Brashier’s attention, but Brashier would not look up at him. He just stared down at his tank and pulled it after him into the darkness.