Gone At Sea: The Mystery of Ben McDaniel in Florida's Vortex Spring
On a hot August night in 2010, 30-year-old diver Ben McDaniel walked down the wooden steps at Florida's Vortex Spring, strapped on his gear, and slipped beneath the water for what should have been a routine dive.
He was never seen again.
In the days that followed, rescue and recovery divers pushed themselves into the tight, dangerous cave system under Vortex Spring, fully expecting to bring back a body. They found nothing. No silt trail. No broken rock. No gear. No remains. The cave-usually unforgivingly honest about its dead-was clean.
Gone At Sea: The Mystery of Ben McDaniel in Florida's Vortex Spring follows the case from Ben's troubled years after personal loss, to his obsession with the Vortex cave, to the last hours witnesses saw him alive. Drawing on public records, diver testimony, media coverage, and the physics of cave diving, Linda Davidson traces every major theory: a fatal dive gone wrong, a staged disappearance, and the possibility that something happened to Ben on the surface before anyone knew he was missing.
Along the way, the book explores:
The staff who watched Ben gear up and descend-then left before his bubbles returned
The world-class recovery divers who insist Ben is not in the cave
The storm, the inconsistencies, and the unanswered questions around Vortex Spring's management
A family fighting for answers in a case with no body, no crime scene, and no clear narrative
For readers of thoughtful true crime, Gone At Sea is not a story of easy villains or tidy endings. It is a haunting investigation into what happens when a man vanishes in one of the most dangerous underwater environments on earth-and the evidence stops just short of the truth.
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