Among the plungers there are legends, thousands of anecdotes that they love to tell. Some of them like to show their rafts and to explain the process. Diary they risk life and work until late night. When they are seen walking around, with the Sunday clothes, it is that they are resting. They take advantage of those moments to speak about everything with emotion.
In Mavicure they told me a history that seems a Creole "Deep Blue":
There was a very quiet plunger; he didn't say anything more than the thing asked, but he was very good under the water. All those that worked with him knew that he was overturned. His wife had left him, boring of expects wealth and not see anything but debts. As he was so needy of money, the guy continued working. An evening, just he submerge, he unfastened his hoses and went down at most deep, by pure lung. Other plungers that were able to see him made signs calling for his return, but he didn't notice. Something like that meant to let that the current dragged him into a sure death. Almost everyone thought that it was an accident. One also came unfastened and was able to make that he saw him, amid the darkness of the river. The guy looked at him and continued as if nothing was happening. His helper thought it better and it recognized that he could not follow him so deep. He said himself that he would probably have to fight for take him out so he returned to the surface. In addition, there was the possibility of him attempting it another time, when he would be alone. The mad plunger got lost in the darkness and nobody saw him again. There was the hope that they would find his body river below, but nothing happens. The fishes ate him up or the earth swallowed him.
They also told in Inírida of a candid one who arrived from Boyacá without at least money for return. The guy thought that the mines were dug in the floor, as those of coal or emeralds. As he didn't know how to dive, he had to devote himself to work for a daily wage to be able to return; he finished staying definitively.
The miners are men with lots of money but without instruction, nomadic that they only pursue gold and they leave when it finishes. And it is easy to go. The "mine" is in fact only a heap of rafts anchored in a place of the river's current. They are always above the biggest veins, those that they can explode with the system they use. Nothing about tunnels. Some said that they invented that name at the beginning, to hide the true origin of the gold and not to have to share it. Nowadays it is strange the Iniridense not knowing a raft.