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Addendum, July 17, 2005

I read this week with fascination and dread a story in the August 2005 issue of Outside magazine about the death of Australian Dave Shaw in Bushmansgat, South Africa. Years earlier, Exley had been to over 880 feet deep in the cave, having a close call with helum-induced tremors. In October 2004 Shaw descended to 886 in the huge underwater shaft using a rebreather and had discovered the body of Deon Dreyer, a diver who had blacked out and disappeared ten years previously. Shaw was determined to return and bring the body up, and in January 2005 he returned to do just that. Although he had just seven years of diving experience against Exley's decades, Shaw had calculated and planned in what seems to me a very Exley-like fashion. On the surface he assembled a strong team and placed a decompression chamber attended by a physician. Ropes hung ready to hoist a striken diver up from the water, with support divers and emergency gas supplies all the way down past 400 feet.


Shaw's plan was simple: descend to the body using the line he had previously tied off, slide it into a special body bag, attach the line, and surface after spending a maximum of five minutes on the bottom. Exactly what went wrong might still be a mystery, except that Shaw wore a video camera on his head that recorded his every movement. At these extreme depths, the smallest detail--even the wearing of the camera itself--could have deadly consequences. Watching the tape later, his friends concluded that Shaw simply let himself work a little bit too hard, get just a little bit out of breath, and that started a downward spiral that killed him.


From the Outside article by Tim Zimmerman:

"Still, Shaw keeps checking the time on his dive computer. After five and a half minutes on the bottom, he's aware enough to know he has to leave, but he doesn't get far. The video shows the bottom moving beneath him. Then Shaw's forward progress stops. His errant cave light has apparently snagged the cave line tied to Deon's tanks. Shaw knows he has caught something, and turns awkwardly. His breathing starts to sound desperate. He pulls at the cat's cradle of cave line, as if trying to sort it out. Every breath is now a sharp grunt. Shaw struggles to move again but is anchored by the weight of Deon's body. The shears are still in his hand, but he never cuts anything. The pace of his breathing keeps accelerating, and there is a tragic, gasping quality to it, so painful to listen to that Herbst and Shirley will no longer watch the video with sound. Twenty one minutes into the dive, the sounds finally start to fade. Dave Shaw, with carbon dioxide suffusing his lungs, is starting to pass out. He is dying. It's heartbreaking to watch. A minute later there is no movement."

The almost spooky end to the story is that four days later, after the emergency tanks had been recovered and the lines pulled, Shaw's body floated up from the darkness with Dreyer in tow, making good on his promise to bring him home.

A handful of technical divers continue to push the limits of deep diving (including Jim Bowden, see www.onr.com/user/zacaton/). The late John Bennett was the first to break 1,000 feet on open circuit scuba gear, but this and other dives were in the ocean, not in a freshwater cave. As Numo Gomes said in 1994, "Four divers in the world have undertaken dives below 200 meters (656 feet); one is dead, another is paralyzed from the waist down, and the other two suffered DCS during their respective deepest dives." (see www.iantd.com/articles/95-1gomes.html). A new depth record for open circuit scuba was set this month (July 2005) by Pascal Bernabe, who reached 330 meters (1,082 feet) in the ocean off Corsica (see http://www.divernet.com/news/stories...5bernabe.shtml).

Yes, even in this day of poseurs driving four-wheel-drives that never leave the pavement, of lawyers who put on leather jackets and parade around on $12,000 Harleys to show they are free spirits, when it seems that everything is style over substance, there are still a few explorers out there who quietly let their actions speak for them, at least to the few people who are there to listen.


จาก....http://www.stationr.org/caving/exley.htm