CAVE DIVER REACTS TO LAST DIVE OF DAVID SHAW

hi everybody woody alpern here from dive talk i'm in gus's beautiful studio what i'm doing today is reacting to what you probably will end up considering a pretty disturbing video and dive situation so you may have heard of it it's the david shaw video the last dive of david shaw was in 2005. you can google it he was recovering the body of dean dreyer it was a body recovery it's in bushman's hole it's a cave in south africa 890 feet in depth and almost i think the elevation was 5090 feet so we have a lot to contend with here deep high altitude and it's a body recovery now a couple of other points that are very important doesn't matter what kind of rebreather he was using happened to be a jurgensen marine hammerhead rebreather had it was a hammerhead ccr with the hammerhead electronics listen to the gas mixtures he had to set up and then i'm going to get into the review tri-mix of course he had a 480 that means 4 oxygen because at that depth the partial pressure at 4 would be the highest partial pressure he could possibly have been able to tolerate 480 means 80 percent helium so the four is oxygen 80 percent is helium he also had a 1070 mix of 1555 a 1740 a 2625 and air nitrox 50 and 100 oxygen there's a lot to contend with one more thing he actually did a dive in this cave the day before the body recovery to set a world's record the deepest ccr dive but then when he was on that dive he found the body at the bottom and when he came back up he said i found this body and he was encouraged to go back and recover the body that had been down there for a very long time so bloated body that he has to bring up from that depth and here's the big one he did all of this by himself let's start the video and react as he submerges the clock starts ticking don surely describes what happens on the water notice he's going down he's going to move over to the entrance of the cave all right so this part is just going down it's right at the beginning it's got as light let's see how clear the water is already i want to take you to the first point that i want to comment on your hearing there so there were some divers in the water but not all the way down to the very bottom where he's doing the rescue recovery i was getting ready to go down now all right get through this part here because i want to stop it when he hits about the 20-foot mark has begun now moving through the restriction checking that everything's okay with the computer good job on checking his computer he's doing that regularly you should do that about every two or three minutes see part of the cave there as we're moving through it is a cave so he's gonna enter in no light zone there's the oxygen hanging at six meters okay i'm going to stop it there so he's at let's call it 20 feet 6 meters he has 100 oxygen at that level that's very important because if something were to go wrong with his rebreather and he had to bail out he needs to be able to do a very long decompression this dive was 9 hours and 40 minutes so he's going to have a lot of deco time now you got to have that oxygen in order to do your deco otherwise you would be in there forever i mean you can't do that on regular air here's the thing he did this dive the day before with no tasks and it was successful i have said this many times before if you have one single problem at this depth you may be able to deal with it if you have one problem and you're by yourself if you have more than one problem and you're going down to this depth can you deal with it because one additional problem compounds in complexity at that depth off the chart the other thing is remember he's going very very deep what is the work of breathing like what is happening to the gas density at this depth we're talking about almost 900 feet underwater let's watch him continue to go down so far so good no real tasks yet and it's the second day in a row so he's feeling pretty good i don't like feeling pretty good on a dive being willing to do something this complex by myself can you imagine trying to do something like this without a team forget having one buddy there's so many tasks that have to be completed you better have a team here we go let's pass getting past all the clutter that's there there's our cameraman everything's going good so he's still around other people at this point it's not very deep final check battle check everything's good and he's headed down and he goes down quickly soon we're coming to the roof that means the cave zone he's going into the cave so he's going to lose all light except for his lights of course and he's passing 22 meters let's stop i think let's stop there at 22 meters you saw two tanks hanging at 22 meters let's call that 22 meters roughly 70 feet at that 70 foot spot he has nitrox 50. why nitrox 50 at 70 feet just so you know what's going on there well if he had to bail out he can switch to that 50 percent oxygen and take that all the way from 70 feet up to 20 feet where he'll switch to 100 o2 20 feet on a hundred percent o2 will have a partial pressure of 1.6 that's okay 70 feet on the 50 nitrox his partial pressure would be 1.6 so that's okay he can switch to those mixes and use them to finish his ascent which is basically a very very long deco from 70 feet up to 20 feet and then ultimately from 20 feet up to the surface that's why they have those particular mixes right there so far everything seems to be going okay going good i'm going to let it run a bit because now he's going to get into the deep depths he's really dropping you see a bit of rock coming down from the roof there now we're in the clear now we're descending on the line now notice he has a rope a big line quickly everything's going good all the way down and i don't know what depth that rope goes to but rope like that would be pretty good pretty difficult to get tangled up my option levels are right a big thick road is a good less chance of it getting wrapped all up twisted all around some of the stage cylinders lots of cylinders on this line lots of cylinders moving down very quickly now all those mixes all those mixes i were telling you about are going to come into play if he has to bail out because basically that will keep his partial pressure they probably had it planned to no greater than 1.6 at any part during the ascent if he had to bail out and get on to those bailout gases those would be at depths to where those mixes would never allow him to exceed a 1.6 partial pressure all the way up to the surface and it's rope all the way down to the bottom it's helping yourself go down running the line very quickly down dropping quickly not really doing much work yet we are on the bottom now moving along now he's on the bottom so check this out a big thick line from the down line okay here we go okay now we're coming to the small line which goes off to the body this is very standard in cave diving you have line it's not very thick and he has that line running from what looks like the end of the rope to the body i guess he tied that off the day before so he knows right where to go to get to the body but look at that bottom how quickly can that bottom silt out at 900 feet especially dealing with another body and having to move around and twist and he wants to get the body by the way in a body bag he doesn't want to bring up a bloated body back up to the surface the family would see it so he was also trying to deal with a body bag can you imagine a body bag filling up with water moving all around on top of everything else by himself dave's working hard now he's trying to save as much time as he can now they're already commenting that he's working hard he hasn't even started the work yet he's just simply got to the bottom and they're already noticing he's working hard the work of breathing is difficult or more difficult than what you would be used to because the gas is super dense even with a 480 mix it's denser he's on gassing very very quickly he does not have a lot of time at this depth i didn't run the profile in idco pro but at 900 feet under water you're racking up deco extremely quick i would say for every minute that you're underwater if it was at 100 meters every minute at 100 meters would require five minutes of deco at a hundred meters okay he went to 270 meters so wow he could be racking up 15 minutes of deco per minute and there we have burner's dolphin there's a dolphin that was put in the roof uh as a joke to verna now it's deflated and gone all the way back down to the bottom he's on the bottom he's at nine we're gonna call him good ten minutes into the dive very quick descent everything's great no problems no dave's working hard this is he's jogging he's like jogging on the surface that part is already bothering me see he's working hard do you think he would be working this hard if he had a team down there with him there are so many tasks i would tell you let's think about the kind of team that would have made sense for this dive well i would say you need a team at various points along the ascent line absolutely at all of those points where those different mixtures are i would have a team member ready to help him get to the next level i would definitely have a team with me so that's already another one two three four five probably five or six people up all up along the line then you've got to have a team at least i would say two other additional people at the bottom to help you help you with possible entanglement help you with putting the body in and if somebody has a problem i want to have double redundancy because if two people have a problem i still want to have a third guy to make sure he can help the other two that have a problem with all the normal problems that can go on with diving on top of the complexities that can happen to 900 feet we could have hypoxia where we have too low of oxygen we could have hypercapnia where you're working so hard you start to get a co2 hit and you breathe through your scrubber by the way can you imagine the weight and how much scrubber he had to have to do a 9 hour and 40 minute dive if you have either one of those things happen hypercapnia is going to cause complete confusion you have very little time to react hypoxia you don't even feel it coming you just black out either one of those problems alone by yourself at that depth i i mean death so he's actually breathing quite heavily at 270 meters see how clear everything is nice bright light shining can see everything happening so right now he can see getting ready that's a very important point they've just made okay they will be able to see dion now as dion's legs so he's at the bottom everything is going good we're working hard so far so good undo the bag and put it over the legs he has to undo a bag is what he just said and get the legs inside the bag i want you to imagine trying to do this with a bloated body which typically are floaty those bodies float i forget the name of the the reaction that's happening in the body i've just read about it the other day that causes bodies to float after a certain amount of time we can look that up later but boy if he's unwedging that body or getting that body out of the gear that's keeping the body down the weight the tanks and so forth that's going to go floaty on him very quickly so now he's got to deal with a body that's floating he's at 900 feet underwater all by himself there's line he's no longer on rope that can easily be moved around and this is a cave that bottom that they said is very clear can silt out like that one problem just a silt out would already be too much in my opinion when you're by yourself how about a silt out a line entanglement and dealing with a body that's going to go floaty on you all at the same time with nobody else there to help you if there would have been other team members to help could all of what happened had been avoided everything's good checking everything's right breathing heavily still jogging still jogging hey bit of silt don't expect that a bit of self okay i'm doing the bag and trying to slide it up the legs but a bit of silt turns into a lot of silt really fast in a cave the body is loose it's not in the uh it's no longer stuck in the mud everything is loose the body's moving around with its cylinders dave's working hard trying to work out what to do next still checking he's still checking all the gauges he's breathing heavy he's working hard so there's a lot going on he is task loaded i like when they said he's checking his gauges but he's trying to figure out what to do do i get how do i get the gear off how do i get him in this bag how's my line doing how's my time doing how's my work of breathing going and again if you all of a sudden start getting hypercapnia from overworking because that work of breathing down there is tough confusion sets in so quickly would he even know to bail out at that point or is he just singularly focused because man you could also be probably a little narked i don't know what 480 mix equivalent nitrogen depth the end is at 900 feet have a look at it on your own but i bet you it's equivalent to a pretty deep dive on regular air so it's probably slightly on top of it which means you're just not thinking as clearly you're not able to react as quickly you're not having to solve problems especially multiple problems easily man imagine if you had two other people there and one of them was doing nothing but making sure the other two that are working are okay now this line is just getting everywhere because this body is floating it's not stuck everything's moving oh here we go compounding problems now starting on the line there light moving out the way light a nice bright line line and take a bit moving up now we can't put the the bag over so it's a case of just untangling the cylinders from the uh the line here now the cylinders are tangled in the line trying to get these scissors to cut you can't get the body in the bag you can't get the tanks out of the um cylinders but now everything is loose this is a very sloping bottom so dave slipped here oh the bottom is sloping so he said dave slipped there what do you think happened when he slipped on the bottom more silt as he's trying to cut and more and more stuff's becoming entangled because what happens is panic starts to set in and you start moving erratically and moving around i've had to cut people out before they can't cut themselves out the only thing they can do is stop and wait for somebody else to do it because you can't see where that line's floating all around there's silt you can't even see the task you're doing anymore so let's watch what happens because these compounding problems spin out of control like that it goes from you heard one minute ago the video said everything's okay he's at the bottom looking at the video to one minute later completely out of control no chance of unfortunately making it to the surface all happened in 30 seconds to a minute it went completely out of control with nobody there to help him again now he's coming back to the body and you can see he's checking making sure everything's right with his with his time time's getting short now the time is nearly to the point where he needs to leave so now he's saying he's checking and time is getting short but here's what happens is his judgment clouded he's he's trying to set this record of a body recovery so maybe he's saying you know what time is short but i'm gonna push it so even if he was able to get the body in even if he was able to get himself uncut was he already doomed by being willing to push what that planned dive was did he follow his plan he had a very specific plan which at 900 feet you have like no room for error plan your dive dive your plan was that protocol followed hey good check all the time checking making sure he's okay working at the same time there's the line he's checking he's checking his computers but he's the line we were worried about being loose busy busy busy trying to untangle himself and insulting so now we've now come to the end of our time now and it's it's time to leave okay so it's time to leave it's time to leave it's at the end of the clock everything's right he's still working hard everything's right he's end of the plan time to leave but he's the narrator said he's still working hard he's still continuing to work hard but he's at the end he can't continue to work hard and he's still working hard he's leaving all a long time working hard well here's the problem he's leaving make sure his gauges are right and he's leaving pretty much when he planned to but stopping him now they're just caught in the line he's caught in the line so he took his plan right to the absolute point where he had to leave there's no room for error anymore there's no margin of error left he went to the very last point of when he had to exit if everything goes perfectly by himself he could have been okay but line entanglement body floating that fast it's over okay he's working hard trying to untangle himself you can see the bang oh there he goes he's moving on again i'm gonna let it play now he's breathing very hard it's been quite difficult to do things hard to watch he's breathing hard good check on the gauge difficult to do things no he's already beyond his time would be getting quite heavy as he's trying to work his way out really slowly dave would start to becoming coherent and then then he would stop did you see how quickly it went from dave was working then he was working harder than it was getting difficult to breathe to then the narrator said now dave's becoming incoherent i'm not kidding you i think that was 15 seconds between the time where he said he's still working checking his computer to becoming incoherent when we say stuff happens fast at depth 900 feet is approximately 30 atmospheres 31 atmospheres that means you are using up your air 31 times faster everything is happening 31 times faster than it would on the surface plus he's at altitude it's cold there's no light there's a line entanglement you have a body floating it didn't go as planned you went beyond the time that you planned and then he becomes incoherent so the question we have now is why did he become incoherent what happened he was still breathing what happened to go from i'm on my rebreather it's functioning i'm looking at my dive computer to incoherent means basically i'm passed out well for those of you who have taken a rebreather class or a mixed gas class it could be only a few things right one of them is what would make you go incoherent black out hypoxia what is hypoxia too low of oxygen or in this case your partial pressure drops to a level where you can no longer maintain consciousness i would say boy dropping below what anything below 0.15 is a very high risk of becoming hypoxic that fast he could become hypoxic which apparently he did that's it he's by himself if you become hypoxic at 900 feet underwater and black out that's it there's nobody around to help you there's nobody around to look at your partial pressure push a button that just gives you more oxygen but he was still moving out and he was still working right right up to the end and now and what he found was he got caught up in the line got caught up in the line [Music] and that was it he was moving away the body and everything was actually towing behind him and he was he had to then try and untangle himself uh from that in a very restricted light position with a a very uh very high sort of breathing rate sad he really meant well he was trying to do a good thing but and he basically succumbed to all the pressures that you've got at that sort of time and his breathing slowly faded and and dave passed away yeah it really is sad i mean there's a person that really was trying to do a good thing i only have a couple minutes left but i i kind of want to summarize it you see really you know when the problem started this is my reaction when did the problem start for dave you know when it started when he successfully completed the first dive that was when he was doomed because that's called luck he got lucky and did a single world record ccr dive by himself that creates false confidence because he didn't have any problems on that dive everything went exactly as planned he also didn't have anything any real tasks other than to go down and come back up that was it i wouldn't say he was complacent necessarily but he he had a sense of confidence that he could now accomplish this mission by himself perhaps because of the day before where he did a record breaking dive the second problem that dave had is something called i i don't want to say this i don't think it's fair to say this but he really wanted to accomplish and get another record so he's willing to push himself you know get that second mark get that second trophy and i'm going to go beyond what i think anybody reasonable would even consider ever doing by themselves tremendous team effort to do a dive of this complexity it's already hard enough to do mixed gas diving with absolutely no task in warm water with perfect visibility 900 feet in a cave lack of visibility floating body multiple different issues can happen and unfortunately it did don't do this there's no reason to push yourself ever to do this to this level we need each other i believe we need each other all the time in all diving i've said that many times on dive talk i'm not a proponent of solo diving independent diving whatever you want to call it it's all good until it's not so that's my reaction to the video let's take care of each other on every single dive we do thanks for watching

Channel: DIVE TALK

Views: 184,904

Rating: 4.8560638 out of 5

Keywords: Bushman’s Hole, Cave Diver, Cave Diver Reacts, Cave Diving, David Shaw, Dive Accident, Dive Instructor, IANTD, Last Dive, NAUI, Open Water Diver, PADI, SCUBA, SSI, Scuba Accident, Scuba Death, Scuba Diving, Scuba Instructor, TDI, Tec Diver, Tec Diving, Tech Diver, Tech Diving, bushman's hole, bushmans hole, cave diver rescue, cave diving scary, cave diving stuck, dave shaw, deon dreyer

Id: V-Ims_56k8M

Length: 28min 2sec (1682 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2021