Expert Diver Reveals the Truth About Dive Watches | Watchfinder & Co.

[Music] well hello everyone and you join us here today to talk a little bit about diving now tom you've got a dive watch and i've got a dive watch i don't know about you but i don't think i've ever actually got mine wet have you me neither maybe a bit of splashback when i was washing up or something but yeah really putting the 300 metres to the test well that's just as well because we have a special guest with us here today diver adventurer nutter extraordinaire andy toolbit and he's going to give us a bit of an idiot's guide on how we can go and do some cave diving andy very very good to have you here thank you for joining us how are you doing thank you for having me yeah i'm doing all right uh and it will be an idiot's guide because because if i'm giving it um that's what we're saying actually well cave diving is a is a cerebral sport you know you don't have to be an olympic athlete um but it is quite a little bit common sense i think rather than on anything anything too intelligent well hopefully you'll be able to pump us full of common sense today because i think between tom and i we probably don't have a huge amount when it comes to outdoor activities but for our viewers and listeners who may be interested in putting their dive watch to the test this is a really cool and fun and local sport that people can take part in so i think first of all what i'd like to do andy is um understand from you a bit more about who you are and what you do and why you're here talking to us about cave diving so um i spent quite a lot of time the forces and then when i left the forces i got into kind of expeditions and exploration projects and uh the main thing that i do i do climbing and skydiving and a lot of stunt work the main thing i do is it's underwater stuff so some free diving but it's mostly the technical stuff so it's cave diving and very deep diving using mixed gases nothing called a rebreather which isn't like scuba gear it basically recycles what your your breath uh it's the same technology that astronauts use and that means you can stay down longer you know and go much further and go much deeper um and i i use that primarily to explore uh you know trying to find lost shipwrecks to try and explore um unmapped underwater cave systems or even lost lost flooded mine systems i think the reason i'm on this podcast specifically is because um i well not actually that recently but um towards the end of last year i got involved uh as an ambassador for panerai awesome i hope that's working out very well for you and uh tom this is probably your opportunity to ask about treasure well it's yeah i mean one of the things that i wanted to ask you is i mean you mentioned how it's kind of a cerebral activity and also you know there's a certain amount of courage that you need to have in order to sort of plunge the unknown but i wondered how much the exploration how much of the the opportunity of discovery how much of that motivates you in what you do does anything ever creep into your mind like there could be something of real importance or you know um there could be some magic down here how much does that motivate you to sort of overcome the dangers uh that's almost the entirety of it that's all point i mean that's what you want to find out i think i think it's human nature that that we've been driven with this curiosity they want to find out what's around the next corner what's over the next hill sure you know what's around the next bend or what's out you know in in the darkness because often even in the open sea you know it might be very light if you look straight down it's like 120 meters to the bottom you can't see the bottom just disappears into the gloom you want you want to know what what that sort of that that darkness is this question mark and you never really know what you're going to find i mean you can you can you can hope um and a lot of exploration inevitably it's maybe not as spectacular as you'd like but that's because once in a while you find you know an absolute gem and it's exciting stuff like just the thrill of of being somewhere that that where no human being has ever been before um or dropping on we found a shipwreck in the english channel we found it on a sort of side scan sonar so we knew there was something there couldn't we make it what it was it turned out to be a world war ii uh merchant ship but but you know we got in the water it's about 70 meters deep in english channel and as you're as you're in free fall down through the water column into the darkness you know it's literally like just starting to tease off that first little bit of paper from the from the christmas present on christmas day like that's definitely something there it could be yeah it could be a lot of ice cream iso containers but it could be a spanish galleon laden with gold you know it could be the goonies but um you um you know you never know that sort of mystery all right that's interesting because i thought yeah i thought it you would push that sort of stuff to the back of your bike because you'd be like no no no it's just going to be an empty cable it's just going to be you know a run-of-the-mill merchant navy wreck or something but i like i like that the idea that it's always just like yeah come on i don't actually want you know most of them we're doing cave diving stuff yeah you find a little bit more tunnel that looked very similar to the tunnel before but sometimes you can find these spectacular passages that that um you know are full of stalactites look amazing or or um these huge chambers these massive cathedral-like chambers as well as that you know my background originally was was um sort of academically was in zoology so you know you're always looking to potentially find new species as well i mean it's gonna be it's going to be small stuff but um in these sort of places but you never know what you're going to find um i mean i've been two kilometers into a cave system and then there's a fish just swimming around i found frogs actually in the caves like miles from the surface how the hell did you get in here they were probably thinking the same thing yeah and even from an archaeological point of view even even i actually over locked down i did uh i did a masters in archaeology and i did my dissertation on cave diving in archaeology and the potential applications for um in the uk and there's been instances where one particular one where a guys lot of guys were cave diving and they surfaced inside this dry cave that was only reachable by cave diving you had to be able to you know this sort of dry part and it was full of human skulls oh goodness how cool is that and what happened was there was actually a chimney if you imagine a natural chimney leading from this dry chamber to the surface and back i think in like uh the paleolithic time or mesolithic time people used to basically bury people and then over the thousands of years that sort of that tunnel that chimney had collapsed and then it got full of dirt and completely sealed over so from the surface you wouldn't know it was there um yeah and these guys surfaced in this you know this chamber of bones and there was obviously those canine bones in there too they think they might be like sacrifices or or ornamentation you know wolf teeth nuts and stuff but yeah um you know you never know what you're gonna find wow so cave diving it like it sounds absolutely fascinating about my experience of diving probably extends to sitting on a beach and seeing some people plop off the side of a boat to explore a couple of meters underneath cave diving sounds like a very very different proposition how do you begin to prepare yourself for cave diving so it's an accumulation really of of years months weeks days and hours and minutes you know depending on the nature of the cave dive because even within cave drive there's some pretty easy ones and some pretty hardcore serious ones clearly you spend years accruing skills and experience to be able to do that and within with the gaining of that skill and that experience you build a sort of mental fortitude against the conditions you're going to face long hours and hours underwater being many kilometers from the nearest exit that's that sort of psychological pressures because there's no doubt that you know being underwater sometimes on your own in the dark in the cold underground is probably one of the most psychologically oppressive places you can be um and then often the days leading up to it you're checking your equipment because you are frankly you're wholly reliant on the technology you're carrying with you if that if that fails then you're in real trouble which is why we all cut and you're planning and actually this is where paranoia counts when i'm sitting planning i think of all the things that can possibly go wrong and i go right how can i either stop them from happening or if i can't do that i'm going to assume those things are going to happen i'm going to have a plan b c d e f in my back pocket ready to go so my rebreather that i spoke about my primary source of breathing gas that's never failed on me never once but i assume it's going to fail on me every time i get in the water and i carry redundance or bailout systems for that so for the the person just getting started with it what do you think are the cool things they need to to do before they even consider going into a cave so obviously you need to learn to scuba dive first the basis of diving um maybe do some night dives that sort of stuff uh you know people penetrate inside wrecks i mean that's a sort of mini metal cave and then from a an instructional point of view you can do you sort of you you take a series of graduated steps the carvandiva courses where you go into an underwater cave but you never go in so far that you lose sight of the entrance so you can always see what they call the blue window you can also see the light and then you penetrate further and further and then you start using things like rebreathers things like uh dpvs uh diver propulsion vehicles basically scooters if you measure torpedo that you can have hang on to and pose through the water because that way you can cover many many kilometers um and then you you know obviously dealing with thermal issues because even in relatively warm water if you're underwater for six seven eight hours you start getting cold um all the way to what we are doing recently what we're doing in the future which is actually camping undergrounds of underwater so the last dive we did was a six hour dive um carrying a mountain of equipment all clipped to us including a big specially made dry tube metal dry tube and in that dry tube with a sleeping bag and a mountain some food and that stuff then we actually surfaced in this dry chamber you know many many kilometers from from the surface camped overnight and then changed our gear around carried on diving and then you know and dived out you you end up spending um two three four days kind of under water stroke underground i'm glad you clarified the surfacing part because i was picturing you pitching a tent underwater and just sort of getting into a wet sleeping bag and the whole thing being submerged which is obviously nonsense you can although you in a in a small scale you can we've we've done stuff um we've actually done a wiki home or something my friend friend chris where we set up a decompression habitat so we we took through the cave diving and lots of dry chambers which are real pain because it's it's it's heavy you can get it weightless under water but if it's if it's a dry cave you gotta you're gonna carry it through and then we build this imagine a giant upside down shopping bag but you know a bag for life that's not a master bag that's a meter wide and two meters long right so um one of them upside down and we just we we secured it to the to the rocks at the seat of the bed then filled it full of flavia with a gas really um which means if you've got two or three hours of decompression um you can get inside that which means you can get out the water you've got to stain your breathing gas you can take your mask off you can drink you can eat enough it's a lot warmer even though the the air temperature within within that bag is the same as the water temperature because water transfers heat 25 times better than air it makes it effectively effectively warmer inside the decompression habitat i'll say now that that whole scenario is filling me full of paranoia already um and so you touched upon some of the equipment that you bring with you what does someone just getting started need to really consider purchasing to take with them for something like this so uh it depends how you're doing it but you're basically the first thing you need to breathe that's pretty essential whether that's scuba equipment or whether it's a rebreather um you need a bailout breathing system so either more scuba gear or another re-breather because um you know as i say paranoia keeps you alive you'll need a mask as you want to see usually a spare mask because i say paranoia keeps you alive we usually wear helmets um we carry torches because again you need to be able to see where you're going it's very very dark under there uh and if you need one you'll need two if you need two knee three so we never go cave diving without less than three torches uh we carry line especially if we're exploring mccurry line um effect it's the sort of ariadne's thread that's you you as how you find your way back out um but because you've got line it's very easy to get entangled underwater um so we carry various cut as well at least three sort of knives or cutters on me if i need to cut myself free from that line you need some thermal protection be a wetsuit or a dry suit if it's really cold um and then you need your sort of computer systems you need a way to know what depth you're at how long you've been under water and if you're using your rebreather then you need a sort of electronic handset to run that rebreather so you know i i always carry [Music] at least one or two computers and a watch with me whenever i whenever i go diving so you mentioned the watch there obviously very topical yeah um there's a it's a bit of a bone of contention within the community and probably spoken about more by people who have never even set their toe in the water than otherwise but some people would say that mechanical watch is outdated um and a wrist watch is outdated and everything can be done with a dive computer you go with both and i believe you've done so even before your relationship with panerai what's the benefit so i mean the dive computers are great but the sort of things that i do especially in very cold water are very very long they're run by batteries so the batteries will eventually run out it's just fine if you're doing a or even five six hour dive but if you're underground uh and underwater for three or four days then you start running the risk of needing to charge that now that's fine because you if you only use it when you're diving it's not as bad so that's technically what i do is that i um i can switch so i can use my dive computers to dive in um with my watch actually because i like to know what time it is because a dye computer will tend to just give you a reference point like how long you've been underwater the dive time effectively but i like to know when i surface okay right at five o'clock six o'clock because i like to know to try and keep a grasp on my biological clock because it's very easy when you're in the darkness for two three four days to start losing a little bit of of grasp on when you should be sleeping in a way to be eating and then in camp um i've i've got my watch on the whole time so you know i again i can i can kind of still operate sensibly if i wake up at two in the morning i know it's two in the morning so i'd go back to sleep at six in the morning then i get up but you you're trying to maintain the sort of natural rhythms as much as possible and essentially it doesn't run out of battery ever so if i've learned anything so far paranoia carry 10 of everything so mechanical watch is a really good opportunity to make sure you've got something that continues functioning it doesn't it doesn't require any external and even with our rebreathers um summary b there's a fully electric but the ones that i tend to use the friends that i die with tend to use there's the option they can run them electrically we can actually run them mechanically as well so even if you get battery failures or things run out you can still still breathe effectively and scuba gear again is a bailout option it's great because it's purely mechanical so just about how long it's been under water or underground doesn't matter how long it's been operating doesn't how cold it is and it's not going to run out of batteries so um we've had some of the preparation talk for what you do before you go to the cave you've mentioned uh we a lot talking about teams of people you're at the cave who are you with do you need to be with them and what are the things that you do to prepare yourself for the literal entrance of that cave well it depends on the nature of of the project but more often than not these days um we we effectively dive so low like recently we went to france there's two of us there but we are carrying enough equipment to look after ourselves because um you know in the darkness if it's low visibility if the visibility gets chummed up which is very easy to happen it becomes nil a nil vis stability environment then your body's not going to be much used to you so you need to basically dive independently and i prefer that anyway because i i don't want to to give the responsibility for my safety to anyone else and you know and i don't feel that they they need to kill that extra burden that they have to look after me as well so um we tend to even dive when we dive as a team dive as um there are some things that we do just logistically so last time we had a with a scooter a dpv these topedo things won each and then we carried a spare one between us um because sometimes you have you know you don't be carrying three four five six seven eight spay as though it becomes the point we just physically can't drag the stuff through the water um so usually before a dive we sort of go in our own little zones we sort our own kit out we test our own kit to make sure it's all working properly even though we would have been tested day before but physically you you then get in the water often the hardest bit believe it or not because you get in there dry suit on rebreather and then you clip all the stuff to you unless i'd had five big scuba balls to clip to me at a scooter and add a dry tube that can take quite a bit of time and effort so at this point usually you're sweating and breathing hard so then i'll put the rebreather uh in my mouth and i'll just start relaxing on the surface just so basically floating in the water and breathing getting my heart rate down get my breathing rate down and and making sure the rebreather itself is is working and looking at my gas mixes um so that you know i'm i'm fairly relaxed before i start the cave dive because there's no point starting it out of breath and sweating and all sort of you know not as much panicking but just just having having just worked hard still trying to catch your breath yeah like an acclimatization period yeah it's a lot of things to make sure you know you can reach all your all your bits and pieces with your gloves on your big dry suit make sure that works you don't want to be halfway through the cave and go oh i i clipped that thing in the wrong place and now i can't reach it so you do all those checks at the surface so you're in the water um that's that is literally the beginning you are going to go down you're going to go across you're going to go into a cave and you shared some footage with me which people will be able to see as we're talking and one word struck me uh immediately was all of this disorientating it looks so disorientating how do you go deeper and longer into a cave and and keep your wits about you keep yourself doing what you need to do yeah it can be i mean frosting is you've you've um you lay a line as i said um so that's your that's just a first point of orientation um i mean if you dive a lot even in nail vis you kind of got a feeling for which way up is because gravity still works in the water and you know if you if you breathe out your bubble still go up um it can definitely be disorienting if there's no vase so you you can drop to the floor uh or find a wall put your hand on the wall put your hand on the floor but once you've got that point of contact that tells you if you are moving up down right or left because your hand is physically touching something so that's often what we'll do but once you're in the cave and you are if you can see if the visibility is good then then it's just like flying you know it's no different to that you are zooming along and actually probably easier to orientate yourself that would be if you're say flying an aircraft because you're flying aircraft you've only got effectively a reference point but beneath you if everything else is blue where is it in a cave in a tunnel i've got sort of a hard reference point a physical environment you know 360 degrees um and i i find that that first part is it's lovely because i haven't humped all this this heavy dive kit down to the dive site and then got it all in my back and get it all clipped up to me it's all just as soon as you leave the surface and you become weightless and everything just starts to sort of it this clip to you becomes weightless it's a lot less effort to dive than it is to get ready for a dive to be honest it sounds like and from my own feelings of what you're talking about and how i'm mentally reacting that um as much as the physical stamina which sounds like it's not too much of an issue the mental stamina is a really big part to play in cave diving especially for a longer trip how do you condition yourself and how do you look after yourself when you're doing a dive when you're in a situation that could be filled with as you keep mentioning paranoia yeah i i think the [Music] the paranoia and fear can very much be curbed by um preparation the old motto of the army uh parachute school was knowledge dispels fear you know if you actually understand how partially works departure systems and all that stuff and we spent a week and realizing the statistics and actually how safe these things are when you finally come to jump out of the plane it won't be as scary so much like cave diving if you understand what you're doing and how things work then you don't you don't if frankly if you're starting a cave dive scared you probably shouldn't be doing it simple as that and that said there is a there is a level of kind of as i said psychologically oppressive this is there's a there's a level of psychological pressure on you when you are underground for hours and hours or under water for hours and hours in a cave and i think the trick really is too is to do the job that's in front of you and not let your mind spiral to the bigger picture i was asked once after i talked someone said oh how do you cope with the idea that you are you know three hours swim from the nearest exit and you're 100 meters deep and you're there's 300 meters of rock above your head and you're on your own i'm like well i don't i don't think i don't allow myself to think about that i just do the job in front of me know you just swim the next meter don't start thinking that the fact the entrance is you know three or four kilometers behind you because um i think you start spiraling out of control then and if you do start to get a little bit um anxious you need to check it straight away because it is exponential that the longer you leave it the harder it is to rain yourself back in and how how would you do that how would you do that is it some bit of zen breathing yeah well i'd like to say that yes and breathing but the reality of it is it's just using me giving myself stern talking to i think it's like that x score you know i'll i'll i'll be in i'll i've had an instant once where i i got a little bit lost um and i was trying to find this this this exit and i'm like okay this isn't good this isn't good right and you start to go okay and we'll walk stop just and actually i did start just hung in the water stop to stop them swimming right what's the reality situation yes i'm lost okay however i've already found um a little dry chamber um a tiny one but big enough for me to get out which meant i could i could change my rebreather around to what i needed to get back out um okay so i'm first thing is i'm not gonna die this is bad but i'm not gonna die okay cool in that case you know calm down get a grip there's a lot of that a lot i think you need to be practical um uncertainly for me it's okay to just stop take a breathe think through the situation work out a solution and and then crack on it's it sounds like cave diving could be quite a good uh training platform for just your whole mental condition for life generally you go down there you're in a situation you have to face it and you have to deal with it yeah well i've said before that keith diving is bainery uh you're claiming or skydiving you can twist an ankle break a leg break your back be in a coma that's a graduation of how things can go for you in cave no no one gets injured cave diving uh it either goes well and you get out alive it goes badly but you do something about it and you get out alive or it goes badly and you don't do enough about it and you don't go alive frankly do you find um to move away from slightly closer that said it's incredibly safe to do a weekend it is incredibly safe it's like driving you know or crossing the road is crossing the road dangerous well for a two-year-old yeah it is but for an adult who's got any common sense no it's not so it's not cave dive the cave diving isn't dangerous safe it's how we do it that makes it dangerous or safe and it sounds like from what you're saying the more preparation you do the more redundancy you have the less chance there is of that danger ever occurring correct oh amazing well thank you so much um this is this has been uh an idiot's guide to cave diving as told by a fantastic and very entertaining expert thank you so much andy i would love to have you on again to talk in more detail about this stuff it seems like we've barely touched the surface so dear and listener if you would like to see more of this uh this kind of stuff the exploration the use of watches where they're supposed to be used do let us know in the comments below thank you so much andy for joining us it's been a real pleasure yeah brilliant truly fascinating thank you and um yeah we hope to see you again with us very soon enjoy your next trip and we'll speak to you we'll speak to you after then bye-bye thanks very much cheers bye now you

Channel: Watchfinder & Co.

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Id: hSn9OfVXb_g

Length: 26min 6sec (1566 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022