THE TRUTH ABOUT THE LAST DIVE OF DAVID SHAW

hello everyone welcome to yet another video from dive talk my name is gus hi everybody it's woody and today we're going to be uh kind of revisiting one of the videos that we did in the past um it was the david shaw video where we talked about we reacted basically to a video where he attempted the rescue um of a you know deceased diver um and did i do that i think i did that one yep we did this one alone and it was before we had the means to do this dual react so we had to kind of pick and choose who would do what um but um you know if you read through the comments of this video there's a ton of feedback about things we got wrong and granted as you know if you follow this channel if you watch some of the videos you know that i'm a big fan of showing woody things for the first time ever and have him kind of react on the fly and that's exactly what happened with the david show video i set him up with the video i hit play and obviously he didn't have all of the facts from it which were then pointed out to us on the comments people are like it didn't happen the next day what are you talking about he had a team like facts like that so woody wanted to come on board and kind of talk about all of the facts because i think that if you read the facts the story is even better this is amazing all right so i'm going to spend a lot of time reading and if for those of you that find this interesting there's an article out there called raising the dead that really lays it out but i think it's very important frankly add a respect to david shaw to get these facts right so i want to apologize i absolutely did no back research when i did the first one and simply reacted but here we go let me tell you what set the story up on october 28th of 2004 shaw listen to this he broke the following records this was at buschmann's hall in south africa the deepest depth on a rebreather the deepest depth in a cave on a rebreather the deepest depth at altitude on a rebreather and the deepest depth running the line he was on a [Music] jurgensen marine had electronics he had various different gas mixtures 480 1070 et cetera et cetera i'm not going to go through all the gas mixtures but he had extensive mixtures to be able to deal with very deep depths uh by the way this cave was at 5090 feet the dive on october 28th that sets the story up was 9 hours and 40 minutes now on this dive which was a record-breaking dive shaw discovered the body of dion dreyer that's a south african diver he died in bushman's halls 10 years previously the body was at 890 feet underwater bananas okay so that sets the story up really clear set of facts there so he does the dive successfully sets the record sets the record and in that dive they knew that the body was still down there somewhere but he wasn't on the dive to look for the body right but he happened to see it that was on october 28 2004 okay all right because this is mind-boggling now listen to this every single minute he spent on the bottom his dive computer said he was now adding more than an hour of decompression time on the way up for every minute so i want you to be clear this is a very important set of facts that we i did not discuss one minute is one hour of what so when they say that every minute counts as you'll hear this story unfold now you know why hold on but let me stop you right there for a second because i i think people people people might think that my outrage is like fake but when you think about like the mount everest of cave diving eagles nest which is one of the deepest cave that you can dive in right super deep 300 plus feet one of the intimidating factors of that cave is that for every minute you spend down there you're adding about five minutes of deco maybe up to 10 minutes of deco depending on your where your po2 is so if you spend five minutes at that depth you have 50 minutes or whatever to spend this guy is adding one hour for every minute he's that that seems insane 886 feet of depth wow okay now this is important so let me let me tell you what happened again i'm reading i'm reading a lot i want to get this right what happened is he stopped about 50 feet to the left perfectly illuminated because it's really clear water down there that's what he described that's what was described was the body it was on its back the arms were reaching up towards the surface this is the exact position shaw knew immediately that was deion dryer a 20 year old south african who had blacked out deep in bushmen 10 years earlier and disappeared and divers had been keeping an eye out for him for a long time okay now listen shaw's up close he could see that this is all really important he could see that dion's tanks and dive hardness snugged around a black and tan wetsuit was all intact dion's head and hands were exposed to the water so those were skeletonized bones okay but his mask was eerily in place on the skull thinking he should try to bring deon back to the surface shaw wrapped his arms around the corpse and tried to lift him and it didn't move all right so and i wonder if he thought he was hallucinating at that depth well he was re he was struggling with with with being marked he talked let's talk about that shaw quickly tied the cave real good thinking to dion's tank so the body could be found again and returned to the shot line to start his ascent i left out some other things about what was going through his mind to then say i cannot do this now remember one hour of deco for every one minute no planned mission at this point right this is just i just found the body you got no time to figure out can i do this that wasn't part of his plan so he's approaching 400 feet almost an hour into the dive shaw met up with his close friend don shirley a very important person in this story he's 48 year old british expat runs a tech dive school there in south africa and after shirley checked that shaw was okay and retrieved some spare gas cylinders obviously for him shaw showed him an underwater slate on which he had written 270 meters found body shirley's eyebrow shot up inside his mask and he reached out to shake his friend's hand he knew of course that who that was so shirley left shaw because shaw had another 8 hours and 40 minutes of deco time at that point so we're not joking about the time frame here dave vell dave this is a quote from shirley it's some of these i'm skipping lots of parts but i'm giving you the highlights dave felt very connected with dion shirley says he had found him so it was like a personal thing that he should bring him back yep which is what's going to get into the real meat of the story now when shaw finally surfaced in the late afternoon he removed his mask and said i want to try to take him out okay so now we know there's going to be another dive so the question is when how logistics and so forth by the way it goes on to say no one knows for sure what killed dion the best guess is deep water blackout from carbon dioxide buildup we've talked about that a lot so that's the speculation just in case i said something wrong on that video i may have on that yeah that's what they think they don't know for sure all right and that's one thing that i think is something to be commended which is he came out and instead of celebrating like yeah i broke the wreck or whatever and like keep it to himself the first thing was i need to go back and get this guy so it's a very good point because listen to this two days later i want to get dates straight yes on october 30th 2004 two days later dave shaw called theo and said i will go and fetch your thumb son theo's the dad theo the dad immensely we immediately responded yes absolutely yes more than anything he realized he wanted to see his boy again okay so if recovering dion from the bottom of bushman's hole was a feat of extraordinary ambition and danger combining extreme depth with demanding work shaw and shirley were just the guys to pull it off why did i read that line these two guys have been diving together technical diving for a good long while many many hours underwater and it took amazing amount of planning so before when i said no he went back the next day and he was alone yeah everything about that is wrong absolutely wait till you hear the planning to his respect that needs to be discussed in detail all right in the fall of 2002 so this is when shirley met shaw hi i'm dave shaw the man said do you mind if i go dive your whole surely sized up the buff ozzy and like what he saw soon shaw was flying and regularly to dive and surely went with him whenever he had time so shaw and shirley had logged more than a hundred hours underwater together in nearly two and a half years they known each other that's a lot of hours together under the water so you know your teammate right that that's important you trust them so shirley introduced shaw to the enticing depths of bushman's in june of 0-4 shaw turned up with this rebreather uh set a record at that point at 725 feet he had a dui dry suit it's interesting there's a thinsulate underwater dry suit um and so forth and so on it talks about he had a p-valve so he could pee regularly and uh yeah if you're going to spend 10 hours ago it was interesting that they would they he would intermediately pull his regulator out he would have candy bars and he would drink water and so forth so that was uh going in place in november of 04 back home in hong kong shaw was in almost daily email and phone conversation with shirley so this is their next month back and forth planning talking how are we going to do this the big dive that's what they named the recovery dive was set for early january and one of the most elusive questions was the condition of dion's body because remember shaw said man this body guys i couldn't even really move it i you know so i got we got to think about that how are we going to deal with the body so um the forensics experts they consulted weren't sure but guess the corpse would be mostly bone shaw decided he better try to get it into a body bag for the trip to the surface or risk having the body fall apart that's why the body bag was brought together with ann another assistant planning this he designed a silk bag with drawstrings long enough to fit over dion's fins on the here we go the big dive was on january 8th a saturday okay so october discovered january 8th almost three months later so on that evening january 1st and made the 45 minute drive to hong kong it talks about with 250 pounds of dive gear in her car car she's his wife anne's shaw's wife yeah shaw had been flying that day because he was a pilot right and met at the uh cafe pacific offices and drove him to the departure area they sat together you're and he says to her you're not crying are you he asked this is kind of like a premonition no ann replied bravely shaw got up to leave for his flight he didn't say i love you he didn't need to she knew well shaw arrived six days before the dive and they were practicing they went over to commodity springs so tons of practice yeah he practiced getting a body into the bag underwater with shirley playing the part of dion's corpse at 66 feet went smooth shirley played limp played dead and it worked it only took him a couple of minutes to get shirley into the bag when they were practicing a day later he and shirley drove to mount carmel um were seven south african rebreather divers hand-picked by shirley the coming saturday january 8th and surely excuse me hand-picked by shirley and a police team from cape town and pretoria because there was a dead body involved we're assembling so big team now hand picked by shirley the dive would go off on the coming saturday january 8th the shirley's diet plan was like an underwater symphony symphony every single detail in fact was planned out he wasn't far from being alone far from just winging it the next day yeah he didn't just strap a rebreather and go down to get him next day wait to hear the plans yeah shaw was looking at a dive that would last 12 hours okay and they're gonna hit the water at six a.m all the other divers this is important are going to key off shaw's dive time and head for specific target depths either to help look after shaw or pass dion's body to the surface so the plan was never for shaw obviously to bring the body all the way up to the surface there were many divers involved at various depths the first diver shaw would meet on the way up of course was shirley shirley would be at 725 feet so it is true i do want to highlight this it is true that at the maximum depth shaw was alone significantly deeper than 725 feet well because i mean nobody has been to that to that death and that's what they said you know what too much risk yeah so he would hand the body bag over and if things went well dionne would be out of the water about 80 minutes after shaw's dive had started because they can keep passing the body up to divers that don't have that deco obligation very smart plan right shirley had done everything in his power to minimize the risk this is coming up with the planning i like this part he planned to have 35 backup cylinders of gas in the water enough so that he shawn even some support divers could survive total rebreather failure so they planned for a total rebreather failure which is smart he arranged for a rope and a sling system to be set up that could haul a diver on a stretcher up the clips of the hole to a recompression chamber so even that was planned uh that they trucked in the police actually brought a recompression chamber to the site tons of planning here tons of logistics were set up for this dive yep tons to cope with any medical emergencies surely had a doctor whatever but i can't even pronounce his name a specialist in diving physiology at the university of stuttgenbach outside cape town but this doctor when he realized that up to nine divers would be in the water and learn the depth they would be going to he almost backed out he said there were too many potential bodies you were dealing with multiple divers going deep and that's serious that's a quote all right skipping some stuff moving forward shaw did have one big wrinkle to work out this is an important point he partnered up partnered up with a south african documentary filmmaker gordon hiles to chronicle this recovery so heils designed an underwater camera housing to be lightweight low light works in low light it was a sony hc-20 handycam and attached it to a petzl climbing helmet for those of you that climb that's a climbing helmet we use things can attach to it shaw was not used to wearing a helmet he liked to carry a high-intensity light on the back of his hand and if he needed both hands underwater shaw would normally sling the light and cable around his neck so it wouldn't snag on anything the helmet cam would make that hard to do so now this is something that shaw's not used to right right this is not how he normally dives shaw tried the device in the swimming pool at mount carmel and decided he's comfortable with the design and weight he told heils that instead of slinging his light around his neck he would occasionally set it to the side he didn't he wasn't going to be able to sling it because of the helmet and the camera and so forth apparently yeah okay three days before the dive shaw carried the camera on an acclimatization dive to 500 feet so it's acclimating because this is that it's pretty deep yeah and and he's diving at altitudes climbing in high altitude so they're up to acclimate as well not just deep but altitude unbelievable okay came out perfect very successful he was impressed with the gear and then shaw said i'm sure you'll be impressed with my video footage as well which is kind of eerie because we know what the video footage showed yeah so they had one big last briefing on friday and went over some final points the most important person on this dive is you this is what shaw said if you have a problem shaw said deal with your problem and forget about me everybody was told that on the team it's better to have one person dead than two he had a separate private conversation though with shirley who had upgraded his rebreather for the dive with an oil-filled hammerhead controller this is also really important think remember that so he could get all the way to the bottom of bushman's if he had to he could you want the controller to break under pressure right shirley had asked his friend if you have problems man do you want me to come down i know what you told everybody else shaw considered it yes but only if i signal you to come down because remember he was going to remain a good hundred and something feet above him right okay shirley and shaw had one last message for the gather team if dave doesn't make it if i don't make it we stay there that's what shirley now told the rest of the team that's the end of the story we don't want to be recovered nobody else try this recovery we stay there the team knows not to come all right time to go guys january 8th it's time for the big dive okay and shirley didn't sleep that night shirley says look you no i didn't sleep i just been thinking it thinking it thinking it through so now here's when it gets already starts to get scary the previous evening as he was charging the battery on his new hammerhead controller a wire snapped this is shirley without the unit he would not be able to make the dive shirley was devastated shaw felt deeply for his friend but was prepared to proceed without him he put shirley and peter herbst in touch with jurgensen marine who manufactured that hammerhead at 9 00 pm the cut-off time he had set for himself shaw went to bed with the help of jurgensen a soldering iron and some tin foil herbs managed to jury rig a fix the hammer had powered up man shirley was on the dive again so jerry rig something that you need for 700 plus for surely that's bananas so let's see how that worked out in the great pre-dawn sean shirley began the 10-minute dive to the drive to the hall they were relaxing uh 6 13 a.m video cameras on shaw took shirley hand said i'll see you in 20 minutes and ducked into the dark waters of bushman's hole because he was going to be able to get back to the 725 feet yeah quickly to be able to see him again a few minutes later theo and marie dreyer made their way to the water's edge that's the parents they had come to see that shaw would it so they came after they didn't want shaw to feel pressured to get the body they didn't want to be standing there when he started the dive right man you got to do this no matter what they they respect we count on you you know kind of thing they didn't do that they came after he was already submerged well that was another thing that people say like why were they there to begin with that's why yeah well just to set a record the first dive was just a set of reasons no no i know but why did the parent why did they tell the parents hey be there when your son comes out like just come later they wanted to yeah i hit the bottom in just over 11 minutes he got to that depth really fast and it was a minute and a half faster than he planned and remember every minute matters that's an hour of deco time he just carved off because of that so he immediately started swimming along the cave line as soon as the corpse loomed ahead he pulled out the body bag then he knelt alongside dion and went to work here almost certainly could feel the narc kicking in the helium and reduced nitrogen of his tri-mix would have limited the effect but it was uh probably still as if he had drowned four or five martinis down excuse me he had been on the bottom of bushman's hole at 886 feet for just over one minute 13 minutes after he submerged shirley got the ghost signal and dropped towards the rendezvous point was shot 725 feet yeah now shirley starts down approaching 500 feet imagine shirley's looking down because it was super clear and he could see shaw's light almost 400 feet below him it was about where he expected it near the shot line the line that they were going to use to come back up there was only one problem the light wasn't moving shirley knew instantly that something had gone wrong by that time more than 20 minutes into his dive shaw should have been ascending i mean remember i told you what every minute does 20 minutes down there now that's 20 hours of decoy if chris was even alive shirley should have seen bubbles burbling that shaw vented the expanding gas in the rebreather and the dry suit you know how we have to right it's expanding we got to get rid of the gas man from our counter movement no bubbles nothing but a lonely still light okay we're approaching the end because we're not out of the woods yet for surely surely state comm is action's becoming almost automatic a motionless diver at 886 feet is almost certainly a dead diver but it was dave shaw down there shirley had to see if there was anything he could do or at least clip shaw to the shot line so his body could be recovered yeah so okay here i go he said to himself at about 800 feet deeper than shirley had ever been surely heard remember he filled it with oil so that that wouldn't happen it happened happened so an enormous pressure crushing something then a thud and he looked down in the hammerhead controller's left arm was a wreck and so shirley said without it uh without it shirley would have to constantly monitor the oxygen levels rebreather and inject oxygen into his breathing loop manually it was a full-time occupation emergency routine at life-threatening depths surely was certain that if he went down to shaw he would join him for eternity he got his rebreather back under control and he had to start back up the line flipping through the alternate decompression profiles on a slate he was facing at least another 10 hours in the water and after a few minutes shaw's light was swallowed by the darkness below him no longer could see light of course he's too high at that point so coming near the end back on the surface the crowd around the hall had no idea what was going on beneath them 29 minutes after shaw had gone under and about six minutes after shirley had seen that his light was not moving support divers uh started their dive to the rendezvous with shaw at 492 feet that's where they support divers were going to be meeting as they closed on their target depth they realized there were no lights coming up and no sign of shirley either so now they're like whoa their plan called for them though to wait two to four minutes they stayed for six and it was time to go remember they were told do not be a hero and dive your plan and they did yeah okay wow so before they started up they appeared one more time into the void this time they could see a light but they couldn't tell who it was andrews took out an underwater slate and wrote did not meet d plus d at 150 meters for six minutes one light below question mark not sure deeds light off on the way up they passed other divers that were there uh another it's another support team who were on the way down they showed each dislike and continued now ascending they uh knew that there was no point in continuing to have all those divers to send more just past 400 feet herps pulled even it was shirley and sorry dave herb silently apologized now this is why it was named the movie was named this big point here herb silently apologized he flashed shirley the okay sign and got one back then shirley asked herps for a slate he scribbled on it for a second and returned it it read dave's not coming back okay getting to the end for the dryers that have been the parents i'm skipping near to the end it had been a dr a terrible half an hour a day that had started out promising the recovery of their son's body was now going to end with shaw and dion both at the bottom of bushman's hole the dryers backed away from the water helpless to do anything made their way to their farmhouse marie to the farmhouse marie was in agony crying and thinking about shaw's wife and family she wandered into shaw's room and saw his shoes wallet cell phone and clothes all neatly laid out it's like he's coming back soon to use it all again where he thought but she knew he wasn't wow um anyways what ended up happening was that shirley was alone down there he had to continue his retreat and then ultimately was uh able to get out surely though had this complication this was left out of the document listen to this this is mind-boggling what shirley had to deal with shirley didn't know it yet but a small bubble of helium had formed in his left inner ear causing extreme vertigo so now shirley felt like he was in a washing machine and off the line in the dark all he could do was see with his light as he spun was black followed by the flash of the cave roof then black he saw a flash of white go by and then again it was the shot line and without thinking he's thrust his hand on the line to grab it that grabbed is what kept him alive if he missed it would have drift off and been lost and up or down wouldn't matter depth or the benz would have finished him and they would have been recovering him as well it finally slowed the washington scene feeling so that he could finally read his computer again it showed that he'd come up to 114 feet he was vomiting from vertigo he knew he had to get back down to 151 feet to finish some more i'm off gassing some more deco and um he was riding on his slate to other divers that now got there i'm having a bad time i've got vertigo i'm vomiting um and so forth and so on but he kept telling himself he wrote each breath was a conscious act i have to think about breathing and those got harder and harder so got to be careful about a co2 buildup so he would go i have to suck in hold exhale suck hold and exhale now that seems so normal gus to us but he had to think to do that and he kept saying i will survive i will survive like his brain told him that and that he he writes later that mental exercise exercise kept him alive so i'm not finishing on the story i'm ending it here he did get out obviously he told the story so he got out he had that problem for months right months months of months of recovering um so far from what i said on the first one i'm going to conclude here i wanted to give the respect to shirley to shaw to all the team members of how much planning went into this i didn't get into this discussion about what do they think happened what did they see on the gopro video that caused the complication for shaw he was down there at 800 almost 890 feet working working couldn't get the body in if you remember and ultimately passed out yeah right too much exertion that's on the first one that part's not wrong but the planning and what went into it was really important to give them this respect and i hope this now helps clarify the real story because it's actually even more amazing than when i did the initial react as you know and gus i appreciate you saying that i had no back preparation gus was like i want you to react to this watch and i think you may have even said woody i think it's the next day they went back and recovered the body right we just somehow wrongly concluded that that's wrong they had months of preparation yeah we talked about it like it wasn't on the it wasn't on the record dive it was just another day they went back maybe the next day and yeah it was yeah it doesn't it doesn't matter because we got a ton of stuff wrong and and i also you know and i know you want to do this too i also see the tons and tons of comments that people made about like well why were they so stupid why not just tie a rope and pull him up now learning the facts you understand that he was a skeleton you can just pull him and it will fall apart um that's why they that's why he made a bag he was like i want to bring up all the remains they consulted they the body is probably going to fall apart which is true because at some point even on the video you can see the the head comes detached yes yes um you know from the body so you can only imagine if they tie a rope to like the waist or something and pull it it would have just disintegrated disintegrated there's no point in the mission and all that but anyway that's it it's a it's it is remarkable the whole thing is remarkable yeah and um shaw was a really good soul he he knew he was the last person to see that body and he wanted to bring that body back for those parents and that's knowing he was going to risk his life and how do i know he knew he was going to risk his life many times you heard me say he told the others do not come after me i know there's a chance that this will happen i know i'm going to risk my life only surely did he say you can come after me if i flag you if i if my light is waving or something like that because shirley was gonna have to look down 150 or so feet because he was always planning on being that far above him so i hope that helps everybody i'm sorry for misstating the facts the first time i really am i'm glad i did the reaction though because um now i feel like it's a real tribute both to shop absolutely and shirley actually yeah absolute legends they didn't do this for money like at no point you learn and you say well they were hoping to collect the 50 000 bounty on the body no like it was all about bringing that body back that's right um and um yeah they made the ultimate sacrifice so thank you everybody and um until the next one we appreciate you tuning into this one see you then

Channel: DIVE TALK

Views: 383,281

Keywords: SCUBA, IANTD, TDI, NAUI, PADI, SSI, Tec Diving, Tec Diver, Tech Diving, Tech Diver, Cave Diver, Cave Diving, Open Water Diver, Scuba Diving, Scuba Instructor, Dive Instructor, David Shaw, Don Shirley, Bushmans Hole, Deon Dryer, Cave Diving Death, Body Recovery, Dave Shaw, Last Dive, Last Dive of David Shaw, The Last Dive, Dive Recorded Death, Death Recorded, Cade Diver Reacts

Id: 4IliXmcAr9Q

Length: 35min 5sec (2105 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 16 2021