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The Story of Bushman's Hole
🕑 Added 2023-08-22 10:15:01 +0000 UTCOne of the most interesting sources I used for this story was the website DeepCave.com – a site that, in large part, was created and maintained by David Shaw himself. It chronicles some of his diving adventures, including detailed dive reports… and there’s also a page dedicated to the preparation for the dive to retrieve Deon’s body.
The dive reports are particularly interesting. The site features one in which he details a dive where several things went wrong – including a near-fatal mishap with some of his equipment:
"I took an involuntary part “breath” and swallowed some water. I quite calmly then decided I was about to drown and seemed to cope with that thought without panic. That water ingestion I think did give me incentive for another minute of no air time though! Anyway…I eventually found the regulator, took some calming breaths of glorious 35% gas, sorted out the tangle and went back on the loop in semiclosed mode again. Talk about a near-death experience!"
It’s incredible to see how complex diving is, and how much can go wrong. But equally incredible is just how calmly he’s able to handle and report incidents like this!
Comments
Fascinating Horror
That's a good point. And one of the things that I learned while researching this is that 200 dives (which sounds like a lot at first) actually isn't all that many when it comes to such a technically complex operation. There's so much to consider - it's kind of mind-boggling
Warhorse
Cave diving is a magnificent sport and with the proper training and equipment, there is definitely no need to feel like you are "cheating death." But what this person did was an invitation to disaster. He had 200 dives under his belt, so he grossly lacked the experience. AND he went solo! IMO an attempt should have never been made to get the body, knowing how deep he was. Also, this was most likely a CO2 hit, not nitrogen narcosis. At this depth, his diluent (breathing mix) was probably 2% O2 & most of the remainder would have been helium. Also at these extreme depths there is compression arthralgia, causing your joints to not function properly. Lastly, when physically exerting yourself at such ungodly depths, it would be super easy to "over-breathe" your CO2 scrubber. Very very sad story. Thank you for another amazing video.
Fascinating Horror
Thank you!
Jennifer Durham
Well done.
