Into the Deepest and Darkest
Deep Diving Adventures In South Africa
And The Gulf Of Aqaba
By
Joseph Emmanuel
Dedication
For All Of Those Who Said I Should, And All Of Those Who Said I Could,
...Safe Diving My Friends.
Table of Contents
Foreword 6
Maps 7
Africa 7
South Africa 8
Sinai Peninsula in Egypt 9
In the beginning 10
What makes a cave diver anyway? 19
Diving the dead-end cave 19
Where did that rock go? 22
The cave with the crumbly roof 26
Never take anything for granted 30
Mix Mysteries – the art of blending gases 32
When computers lie 37
Boesmansgat Beckons 40
First time at Mount Carmel 40
A night in an ablution block 46
First dive 46
My deepest dive yet 50
Return to Mount Carmel – my first Trimix dive 51
Impressions of infinity-100 metres and beyond 55
Into uncharted waters 63
Nuno ventures deeper than ever before 63
Verna takes women into a new space 73
A Polish Gentleman 90
First meetings 90
Leszek’s second trip to Boesmansgat 92
Lightning strike at 6 metres 92
Deepest Polish cave diver 95
DCI- what now? 101
The dive 101
Rendezvous at 107 metres 102
Neurological bend? 105
Resolution 108
Face to face with fear- Verna’s very close call 112
Nuno’s Red Sea record - the mission I missed 117
Diving again 122
Verna’s second world record 127
The white snake almost got us 129
The blue dolphin in the roof 131
The day of the big dive 133
Back in the big city 140
Another man on the bottom of Boesmansgat 143
A mystery finally solved 146
A third death at Boesmansgat 150
Deon goes home 153
Nuno sets another record-in the Gulf of Aqaba 156
The team prepares 156
We leave for Egypt 161
Cairo, city of the Pharaohs 162
Reunion at Planet Divers Hotel 165
My first dive in the Red Sea 167
The NABQ Explorer 171
First day at sea 176
The Blue Hole of Dahab 182
150 metres into the Gulf of Aqaba 185
318.25 Meters – a new world record 188
Epilogue 200
Twelve years of diving, time to reflect 200
How long is a piece of string? 201
And of the future? 202
Appendices 204
A. Equipment considerations. 204
B. Other cave diving references. 213
C. Glossary of terms 214
Index 217
Foreword
Fourteen minutes to descend, thirty-one decompression stops to look forward to. My first decompression stop was at 190 metres; my first support diver only met me at 120 metres. I had to endure twelve hours and twenty minutes of decompression in rough seas. In the end I had done something no one else ever had. I’d dived to 321.85 metres on open circuit scuba and returned to tell the tale. In the process I’d breathed 90,000 litres of gas had 15 backup divers working in relays to support me.
This is the incredible place that over twelve years of ever deeper cave diving and exploration had brought me and my dedicated support team. I have seen the author of this book go from a novice open water diver to become one of the most experienced technical diving instructors in South Africa. Joseph Emmanuel was with me for almost all my record breaking dives over the years. This book is his personal account of those expeditions.
The book is about more than just diving. It’s about trust, and friendship, and faith in other people’s ability. It’s about determination to see a goal achieved. It’s about relationships and communication, logistics and planning. It’s about a journey that began more than ten years ago and a destination that as explorers we will never really reach.
Nuno Gomes - October 2006
Guiness Book of Records 2008
Deepest Seawater Scuba Dive-318m
Deepest Freshwater Cave Dive-282.6m
Maps
Africa
Showing South Africa and Egypt Highlighted
Maps courtesy of MapCruzin.com http://www.mapcruzin.com
South Africa
Shaded ovals indicate approximate location of sites mentioned in the book.
Boesmansgat cave
Wondergat cave
Sodwana Bay
Badgat cave
Welkom Recompression facility
Sinai Peninsula in Egypt
Shaded ovals indicate approximate location of sites mentioned in this book
Suez canal
Gulf of Aqaba
In the beginning
23rd August 1996 – Boesmansgat in the Northwest Province of South Africa. It’s around 9 am, and I'm sitting at the side of a small pool of water, approximately ten metres by five metres by six metres deep. It looks for all the world like other ponds at the bottom of other sinkholes in this remote part of South Africa called the Karoo. The surface is so still it has a glassy appearance to it. But this wonderfully peaceful place has a secret. Below this tranquil surface lies what is regarded by some as the largest single body of underground water in the world. Even more significant for me, a very good friend and one of the best divers I’ve ever known, is making his way down to 282.6 metres. It will take him fifteen minutes to get there and, if all goes well, in excess of twelve hours to return to the surface. We are 1550 metres above sea level making his dive equivalent to over 300 metres, deeper than any free-swimming scuba diver has ever gone.
The tension around me is palpable, not a breath of wind, not a sound from the usually noisy insects that swarm over this pool of life in the middle of the Karoo. I'm kept company by six other divers, each of whom has a role to play in the next twelve hours. For the moment at least, we have nothing to do but wait. I remember thinking “someone should write a book about all this”. This, in my way, is that book.
Now, nearly twelve years and a new millennium later, once again I’m part of a group of people working towards a unique diving objective. In the process we’re building bonds of friendship that I know will endure for the rest of our lives.
I find myself thinking back on that first incredible dive and wondering what it is that draws me (and indeed all of us) back to what some people call the most dangerous form of scuba diving, deep cave exploration. I’ll be exploring some of the things that motivate me and the rest of the group of people I count myself lucky enough not only to dive with, but also to name among my friends. I’ll share some anecdotes and touch on some of the great debates regarding cave diving protocols and practices. I will try to give the reader something of the vantage point I have as an insider on these expeditions. You will notice that the chapters follow a more or less chronological order. I have done this to show the slow and sometimes scary path we took to learn enough so we could begin to consider the kind of diving we wanted to do. What this book is not, is a technical diving manual. However, for the sake of clarity I have included some technical aspects of cave and mixed gas diving. It is in no way intended to be a manual for either cave or mixed gas diving. Neither is it intended to replace proper training with an accredited organisation. For the more cu
rious readers I’ve added an appendix on equipment considerations and a list of recommended additional reading.
The author after another memorable dive in Boesmansgat
The tough question when one sets out to write what is in effect something of a memoir is of course where to begin. Well, I reckon that the logical place is the beginning.
In my case, it started many years before I first learned to dive, when we in South Africa finally caught up with the rest of the world and got TV. Yup, we haven’t always had it. The South African Broadcasting Corp. (SABC) was wise enough to screen a number of documentary specials featuring Jacques-Yves Cousteau and his legendary research vessel Calypso. As a lad in my teens, with a keen interest in the natural world, this series was absolutely fascinating. From the first time I saw Calypso and her crew exploring the underwater world, I was hooked. I guess a little part of me knew that sooner or later I would learn to dive.
I remember being captivated by the Cousteau teams as they criss-crossed the world’s oceans in search of better understanding. Eventually they became more sociologists than pure marine scientists. The Cousteau Society, like most such organisations has had its share of problems over the years, but is still going strong. I’m pleased to say they are more and more involved in education of indigenous peoples and in some respects have become the ecological conscience of more developed nations. The only thing that detracted from these old documentaries was the fact that we were watching them years after the rest of the world. In fact, by the time we saw the Cousteau Specials, the divers had changed from the famous black and yellow wetsuits and helmets to the more photogenic silver. Imagine my surprise when I found out that the Cousteau divers did not always use twin hose regulators and that their backpacks had buoyancy compensating (BCs) devices built in.
I had no idea how dramatically technology would change in the years it took from those first movies to when I learned to dive. I missed twin hose regulators and horse-collar BCs by a couple of years at best. When I started diving it was not compulsory to use a BC in South Africa. But thankfully single hose regulators were already the norm. Horse-collar BCs were still fairly common and if you talked about an octopus, most people thought about the eight-legged critter we see underwater. ‘Real’ divers looked at you a bit strange if you had an extra second stage on your regulator.
There were basically two training agencies in South Africa, the American NAUI (National Association of Underwater Instructors) organisation and SAUU (The South African Underwater Union), that got its international status through affiliation to CMAS (World Underwater Federation) originally based in Monaco and currently headquartered in Rome, Italy. The University of Witwatersrand Underwater Club (WUC) happened to be a CMAS/SAUU club, which I think turned out to be a good thing for me. The CMAS organisation has always been run around a club structure, and been largely non-profit. Also, they had very high standards of training - especially the physics and physiology of diving.
I remember my first diving course. It took place in January 1991 at a disused quarry called Bass Lake. The One Star Course required me to do a mere five dives to qualify. I did about twenty dives before my course was over. This was before my first sea dive! In my enthusiasm I went on all the weekends that the course had and in the five weeks or so had become something of a Bass Lake veteran.
The lack of spectacular scenery aside, I felt I was in my element. Bass Lake is one of the few local dive sites around Johannesburg and is still used by the diving industry to train divers before they head to the sea. The only sights you get to see as a diver in Bass Lake are a bus, a plane and a scrapped diving bell of sorts. After all these years these ‘wrecks’ are still there. Although still frequented by many hundreds of divers every year, the visibility has dropped to an average of about just 5 metres over the last few years.
It was not long after this that I finally got to go to the ocean, Sodwana bay off the Kwazulu Natal to be specific. This is the most southern tropical reef system in the world. I say reef system, because it’s actually a series of reefs that extend up the coast from a point called Jesser point. It’s from this beach that all the boats launch out through sometimes very rough surf, and skippers have to learn to read the waves or risk flipping their boats. I witnessed more than one boat tip over in the surf over the years. Often the skipper is simply not trained to launch in surf, but on occasion it’s a pure accident.
One such occasion happened to our Wits Underwater Club boat (cheerfully called “The Lurking Hurler” after a particularly unfortunate member of the club who got seasick on nearly every dive he did!). We were coming in from a dive with a full boat (that’s five people, four scuba tanks and sundry fins etc on board). We spotted a ski-boat in distress just off the rocks of Jesser point. On board were about six people, four of them children. Our skipper quickly got us to shore, and with only one other person to assist set off to take the people off the boat. Our scuba tanks and other gear were still on the Hurler. Anyway, he got the children and I think one adult off the boat, dropped them on shore and was on his way out to try to tow the ski-boat out to sea were repairs could be made to the motor.
He dropped off everyone including my friend who had helped him the first time. But this left the Hurler a little too light for the surf conditions, so when a freak wave combination hit the boat it lifted its bow and the wind did the rest. Over went the Hurler, and the skipper was unceremoniously dumped into the water. Fortunately he was not too far out to sea and was able to swim back himself. The rest of us sprinted down the beach, dived in and righted the boat and pull it back to shore. Luckily no one was injured and no kit lost, but we did spend the rest of the day and quite some of the night cleaning the engines and spraying water-displacing oils into the engines. Would you believe the boat ran better than ever after that?
I can only describe these trips up to Sodwana with the University diving club as some of the best times of my life. The underwater world that Jacques Cousteau had introduced me to so many years before was everything I expected. I feel that we as divers have the privilege of witnessing some of the most fragile ecosystems on earth first hand. As such we have a special responsibility to educate non-divers about the sensitive nature of the oceans and the impact that damage to reefs and the oceans have on quality of life in general.
Thanks to the club structure of CMAS, I had the opportunity to learn a lot more than just the mechanical skills of scuba and skin (breath-hold) diving. I’ve been involved in planning expeditions to remote dive sites. Helped plan and executed dives requiring hours of decompression and multiple gas changes. I’ve learned about small craft handling and compressor operations and even regulator maintenance. I’ve become a certified instructor and chamber attendant, and assisted a number of medical cases in which the recompression chamber was used to administer hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBO). I’ve dived in some of the most remote sites in South Africa, maybe even the world. Before Divers Alert Network (DAN) came to South Africa, the only way to get to a chamber was by private car or ambulance. Often the nearest recompression chamber was six to eight hours away at best by car. Perhaps most significant for me was that all this training and experience would one day enable me to help two good friends to safely accomplish record breaking dives. Although I didn’t know it back in 1991, my fellow club members, Nuno Gomes and Verna Van Schaik would one day alter many peoples’ perception of what was possible in deep diving. Nuno was club chairman when I first joined and the driver behind the clubs very active cave diving group. Verna did her first dives just a year before I did mine. The years ahead would see us both become members of Nuno’s deep support team. Nuno and Verna eventually decided , independently, and years apart, to try and push the boundaries of deep diving by diving deeper than anyone ever before. Ultimately they reached the incredible depths of 321 and 221 metres respectively.
Hopefully you’ll stay with me as I retrace my first twelve years of diving. And at the end you’ll not finish up writing us off as a crazy bunch of adrenalin
junkies, which we certainly don’t regard ourselves as. In fact I think it’s the very opposite; I know I speak for all of people in our group when I say that we’re generally very happy to do dives where nothing unexpected happens. Quite simply, in deep cave diving if anything unplanned does happen, it’s very likely that someone may be seriously injured or even die. I’ve been lucky, maybe even blessed, in that in over 700 dives I’ve never to be on an expedition where someone died (although we’ve had our share of minor decompression hits and what can only be described as very near misses).
The divers around me have not all been as fortunate. To give you an idea of what I mean: of the ten or so people I regularly dive with, five have been on trips that either had fatalities, or were involved in search and recovery dives for missing divers - one of whom is still missing. That is not to say that any of the people involved are, or in a few cases, were bad divers. Dennis Harding for one was not only a friend, but a senior technical diving instructor and highly regarded in the diving community. Rian Bower was the head of CMAS in South Africa and similarly a person with vast diving experience. Unfortunately, as is often the case, we’ll never really know what happened to these people. Dennis died during one of the first expeditions off Sodwana to find “old four legs”, the ancient and elusive Coelacanth. He was attempting to rescue another diver during a dive to in excess of 100 metres. Before his untimely death, Dennis had the privilege of being among the very few people ever to have dived with living Coelacanths. Rian died whilst attempting to recover from a catastrophic loss of gas whilst decompressing after a Trimix dive. His body was never recovered from the sea.
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