Ten minutes into his dive, Dave Shaw started to look for the bottom. Utter blackness pressed in on him from all sides, and he directed his high-intensity light downward, hoping for a flash of rock or mud. Shaw, a 50-year-old Aussie, was in an alien world, more than 800 feet below the surface pool that marks the entrance to Bushman's Hole, a remote sinkhole in the Northern Cape province of South Africa and the third-deepest freshwater cave known to man.
Shaw's stocky five-foot-ten body was encased in a black crushed-neoprene drysuit. On his back he carried a closed-circuit rebreather set, which, unlike traditional open-circuit scuba gear, was recycling the gas Shaw breathed, scrubbing out the carbon dioxide he exhaled and adding back oxygen. He carried six cylinders of gas, splayed alongside him like mutant appendages. On the surface, Shaw would barely have been able to move. But in the water, descending the shot line guiding him from the cave's entrance to the bottom, he was weightless and graceful, a black creature with just a flash of skin showing behind his mask, gliding downward without emitting a single bubble to disrupt the ethereal silence.
Only two divers had ever been to this depth in Bushman's before. One of them, a South African named Nuno Gomes, had claimed a world record in 1996 when he hit bottom, on open-circuit gear, at 927 feet. Gomes had turned immediately for the surface. But Shaw, a Cathay Pacific Airways pilot based in Hong Kong and a man who had become one of the most audacious explorers in cave diving, didn't strive for depth alone. He planned to bottom out Bushman's Hole at a depth that no rebreather had ever been taken, connect a light reel of cave line to the shot line, and then swim off to perform the sublime act of having a look around. At that moment late last October, cocooned in more than a billion gallons of water, Dave Shaw was a very happy man.
Shaw touched down on the cave's sloping bottom well up from where Gomes had landed, clipped off the cave reel, and started swimming. There was no time to waste. Every minute he spent on the bottom—his VR3 dive computer said he was now approaching 886 feet—would add more than an hour of decompression time on the way up. Still, Shaw felt remarkably relaxed, sweeping his light left and right, reveling in the fact that he was the first human ever to lay line at this depth. Suddenly, he stopped. About 50 feet to his left, perfectly illuminated in the gin-clear water, was a human body. It was on its back, the arms reaching toward the surface. Shaw knew immediately who it was: Deon Dreyer, a 20-year-old South African who had blacked out deep in Bushman's ten years earlier and disappeared. Divers had been keeping an eye out for him ever since.
Shaw turned immediately, unspooling cave line as he went. Up close, he could see that Deon's tanks and dive harness, snugged around a black-and-tan wetsuit, appeared to be intact. Deon's head and hands, exposed to the water, were skeletonized, 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. It didn't move. Shaw knelt down and heaved again. Nothing. Deon's air tanks and the battery pack for his light appeared to be firmly embedded in the mud underneath him, and Shaw was starting to pant from exertion.
This isn't wise, he chastised himself. I'm at 270 meters and working too hard. He was also already a minute over his planned bottom time. Shaw quickly tied the cave reel to Deon's tanks, so the body could be found again, and returned to the shot line to start his ascent.
Approaching 400 feet, almost an hour into the dive, Shaw met up with his close friend Don Shirley, a 48-year-old British expat who runs a technical-diving school in Badplaas, South Africa. After Shirley checked that Shaw was OK and retrieved some spare gas cylinders hanging on the shot line below, Shaw showed him an underwater slate on which he had written 270m, found body. Shirley's eyebrows shot up inside his mask, and he reached out to shake his friend's hand.
Shirley left Shaw, who had another eight hours and 40 minutes of decompression to complete. As Shirley ascended, it occurred to him that Shaw would not be able to resist coming back to try to recover Deon. Shirley would have been content to leave the body where it was, but Shaw was a man who dived to expand the limits of the possible. He had just hit a record depth on a rebreather, and now he had the opportunity to return a dead boy to his parents and, in the process, do something equally stunning: make the deepest body recovery in the history of diving.
Comments
Does outside not employ editors? Good writing but should have been half the length.
Flag ThisIMHO, the details is good. gave a lot of info, any less it would be just like most account of the recovery. (too short and concise) Divers would definitely appreciate the details.
Flag ThisTo the editors: quit being misers and allow readers to view ARCHIVED articles on ONE page
Flag ThisFantastic article. Long live long form journalism and may we fight the ADD that has taken over our short article obession.
Flag ThisAmazing article...
Flag ThisAmazing article...
Flag ThisWhat on earth do ghosts have to do with anything in this article?
Flag ThisGreat article.
Flag ThisThis article is considered a classic and rightly so. I have been soured on reading for quite some time. I am glad I have read this true account because it has restored in me the pleasure of reading. Thank you.
Flag ThisThis is a fascinating article - I cannot relate to that kind of risk taking, but it thrilled me as a christian to hear the testimony of Daves daughter to know that he is with the Lord....that is the final Word!!!
Flag ThisEditors and Tim Z, Pay no attention to the first post. Great article! Keep 'em coming!
Flag ThisI was engrossed the entire time. I couldn't stop reading, and getting a phone call in the middle of the dive was disorienting. Fascinating, heart wrenching, and thrilling.
Flag ThisGreat article, loved the length and details...you really honored all the people involved with this article. Keep up the great work, thank you!
Flag ThisFor anyone involved in the technical diving community this event has been rehashed a thousand times. It is widely accepted he assembled his rebreather wrong prior to the dive and it was the cause of the co2 buildup that resulted in his death. Anyone that says "he died what he loved to do" is a moron. To leave children and a wife behind your own ego is selfish and dumb. Who really cares who's the deepest diver, or any record for that matter. If your life is that meaningless that a statistic is what you live for then re organize your priorities. I still technical dive, and I still use a rebreather (which some say has a 1 in 100 death rate) but I don't chase records and I sure as hell don't do dives past 200' anymore because I would rather see my kids and wife than brag about how deep I went or what old rusted wreck I took a picture of.
Flag ThisAn amazing article - you've honored each and every person involved, especially David Shaw. I hope you won't listen to the first comment about the article being too long. It was perfect. Absolutely perfect. You've made me fall in love with reading.
Flag ThisEvery single word of this article was perfect and necessary! What an excellent read! And an amazing story!
Flag ThisHe gave his life to recover a dead body? Senseless excuse for adventure. What is wrong with adrenaline junkies whose need for a fix gets them killed, leaving their loved ones behind to wonder, "Why?"
Flag This@GEOFF BRANDON: Right on. You hit the nail on the head.
Flag ThisIncredible article. What a story. You need some real healthy fear to do this stuff, and this has given it to me.
Flag ThisLoved the article (and Geoff Brandon's comments are spot-on), but what does this have to do with ghosts? I don't get that part.
Flag This@Geoff Brandon - incorrect.. there was no wrongly assembled rebreather despite what you claim to be widely accepted. He did the same dive in Oct 2004 on the same unit with the same scrubber type and nothing went wrong then. The CO2 build-up was purely because of workload at depth, and the fact that he got caught in the line. Also note it was not a record chase, but a promise to Deon Dreyer's family to bring back their son. I reiterate.. he did the same dive a few months before with success, and therefore thought he would be able to keep the promise. This is Andre Shirley, wife of Don Shirley and good friend of Dave Shaw, and co-planner of the dive.
Flag ThisGreat form. Four short sections of preparatory data, the story and then four short sections of consequences and analisys. This is great writing. The subtelty with which the details of the camera being an obstacle and of Shirley decision to turn back, i think, make for great pathos.
Flag ThisStating the obvious: Ghosts are mentioned here because Shaw brought Deon back after both had died.
Flag ThisGreat piece of writing. As a diver, I could almost 'live' the experience with Dave, Don and Big B. It's good to know the full story of the Bushmans dive.... much speculation out there. To the agnostics and gripers about the length of the article... no detail of this dive should be omitted or shortened so that we can understand the facts as they are.
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