Underwater Adventure: Cave Divers Face Death

March 19, 2007 — -- Bushman's Hole, on the edge of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa, is one of the strangest places on Earth. It's a prehistoric crater on an otherwise endless track of desert, and for an elite but extreme fraternity of explorers, what happened there is the stuff of myth and legend.

The terrible beauty of the place can't be seen from the air, or even the ground. But if you trace the walls down, you reach a tiny pool covered in algae. Keep going, through a narrow shaft running for another 150 feet, and finally it all opens into a vast freshwater cavern tall enough to hold the Eiffel Tower, and deep enough -- nearly 1,000 feet -- to mesmerize the most experienced, technical cave divers in the world.

Don Shirley is one of only a handful of divers who has "gone deep" at Bushman's Hole.

"It's hypnotic," said Shirley. "When you get permission to dive in a cave, as it were, the cave, it greets you, and you just want to go and explore."

Verna Van Schaik holds the women's dive record there, and said that a good dive propels you to go even deeper.

"That's the lure, that's the danger," she said. "You kind of are able to logic yourself into the fact that the risks probably aren't so real."

The environment in Bushman's Hole is so alien that deep divers compare it to space walking:

"Imagine floating," said Shirley. "So you've got no pull by gravity whatsoever… you're moving around in this cave and you can float up to a ceiling…you can float around corners. And if you couple that with silence, then there's absolutely zero noise. That's a magic experience … It is a different world."

Bushman's Hole is the kind of world a young man with a thirst for thrills might love. Theo Dreyer still remembers the day, 10 years ago, when his son Deon was invited by the South African Cave Diving Association to join them as a support diver at Bushman's Hole. Deon Dryer only had two years of diving experience, but it promised to be the thrill of a lifetime.

"They wanted to go deep," said Theo Dreyer. "So [Deon] got invited along to do backup for the guys… He said 'Dad, this is an honor being asked to do this.'"

Exactly what happened on that dive, 10 years ago, is unknown. The dive team reported that while coming back up they looked down and saw Deon Dryer's cave light fading, sinking back into the abyss.

Theo Dreyer said the rest of the group tried a rescue, "but it was futile, he'd gone down too far."

There's a local legend that a man-eating serpent lives at the bottom of Bushman's Hole, but what likely killed Deon Dreyer was something more prosaic, and poisonous.

When a cave diver breathes too heavily at extreme depths -- as an inexperienced diver like Deon Dryer might -- carbon dioxide can build up in the lungs, resulting in a blackout. Deon Dryer never came back from Bushman's Hole.

"The average person, when they pass along, gets buried in a tomb…and there's somewhere you can go where there's a living memory…and you can go share some thoughts," said Theo Dryer. "We didn't have that. I mean, there was no body. There was nothing."

The memory of Deon Dreyer faded, but Bushman's Hole remained a bright jewel, luring some of the best cave divers in the world. Among them was Dave Shaw. Ten years after Deon Dryer's death, in October 2004, Shaw undertook a kind of dive never attempted at Bushman's Hole.

Shirley explained that most world records for diving are what he calls "soap on a rope," -- where divers descend quickly and come right back up again.

But Shaw dove nearly 900 feet, and he attempted a few minutes of unprecedented exploration at the bottom.

"Nobody swims at depth," said Van Schaik. "It's just not done. They'll say you are stupid to swim at depth. But this was proper exploration…it was brand new."

When Shaw reached 800 feet, the air mixture in his air tanks began to produce narcosis --what divers call "rapture of the deep."

"It's the effect of the nitrogen in the air that you breathe," said Van Schaik. "And it basically is equivalent to being drunk. So you lose your ability to mentally process…and you lose your coordination."

At 876 feet, Shaw reached the cave floor, and did something no deep cave diver has ever done before: he moved away from his main line, cautiously exploring a previously unseen world, where he discovered something he did not expect. It was the body of Deon Dreyer.

"When I discovered Deon, he was lying on his back," said Shaw. "Hand flat, with his arms floating, due to the buoyancy of his wet suit that he was wearing. He still had his mask in place, but the body, part of the body that I could see, had no flesh on it."

Unable to pry the body from the silt, Shaw marked its location with a feeder line, and began a lonely, slow journey back to the top, carrying with him the strange news of his discovery.

After 10 hours underwater, Shaw emerged from Bushman's Hole. He was hardly out of his wet suit when he passed news of the discovery to Deon Dryer's parents, Theo and Marie.

Theo Dryer said that at that moment he was shocked. "It takes a while to sink in. … it's unreal."

Shaw then made an amazing proposition: He offered to go back down and try to bring back Deon Dryer's body.

"I'd come to accept that Deon would never be recovered," Theo Dryer said. "So you get comfortable with the idea. Now all of a sudden, they offer… to recover Deon…[and] there's doubt. Should I leave him there? He's happy there. Or should we recover? But then, yes, we went for the recovery."

Van Schaik said that Shaw and Shirley were the perfect team to attempt the rescue. "They created the perfect team. I think Dave had the drive and the ambition, and Don had the know-how and expertise and his own ambition. Um, but together they were able to… you know, to conquer this."

Shaw and Shirley were attempting the deepest underwater body recovery in history, and South African film producer Gordon Hiles thought it would be a good opportunity for a one-of-a-kind documentary film.

Hiles said that "the number of people who have dived deeper than 250 meters, that, that number is smaller than the amount of people who have actually walked on the moon."

In the weeks after the discovery of Deon Dreyer's body, events moved swiftly. Shaw and Shirley developed a complex dive plan that would require as many as nine different divers working at varying depths. The big question was how to bring the body to the surface.

"The best response I got was, there could be some soft tissue still but mainly [it will] be a skeleton," said Shirley. "And because of that, we were worried about the body falling apart literally, as it was coming up, and that's where the bag idea came from…"

Ann Shaw, Dave's wife, sewed a body bag that would be used to carry Deon Dryer's body.

Most of the equipment being readied for the dive was familiar to both Shaw and Shirley, but Shaw's helmet camera -- designed by Hiles -- was new and untried.

Two days before the final dive, the full team began assembling at Bushman's Hole, each member with a specific duty. Shaw would go the deepest and retrieve the body.