BOESMANSGAT, South Africa (10 Jan 2005) -- Australian diver Dave Shaw went missing on Saturday in the world's third deepest freshwater cave, Boesmansgat, in the Northern Cape, and there will be no search for him - he is presumed dead. Shaw and a team of technical divers attempted to recover the remains of Deon Dreyer, a diver who blacked out and drowned in the cave while diving there in 1994. He was 20 years old. Dreyer's body had been lying at a depth of 270m at the bottom of the cave. The police commander of the operation, Superintendent Ernest Strydom, said yesterday there was little chance of Shaw returning from the depths of the cave. "We presume Dave is dead." He said Shaw's wife and two children, who live in Australia, had been informed of his disappearance. Shaw was an airline pilot for Cathay Pacific. Strydom said that during preparations for Saturday "it was apparently discussed and concluded that if something goes wrong the team will not attempt to search for the missing person". "That was agreed beforehand because if you do that you endanger everyone's life. It's a very individual type of sport." A team of 30 people, including police and paramedics, were involved in the recovery attempt. Strydom said diver Don Shirley, who is the dive's technical co-ordinator, was making a good recovering yesterday after suffering from decompression illness. He returned to the surface on Saturday evening. Strydom said Shirley descended 250m in an attempt to look for his teammate after Shaw failed to meet him at 220m. But he began suffering from decompression sickness. Vomiting and disorientated, he returned to the surface at about 4pm and was placed in a decompression chamber. Police diver Inspector Theo van Eeden said Shaw's "rebreather could have packed up. Only he will know". Rebreathers allow divers to stay under water for longer periods. The divers involved are all members of the International Association of Nitrox and Technical Divers. Technical diving is an advanced form of scuba diving and uses special methods and equipment to explore environments and perform tasks beyond the range of recreational diving. Shaw and his team of divers were equipped with closed-circuit rebreathers as opposed to traditional scuba equipment. On Saturday, the team of volunteer technical divers and police divers, assisted by paramedics, attempted to recover Dreyer's remains. A day before the dive Shaw, who discovered Dreyer's body on October 28 last year, demonstrated how he planned to seal Dreyer's remains into a green body bag. | | Dave Shaw Shaw was unable to bring Dreyer's body to the surface during his October dive as his oxygen cylinders were firmly embedded in the mud. Once Shaw had secured the body he planned to take it up to Shirley. Dreyer's body was then to be passed up seven more times from one diver to the next until, at 20m, police divers would pull him to the surface an hour and 20 minutes later. The divers entered the 18°C water at 6.15am. Thirty minutes later things began to go wrong. It would have taken Shaw 15 minutes to descend to the bottom. Once there he would have had five minutes to secure the body and take it to Shirley. According to the plan, it would then have taken Shaw 11 hours and 50 minutes to return to the surface - cold, exhausted and hungry - having sipped only water and energy gel for 12 hours. "On the bottom, time is critical," Shaw said on Friday. At 270m every second would add one and a half minutes to the time it would take him to resurface. "This is an extreme dive. I am repeating a world record dive with a task at the bottom," Shaw said. Don Shirley said of the hours it would take to resurface that "it's not real time. It feels like (being in) space. You go into a sleep state." Waiting for Dreyer's body at a depth of 100m would have been Steven Sander, owner of a security company in Johannesburg, who was a police diver for 16 years. The water at Boesmansgat was so clear, he said, it was "like diving in mineral water. It's very lonely and very cold". Each of the eight technical divers wore equipment worth R100000, weighing up to 35kg. They used closed-circuit rebreathers. Unlike conventional scuba gear, rebreathers recycle exhaled gas by chemically scrubbing it of carbon dioxide with soda lime. Thus diving on a rebreather is bubble-free, less wasteful of gas and allows more dive time. In addition to the air and oxygen cylinders attached to the rebreather packs is a cylinder of argon gas used to inflate the diver's suit and insulate the diver. SOURCE - Sapa |
