Deaths at Eagles Nest - Homosassa FL

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One can learn almost anything from books or online ... but to understand the meaning of what one learned requires context. Context comes from experience, not reading.

That said, a serious clue that there were massive gaps in what these two learned through self-teaching is the fact that they ran out of gas. Absent a serious mishap ... such as a total silt-out ... this simply should never happen to a cave diver ... however they may have trained. Even a complete failure of one diver's gas supply ... by whatever means it happens ... should not cause the two of them to run out of gas prior to exiting the cave.

The fact that it happened says to me that these two may have learned something through online study ... but they didn't learn nearly enough to be where they were ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I would hazard to say that one could learn a tremendous amount about gas management from books or online. Is there really anything about gas management that one could not learn from a book or online? I know the calculations are in books and online. I know the rule of thirds is in books and online. I know the decompression tables are there. I know there is plenty on partial pressures and oxygen toxicity. Even the explanations of the "whys" and "wherefores" of gas management are there.

Yet our heros seem to have perished due to poor gas management.

Now, it could be that our heros ran out of gas while dealing with some other problem, such as getting lost, but I have seen nothing suggesting that. So I will assume it was just poor gas management, the one easy thing they could have learned pretty well from books or online. My conclusion is that they probably did not even do the book or online learning.
 
Assuming they knew all there was to know about gas management, that doesn't mean they could carry out their plan while impaired by narcosis. There's a reason people dive hypoxic trimix at those depths.
 
I get the impression that a gate with a lock is a device used in quite a few sites. What insures that someone can not be locked in?

Good question. There is at least one site with the gate underwater at the entrance to the cave. Some cave divers have been known to bring their own lock/chain so they can lock the gate open. It's not a desirable solution though for obvious reasons. Gates on land make more sense, but there are at least a few recent cases that I know of in which untrained divers got past the gate (by climbing it, breaking in, or just using false pretenses to get the key) and have died at the site. I think gates can work well as a deterrent in some cases, but it doesn't stop those people that a truly determined.

@ItsBruce

Good point. I don't get the impression that they had a good handle on even the "book learn'n" part of gas management. I would also add that normally technical divers gain experience with gas management, narcosis, dealing with additional tanks/regs, and lots of other factors by progressing in fairly small steps and under the supervision of instructors and other experienced divers. That gives them the advantage of knowing basic things like their own SAC/RVM rate under different conditions or how to recognize when narcosis is getting the best of them. Unfortunately, these two did 3 dives at Eagles Nest and each dive was ~50' deeper than the previous. Those are hardly baby steps. With those kind of jumps, how would they even apply what they learned on the previous dive to the next dive? There is too much difference for the dive plans to be comparable.
 
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Good question. There is at least one site with the gate underwater at the entrance to the cave. Some cave divers have been known to bring their own lock/chain so they can lock the gate open. It's not a desirable solution though for obvious reasons. Gates on land make more sense, but there are at least a few recent cases that I know of in which untrained divers got past the gate (by climbing it, breaking in, or just using false pretenses to get the key) and have died at the site. I think gates can work well as a deterrent in some cases, but it doesn't stop those people that a truly determined.

.

I was thinking in terms of the UW gate so the entire facility in not unnecessarily closed to other divers. Locking it open would still allow subsequent divers to enter who could later find a locked exit.
 
I was thinking in terms of the UW gate so the entire facility in not unnecessarily closed to other divers. Locking it open would still allow subsequent divers to enter who could later find a locked exit.

That is certainly a concern. Ideally, each dive team would need to lock it open with their own chain/lock. If your team's lock is the last one then you would close the gate behind you and lock it shut with the shared lock. That is the theory, but I hate the idea and so would most other cave divers. Reasons why...

* I don't want to have to worry about the nightmare of being locked in (instead of enjoying the dive) because of some failure in the gate protocol.
* I don't want to fear that I might have locked someone else in because they didn't bring their own lock/chain or similar failure of protocol.
* I don't want the entrance to the cave (often one of the most beautiful areas of the cave) marred by a gate or any other man made structure.
* Determined people will (and have) found ways to bypass the gate anyway. The sad truth is, it's really not feasible to stop people that have this mentality.

In short, the cure is probably worse than the disease in most cases.
 
I would hazard to say that one could learn a tremendous amount about gas management from books or online. Is there really anything about gas management that one could not learn from a book or online? I know the calculations are in books and online. I know the rule of thirds is in books and online. I know the decompression tables are there. I know there is plenty on partial pressures and oxygen toxicity. Even the explanations of the "whys" and "wherefores" of gas management are there.

Yet our heros seem to have perished due to poor gas management.

Now, it could be that our heros ran out of gas while dealing with some other problem, such as getting lost, but I have seen nothing suggesting that. So I will assume it was just poor gas management, the one easy thing they could have learned pretty well from books or online. My conclusion is that they probably did not even do the book or online learning.

deep cave diving isn't just a simple numbers game. There's a lot more to it. Most of which is learned from experience in shallow caves, then moderate depth caves, and only then progressing to the real deep stuff. You can't get that from a book or the internet.
 
deep cave diving isn't just a simple numbers game. There's a lot more to it. Most of which is learned from experience in shallow caves, then moderate depth caves, and only then progressing to the real deep stuff. You can't get that from a book or the internet.


have a garage full of gear most likely suitable for deep cave diving, including the card to get hypoxic trimix, i know what i dont know, and thats how to cave dive. I might be close to having the knowledge of cave logistics, navigation, procedures and gas planning for caves, but close is no cigar.

I wonder if dad had taken ad/dp/tec45 he might have realized what he didn't know....
 
Sorry, not buying it.

"I hope there isn't a cave in" is something where someone can say "it won't happen to me"

Taking 200 CuFt of gas on a dive that calls for 600 CuFt isn't a risk, it's suicide.

flots.

You're making my point.

The minute they read the sign that said DEATH AWAITS those who don't know what you are doing, the amount of gas or type they had was irrelevant. They didn't think that death would happen to them.

What you call suicide is what they called cave diving to test equipment on Christmas day.


FWIW, my "it won't happen to me" threshold is in agreement with yours in that the choice to dive this sight over and over again was suicidal in nature.

There is only the Sheriffs report of the depth of recovery and a news quote of one of the rescue divers saying "233" with no reference to who's computer. There is a report that Mr. Spivey's octo was not hooked and both divers tanks were empty. None of this is enough data to do anything more than speculate as to what the series of events actually happened. Suffice to say they drown because they didn't have enough air to get back to the surface.
 

One thing that bothers me in that article and many of the posts here is the constant reference to certification. I consider certification to be irrelevant. Training, yes. Although certification implies training it does not necessarily equate with competence, and a lack of certification does not equate with a lack of training or competence.

I do think that the difference matters.

**I am sure someone will somehow manage to construe this as suggesting the divers in question were sufficiently skilled so let me be absolutely clear that this is NOT what I am saying.**
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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