Woman dead, husband injured on 230 meter dive - Greece

[Centrals]

.... Boesmangot Cave, where David Shaw had failed attempt to recover a 10-years old diver remains of Deon Dreyer, at 270m.

David Shaw did not really fail but paid for his life as well. Deon Dreyer remains + Shaw's body were recovered eventually.
There is a book, Raising the Death, by Philip Finch gives a better account on that dive.

 

[wgw04024]

That was a GREAT book.

 

[Kay Dee]

Exactly my view. I don't understand why we keep seeing attempts to break depth world records in scuba diving (and in many categories???

With all due respect to the dead, and wishing the living a speedy and full recovery in this particular case off Greece; I think you may find the 'answer' to your above has something to do with 'Darwins Law'.

 

[Kay Dee]

I can see the prestige for a professional diver if everyone survives uninjured, and it would have been good for their business.

I beg to differ Dan, true professionals would today give him / her little respect (this is meant 'in general' that is I am not pointing the finger at just this partucular case), save for having the cojones (stupidity?) to do it.

But yes, to many it may / would give publicity to 'their' business, but.......................what are they really 'acomplishing' or contributing to 'diver knowledge' save said publicity'? (Rhetorical question.)

But each to their own, as Tom Mount once taught me many many years ago, and I quote, "Everyone has the right to kill themselves in any way they see fit". And yes, I still do agree with that statement.

 

[DandyDon]

I think it's similar to the Andrea Doria being viewed as the holy grail dive for some. My old instructor used to tell me that was his. I hope his wife talked him out of it.

 

[Kay Dee]

I think it's similar to the Andrea Doria being viewed as the holy grail dive for some. My old instructor used to tell me that was his. I hope his wife talked him out of it.

Well 'back in the day' it once was, or at least was veiwed by many - although mainly by those in the USA - as the 'holy grail' as it were.

And if you live in the NYC area maybe it still is, but it is far far from that now in the grand scheme of things, IMO mind you; and although I haven't dived her, I do believe some of the the early Doria penetrations - and shenanigans ;-) - are still up there with the very best!

As for dying diving, I can think of 'better' ways, but then again I can think of / have seen much much worse.

But as my good friend Mike Gadd once said 'when you are eyeballing death literally right in your face', the old "at least he died doing sometihg he / she loved' just doesnt ring true (to the one about to die that is). Or didnt for him on one incident where he only just - because being on a CCR - and I mean just, survived.

 

[cerich]

I can see the prestige for a professional diver if everyone survives uninjured, and it would have been good for their business. I'm sure we'll keep seeing attempts.

Sad isn't it?

 

[boulderjohn]

I can see the prestige for a professional diver if everyone survives uninjured, and it would have been good for their business. I'm sure we'll keep seeing attempts.

I beg to differ Dan, true professionals would today give him / her little respect (this is meant 'in general' that is I am not pointing the finger at just this partucular case), save for having the cojones (stupidity?) to do it.

But yes, to many it may / would give publicity to 'their' business, but.......................what are they really 'acomplishing' or contributing to 'diver knowledge' save said publicity'? (Rhetorical question.)

This is similar to the recent "Dr. Deep" episode in St. Croix, in which a man who was really just a beginning tech diver attempted to set a new depth record. The dive shop that sponsored his attempts advertised it to the hilt, and I believe they very much wanted to achieve fame through their association with the feat. When it was advertised on ScubaBoard, the outcry against it from the knowledgeable professionals participating in the thread was intense. They said it was pointless. They said it was foolish. Most importantly, they correctly predicted his death.

But he was not deterred, and when he died, I openly blamed the professionals in his environment for it. They egged him on, and if you saw the videos they made, you will see how dramatically they did that. They built it up to the point that he could not call it off, no matter how much sense the professionals in other locations--notably ScubaBoard--made in trying to dissuade him.

So what is the difference, one professional to another?

In the writeup leading to his attempt, the writer praised his rapid development of his technical diving, saying that he had quickly surpassed the maximum depth his instructor had ever achieved--215 feet! (For those who don't know, you cannot even get a full trimix certification card for any agency without going deeper than that.) When he died, one of the retrospective pieces written by the professionals who egged him on--they are the ones who called him Dr. Deep--said that he knew more about technical diving than anyone on the planet. (He had only been doing technical diving for months, really, and he had only gotten OW certification a few years before.) They later took that absurdity off the web site, but for the time it was up, it spoke volumes about their own lack of knowledge.

Yes, there are people who have gotten professional certifications, but at the beginning level of professional certification, you are nowhere near the top of the mountain. When you are nowhere near the top of the mountain, you have no real idea how far away it really is. You have no idea what it takes to do a dive like that. You have no real idea what it means to "know more about technical diving than anyone on the planet." It is all too easy to underestimate what it takes to do the truly serious dives.

The PADI trimix course has a nice section about this. It tells the student they have gone as far as they can in deep diver certification training, and they are now certified to 300 feet. It is possible to go beyond 300 feet, and someday they may want to do that. They are cautioned to take very measured steps, constantly making a realistic appraisal of the dangers involved and their ability to meet them. It is excellent advice.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

More info in Greek media.

If the articles are right, the both felt sick at depth (230 meters???) and the woman become disoriented and didn't follow the planned accent profile and her husband managed to make a 3 hour accent with the help of safety divers before he was air-lifted to the Hyperbaric Chamber in Thessaloniki.


This article, suggest they were trying to break the depth record for group diving. Is there such a thing?

Also in this article, her husband said that currents made him lost contact with his wife at depth!

I have one degree of separation from the couple. The information that I have is that they reached 231 meters without incident, and the problems occurred at 40 meters during their ascent. I do not know what their deco schedule was.

 

[boulderjohn]

I think it's similar to the Andrea Doria being viewed as the holy grail dive for some. My old instructor used to tell me that was his. I hope his wife talked him out of it.

Well 'back in the day' it once was, or at least was veiwed by many - although mainly by those in the USA - as the 'holy grail' as it were.

I think this demonstrates the changes in diving over time, and it reflects upon this incident.

There are a number of issues that make the Andrea Doria challenging. Anytime you are diving an ocean wreck that was not prepared like an artificial reef, you are going to face some risks. What makes this one special? Here is the Wikipedia explanation:

Due to the luxurious appointments and initially good condition of the wreck, with the top of the wreck lying initially in 160 feet (50 m) of water, Andrea Doria has been a frequent target of treasure divers. It is commonly referred to as the "Mount Everest of scuba diving."[24] The comparison to Mt. Everest originated after a July 1983 dive on the Doria by Capt. Alvin Golden during a CBS News-televised interview of the divers following their return from a dive expedition to the wreck aboard the R/V Wahoo. The depth, water temperature, and currents combine to put the wreck beyond the scope of recreational diving. The skills and equipment required to successfully execute this dive, such as use of mixed gases and staged decompression, put it in the realm of only the most experienced technical divers.
​

The water temperature ranges from 40-48 degrees, and a web site I visited put typical visibility at about 25 feet. Yes, that is indeed an advanced dive today, but it was a very advanced dive in the earliest days of diving. You were going to near record depth then if you went to the bottom. That is not remotely the case today.

Last weekend I was part of a 3-man team doing a little exploration at the bottom of a sinkhole. I was third in line as we went, tying off the permanent line laid by my teammates to the stakes I was shoving into the deep silt. Because of what was happening in front of me, my visibility was about nil. With my canister light hanging from my neck, I held the line in one hand, shoved in stakes with the other, made the wrap in the notch, and moved on. I never saw more than a few feet through the silt before we got back to the ascent line we had just dropped. That was 270 feet deep, and the water temperature was in the high 50s. That's deeper than the Andrea Doria, with worse visibility and similar temperatures.

No one was comparing that dive to any mountains--it was just a routine tech dive being done by some routine tech divers--barely worth mentioning. That is the difference between then and now. Dives that were at the cutting edge 30 years ago are now not only commonly done, they are often done by students as part of their training.

So back to this fatality. Going for a woman's depth record seems to be a flashback to that era of diving. The reason the record has not been broken in a while is probably because most of the world's top divers have stopped thinking that sort of thing is important. We are in a different diving world today than we were then. People tried to keep Dr. Deep from doing his dive by pointing out that he was risking his life for something that had no importance whatsoever. She needed to have someone tell her that as well.