transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:05] It's Thursday, October the 28th, 2004. In South Africa, the undulating plains of the Kalahari Desert stretch out beneath a pale sky, the ochre-colored earth and scrub brush warmed by the brilliant sunshine. But in an isolated corner of the country's northern Cape province, this vast rolling expanse is suddenly interrupted, punctured by an enormous sinkhole, as if a titan's fist punched through the landscape, leaving a deep, gaping wound in the ground. The walls of the abyss plunge down towards a small, duckweed-covered pond below. At first sight, there is nothing remarkable about it. But beneath the surface, this pool opens up into a spectacular, bell-shaped chamber, a submerged natural cathedral. This is Bushman's Hole, one of the largest freshwater caves in the world. Nobody is entirely sure how deep it may go. No light or sound penetrates its depths. It is an inhospitable, alien place, a dead zone. And yet today, life has come to Bushman's. Deep below the surface, a tiny pinprick of light descends steadily through the infinite darkness. It's a torch belonging to 50-year-old diver Dave Shaw. He glides gracefully downwards with single-minded focus, guided by a weighted shot line. At around 260 meters, or 850 feet, Dave reaches the silty, sloping bottom of the chamber.

Speaker 2:
[01:57] And then he did something that no one has ever done at those sort of depths. He got out a reel, joined it to the line, and started to reel out down the slope.

Speaker 1:
[02:09] Dave pushes deeper into the unknown, keen to explore the uncharted floor of the cave. He has just achieved an elite status. At this point, more people have walked on the surface of the moon than have ever successfully dived to these sorts of depths. He is now nearly as deep as the Eiffel Tower is tall. Dave swims slowly forward, sweeping his torch from side to side. Only the third diver in history to reach the bottom of this extraordinary cavern. But then his light catches on something unexpected, and shocking.

Speaker 2:
[02:51] So he's reeling out and he actually had gas that would have taken him to 300 meters. But at 270 meters, he saw a body.

Speaker 1:
[03:05] Encased in scuba diving gear, the body is lying on its back, its legs outstretched, its arms floating. Exposed to the water, its head and hands are mere bone. Yet, a diving mask is still strapped disquietingly to its skull. The face turned up towards the black void above. Barely hesitating, Dave abandons his exploration and swims towards the body. He wraps his arms around it and tries to lift it from the silt. But it won't budge. Already over his maximum time at this depth, Dave has no choice but to turn and begin his long treacherous journey back to the surface. But not before attaching his cave line to the body so that it can be easily found again. At around 140 meters, he meets his close friend and frequent dive partner, 48-year-old Don Shirley, who has been acting as his support today. Dave manages to communicate what he has found and Don gravely acknowledges. He shakes his friend's hand, then leaves Dave to continue his ascent to the surface. But they will both be coming back here soon. Wordlessly, almost telepathically, a decision has already been communicated between them. What neither man can know is the unimaginable impact this decision will have on so many lives or the tragically high price which will be paid as a result.

Speaker 2:
[04:41] We then mutually decided without words we would actually go down and pick up the body in a couple of days' time.

Speaker 1:
[04:57] Never wondered what you would do when disaster strikes. If your life depended on your next decision, could you make the right choice? Welcome to Real Survival Stories. These are the astonishing tales of ordinary people thrown into extraordinary situations. People suddenly forced to fight for their lives. In this episode, we meet world-renowned diver Don Shirley. In October 2004, Don and his friend Dave are diving in South Africa's legendary Bushman's Hole, when Dave stumbles on a body in the darkest depths of the flooded cave. The discovery kickstarts an audacious mission, the deepest body recovery ever attempted. But in this environment, there is almost no room for error. Even the slightest mishap can be fatal.

Speaker 2:
[05:46] When you're deep, really, only you can solve your problem. Only you can breathe for you, only you can swim for you.

Speaker 1:
[05:53] So, when, during the dive, the two friends run into multiple unexpected difficulties, a harrowing battle for survival ensues in one of the most hostile and perilous places on earth. And the consequences will be calamitous.

Speaker 2:
[06:07] You're actually in the darkest and blackest of places that actually eats your light. The light just disappears. It just evaporates. It's like the cave is eating it up. It's a dark, dark place.

Speaker 1:
[06:20] I'm John Hopkins. From the Noiser Podcast Network, this is Real Survival Stories. It's 4 a.m. on Saturday, January the 8th, 2005. In South Africa, the skies above the Kalahari Desert are still black. The landscape cloaked in the blanket of night. Inside a small lodge on Mount Carmel game farm, some 300 miles southwest of Johannesburg, an alarm breaks the silence of a dark room shared by two men. 48-year-old Don Shirley and 50-year-old Dave Shaw. The two friends stretch and yawn, then set about the business of showering and getting ready for the day ahead. Their actions are ordinary, offering no hint of the vast undertaking that lies ahead of them. After a light breakfast, the two men climb into Don's pickup truck and pull away from the lodge. In the pre-dawn darkness, they drive east through the desert, their vehicle bouncing along the rough dirt track. Their destination is Bushman's Hole, one of the largest and most dangerous freshwater caves on the planet. It has a known depth of around 280 meters, over 900 feet, but could go even deeper.

Speaker 2:
[08:01] The cave, when it goes down, is a big, big sinkhole. We don't really even today know where the bottom is or how deep it really is. People have been to what is the bottom that you can actually easily get to, but I'm sure it goes further.

Speaker 1:
[08:16] But Bushman's Hole is legendary in the diving community for more than just its depth. In December 1994, tragedy struck. A 20-year-old diver named Dion Dreher died in the cave after losing consciousness around 50 or 60 meters down. His body was never found until nearly 10 years later when Dave Shaw stumbled upon him frozen in time on the cave floor. And today, after months of planning, Dave, Don and a team of other divers will try to recover Dion's body and return him to his family. It's an ambitious project, but if anyone's up to the task, it's these men. Although incredibly, Dave only learned to dive in 1999, he has achieved meteoric success, rising in a handful of years from a novice to one of the world's most skilled and audacious divers. Don, meanwhile, has been at this for decades and is a respected, well-known instructor with a wealth of experience. Raised in Egham near London, Don's passion started at the age of 10 after a visit to Wookie Hole in Southern England, an impressive cave system featuring a number of underwater chambers and tunnels. Young Don was entranced.

Speaker 2:
[09:39] I thought, wow, I just want to go and look underneath here and see where it goes, see what it does. So that's really where the quest for diving and then cave diving really started.

Speaker 1:
[09:51] However, diving was relatively niche in Britain at the time. Information and instruction were difficult to find and equipment expensive. Nonetheless, Don was determined. After leaving school, he joined the army, which gave him the opportunity to learn to dive and try other adventure sports such as gliding and parachuting.

Speaker 2:
[10:11] I did diving almost from day one. I spent half my time in the evenings doing diver training and things like that and would go away on weekends eventually. The Sergeant Major used to think that I was trying to get away from doing duties on the weekend but I was actually going diving. Diving was my absolute passion and I really carried that on throughout my time. So anytime I could, I went diving.

Speaker 1:
[10:37] Don's career in the military took him across the globe, from Northern Ireland to the Falklands and the Persian Gulf. Alongside his military duties, he racked up thousands of dives and as he honed his skills, he began passing on the knowledge he acquired to others. After retiring from the army, at the age of 40, Don was able to focus on his true passion. He moved to South Africa and set up a diver training center in a flooded multi-level mine named Kamati Springs. For divers, it's a paradise of flooded passageways, deep shafts and old mine workings. Together with his wife, Andre, Don has built a thriving business. Among his specialties is his pioneering use of re-breathers, machines which recycle the gas breathed by a diver instead of expelling it into the water like more traditional open circuit systems. Re-breathers allow divers to remain at greater depths for longer periods of time, without needing to carry numerous large gas cylinders. However, due to the contraption's complexity, there is greater potential for malfunctions. Still, for Don, this tech is liberating.

Speaker 2:
[11:53] When you're going in water, you exist at another level. Everything becomes very, very focused. And really, that's one thing I like about diving in general. It's just the fact that when you're in the water, you're no longer a surface-dwelling creature. You actually live in the water, which is really one of my mantras. When you're diving, you're living in the water, just like a fish would live in the water. And you never look at the surface as being somewhere to go. My pet saying his surface is not an option.

Speaker 1:
[12:34] Don's reputation as an instructor quickly spread. Among those drawn to his dive center was Australian pilot Dave Shaw. Although relatively new to the activity, Dave has already completed a number of impressive dives by the time he visited Kamati Springs in September 2002. And what he lacked in experience, he more than made up for in ambition and ability. During Don and Dave's first dive together, it was clear this was the beginning of something special.

Speaker 2:
[13:05] We felt like we knew each other quite well. I watched him kit up and he kitted up just like I would. It very much fitted in with my profile of diving with people. Anyone can turn up to me and give me a whole list of qualification, but until you actually get them in the water, you don't really know what they're going to do. So the first dive always is the checkout dive, and then you gradually extend from there. But when Dave joined me, it felt like he had been diving with me forever.

Speaker 1:
[13:33] As their time in the water together increased, so too did their friendship. A deep, almost brotherly bond soon formed between the two men. They even looked similar enough that they were frequently mistaken for siblings. Crucially, they were equals in the water, able to dive together to extreme depths where few could follow.

Speaker 2:
[13:53] We literally played in the water. I used to call it a ballet, where he would go one way, I would go another, and we used to meet in the middle somewhere. My cave is like a three-dimensional maze, so you can literally go in all sorts of directions and meet up, if you know what you're doing and where you're going. So really, that's what we did. One day I would lead, another day Dave would lead. We used to call it Batman and Robin. Everything we did was just a pleasure. It wasn't about depth. What it was about was actually using the equipment that we were using to the end of its ability, to really put the machines through their paces and actually enjoy being there.

Speaker 1:
[14:35] It wasn't long before Don knew Dave was ready to tackle something more challenging than Kamati Springs. And in June 2004, they visited Bushman's Hole together.

Speaker 2:
[14:45] That was the start of Dave's Adventures of Bushman's. And it's a poetic place. It's one of the big five, or what I call the big five caves of Africa. And each one comes with its own thing, but they're all deep. But we were actually exploring the depth in a big open space that is pitch black, but bright when we shine our lights on it. It was just an amazing place to go. So Dave was hooked them.

Speaker 1:
[15:10] On their second visit to Bushman's in October 2004, with Don acting as his support diver, Dave became only the third person in history to return from the floor of the cave and set a world record for depth on a re-breather in the process. What nobody could have known was that he would also find Deondrea's body. Both Don and Dave naturally assumed they would repeat the dive in the coming days and recover the body. But things haven't been that simple.

Speaker 2:
[15:45] Obviously, straight away, the news came out that the body was in the water. And now, it turned into a crime scene because this is a body in the water and it needed to have chain of evidence and everything else. So it reasonably quickly became, no, we can't just turn around in a couple of days time and casually fly dive and go and pick up the body and bring it out.

Speaker 1:
[16:10] Instead, the last two months have been focused on coordinating and planning one of the most daring body recoveries ever attempted. The logistics alone are daunting.

Speaker 2:
[16:22] We had to put everything in place to do a body recovery dive, which is completely different animal to doing a normal dive where you just dive and go fun. Bushman's is not a little puddle that you would actually wander into. It's actually in the middle of nowhere. You're six hours or maybe nine hours from Joburg, Johannesburg, and there are no facilities there for a diver. So you have to take everything.

Speaker 1:
[16:50] It's a massive operation and takes nearly a week to get everything on site, to make final preparations and to perform practice dives. By the time Don and Dave park up at Bushman's Hole on the morning of January 8, 2005, the place has been transformed. Tents and vehicles litter the rim of the abyss. The air thrums with the sound of a generator and people hunch around campfires. In addition to support divers and medics, there are police, reporters, a documentary film crew and a mine rescue team. There is even a mobile recompression chamber on site, crucial for any diver who may suffer decompression sickness or the bends as they surface. Scuba gear is scattered on the boulders around the pool, near a multitude of gas cylinders piled on the rough ground. As the world lightens, people pick their way down the rocky slopes and begin preparing for the dive. On paper, the plan is simple. Dave will swim down to the bottom of the chamber and place Dion's body into a specially designed silk body bag. As he ascends, Don will be diving down to meet him at 220 meters, around 720 feet, where he will take possession of the body. Don will then rise through the water and pass it to the next support diver and so on. The relay process will continue until the body reaches the surface, thereby freeing up the divers who have been deepest and need to complete the longest decompression stops.

Speaker 2:
[18:27] We had a whole team of divers. Everybody there was doing an epic dive in their own rights. All diving effectively solo with a team moving through the water column. So everyone is doing an incredible dive.

Speaker 1:
[18:44] There are some clear rules. If anything goes wrong, each person is to prioritize their own safety. There are to be no heroics. And Dave and Don both publicly state that if they perish during the dive, they do not want to be recovered. On the surface, the team will be coordinated by a dive marshal, Werner Van Schuik, who set the women's world record for deepest scuba dive at the site just days before Dave discovered Dion's body. If all goes to plan, the process should run like a well-oiled machine. But despite all their preparations and precautions, when entering such a hostile environment, the slightest problem could have catastrophic ramifications. Shortly after sunrise, everything is in place.

Speaker 2:
[19:31] We go down early morning because we're doing a 12-hour dive. So we want to dive early so that we can finish the dive still in daylight. So at 6 o'clock we are ready to dive. Dave's in the water with all his gear, with his helmet on, with the camera. And this is well, well, well before GoPro. This is a monster on his head. So he's got this camera which he turns on on the surface. I get in the water with him before he goes, because I want to show him that I'm ready to go, because he needs to know that I can follow. So we shake hands and he goes down.

Speaker 1:
[20:07] Just after 6 a.m., Dave sinks out of sight beneath the water. The focus then turns to timing the next divers descents. Don floats in the pool as the seconds slink by, staying calm and focusing on his breathing. 12 and a half minutes after Dave goes down, Don follows him. He makes for a narrow opening at the bottom of the pool, a bottleneck which eventually opens up into the enormous chamber. As Don descents, the slanting shafts of sunlight start to fade, and he enters a twilight zone. The blackness closes in as he emerges into the upper section of the vast underwater cavern. His torch illuminates the astonishingly clear water around him. But the chamber is so large and so dark that the beam of his light doesn't touch its rocky walls.

Speaker 2:
[21:05] You're actually in the darkest and blackest of places that actually eats your light. The light just disappears. It just evaporates. It's like both the cave is eating it up. It's a dark, dark place.

Speaker 1:
[21:18] Many would recoil from such places. But Don is at home. There is a serenity here. His bulky equipment, so cumbersome on land, now seems weightless and he glides gracefully through the water. Around 120 meters down, Don begins looking for signs of Dave, who should, at that very moment, be returning with Dion's body. The darkness below offers few clues as to what is happening.

Speaker 2:
[21:51] Now, as I'm dropping, I'd expect to see bubbles from Dave, because you don't make bubbles in a rebreather, but when you're coming up, you do, because gas expands. And you have to vent that gas off.

Speaker 1:
[22:04] But there are no bubbles. It's possible Dave has been delayed at some point during his descent, or whilst securing the body inside the bag. But as Don continues down the shot line and still sees nothing, concern mounts. He goes another 10 meters, then 20, and still there is no sign of his friend.

Speaker 2:
[22:26] I expect to see some bubbles, see something going on below me. I don't see anything. So then I think, oh, something is, something is wrong.

Speaker 1:
[22:46] Don squints into the dark abyss below, looking for any indications that Dave's on his way back up. At a depth of 150 meters, nearly 500 feet, he passes a last cluster of emergency gas cylinders that have been clipped to the shot line. And then suddenly he sees something. A tiny light shines in the darkness more than 100 meters below, like a single star burning in the vast blackness of the night sky.

Speaker 2:
[23:19] I look down and I can see a small, small, small light in the distance. And the agreement that Dave and I had is, if you've got a problem, the distress signal is waving a line. The intention was, if he had a problem, he would wave the light, I would carry on down. I had the gas to do it. I was the only diver that actually could go to those depths. Everyone else had limits.

Speaker 1:
[23:42] But the light isn't moving. As Don descends towards 220 meters, the intended rendezvous point with his friend, it remains motionless. And still, there are no bubbles to suggest Dave is ascending. In the gloomy depths of the cave, something has gone badly wrong. Don has to get down there.

Speaker 2:
[24:05] As I'm going down, I'm knowing, right, OK, I'm probably going to go all the way down. So I'm preparing for that fact.

Speaker 1:
[24:13] He continues plummeting through the fathomless darkness, the pressure increasing with every meter he descends. The light grows bigger as he nears it, but it remains unmoving. With steely calm, Don pushes on towards the bottom of the cave, 230 meters, 240. He is now deeper than he has ever been before. And then, at about 250 meters, there is a sinister crack, followed by a dull thud. To an expert like Don, it's a grimly familiar sound.

Speaker 2:
[24:52] Now, I've heard that thud before, where you're at depth and you get an implosion of some sort. It's not an explosion, it's an implosion. So you get a, almost like a sucking thud, and you feel it in your body, because in the water, you can feel all these things. So now I had to put the brakes on.

Speaker 1:
[25:13] The rebreather controller on his left wrist has imploded under the immense pressure at this depth. Things have just got a whole lot more complicated. Don must now manually insert gas into his breathing apparatus using another controller, and it's a tricky task. At these depths, too much oxygen becomes toxic and can cause severe convulsions, which would likely prove fatal.

Speaker 2:
[25:39] What I do is I add a little bit of oxygen. It's a drill that we practice many, many times, but I've never put oxygen in at 250 meters. The display on the handset jumped up to 2.6 bar pressure of oxygen, which is really unhealthy.

Speaker 1:
[25:57] Even as he tries to delicately feed oxygen into the system, the levels of the gas in his re-breather grow dangerously high. Don is forced to switch to his open-circuit backup tanks. But that comes with another problem.

Speaker 2:
[26:13] The first thing you do when you go open-circuit is look at the gauge to see how much gas you've got. Now, when you look at the gauge, just like a second hand on a watch, with every breath, it clicks back, like a second hand going backwards. So I knew that I didn't have many breaths. At that depth, I'm 26 bar pressure. So 26 bar pressure is every breath is multiplied by 26. So that gas is not going to last too long. So now I've got to get off this open circuit.

Speaker 1:
[26:48] Back to plan A. Don needs to get his re-breather stabilized soon. If he can't, he may not have enough gas in his backup tanks to reach the nearest emergency cylinders nearly 100 meters above. Drawing on his years of training, he performs a procedure known as flushing the loop, reducing the oxygen in his re-breather to safe levels so he can switch back to the machine. Slowly he gets things under control. Crisis averted for now. But manually inserting gas and monitoring his levels is going to be a full time job. All his attention now has to be directed towards his own self preservation. And if he is having to focus on himself, it means he cannot focus on Dave. He cannot go any deeper. The bleak situation leads to a painful decision.

Speaker 2:
[27:45] Now I know there is absolutely no way that I can go down to Dave. And Dave is not moving. So this is, in priming terms, this is where you cut the rope. So now I must leave. But all the time I am thinking Dave is not dead to me. Here maybe something will happen. Maybe he will come out. Maybe I will be able to follow along. But I have actually got to come up now.

Speaker 1:
[28:11] With one last glance of the unmoving light of his friend, John begins to head back to the surface. Having gone deeper than he planned, he now needs to work out a new schedule for his ascent to limit his chance of getting the bends. Also known as decompression sickness, this occurs when a diver resurfaces too quickly, not allowing enough time for nitrogen, another gas absorbed into the body through breathing, to be safely released. Without proper decompression stops, the nitrogen can form highly dangerous bubbles in the blood and tissues, leading to dizziness, difficulty breathing and even paralysis. Above Don right now is almost 250 meters of water, over 800 feet. It's going to be a long, dangerous journey. On the surface, everything is running smoothly. Nobody has any idea of what has just happened in the depths of the sinkhole. As planned, the next support divers enter the water and descend to 150 meters where they are scheduled to meet Don. But when they get there, there's nowhere to be seen.

Speaker 2:
[29:26] I've got divers waiting at 150 meters, but I knew they wouldn't be there when I got there because they can only stay so long. And the command is stay as long as you are programmed to stay and then leave because what we don't want is multiple injuries. We don't want someone to sacrifice themselves unnecessarily for somebody else.

Speaker 1:
[29:47] Just before they have to leave, the two support divers see a single light rising up through the darkness. At this distance, they have no idea whether it belongs to Dave or Don, but its significance is clear. Only one of them is coming back. The divers retreat to the surface to break the news to the rest of the team. Meanwhile, Don continues his slow, steady ascent, all the time looking back down to see if there is any movement from Dave's light, clinging to the unlikely hope that his friend might still be alive. Eventually, he reaches 150 meters, where a group of emergency tanks are clipped. With the gas in his own cylinders now depleted after his re-breather malfunction, he's reached them at a crucial time.

Speaker 2:
[30:37] I come up, I get to that 150 meter, no bubbles below, light still not moving. I'm on my own there, and what I should do is actually pick up another cylinder. I've really only got one and a half cylinders if something went wrong. But, you know, I don't take the cylinder. I leave the cylinder for Dave. If Dave comes back, he's going to need the gas. So I leave the cylinder there and I carry on out.

Speaker 1:
[31:02] It's an unrealistic shred of hope, but hard to shake. On the surface, dive marshal Werner has set an emergency plan into motion, and tension mounts as people wait to discover which diver is coming back. The question is soon answered. When Don reaches 80 meters, another support diver drops level with him. Immediately the diver sees Don's wrecked re-breather controller. It's obvious he has gone deeper than planned, and that can only mean there was a problem. Don goes to write something on a diving slate, a plastic waterproof tablet divers can scribble on to communicate underwater. It is vital that the rest of the team knows what has happened, so they can adjust their plan accordingly.

Speaker 2:
[31:49] I write on the slate and say Dave's not coming back. So I give that slate to him and I say, you know, don't go down, go up.

Speaker 1:
[31:57] The dive has turned tragic, but there is little time now to process it properly. All attention switches to getting Don out safely and ensuring there are no other accidents. In the dark embrace of the cave, Don focuses on keeping his oxygen levels under control and adhering to the correct decompression stops. At around 45 meters, he reaches the roof of the enormous chamber. Somewhere above him is the bottleneck, which will take him back into the basin above. Don reaches for another nearby cylinder attached to the line so he can flush his breathing loop and maintain safe levels of gas within his re-breather. But then, with no warning, Don's surrounding suddenly turn hazy and unsteady. His eyes struggle to focus. He is losing consciousness.

Speaker 2:
[32:52] I pick the cylinder up and clip it off onto me. And as I do that, I start to pass out. It's like I'm not there. I'm just mentally drifted away. It's like I'm fainting, like I'm going to sleep, like I'm in a dream world. I don't even know where I am.

Speaker 1:
[33:15] With the edges of his vision darkening, Don has just seconds before blacking out completely. If he does, he'll drown. Don's movements become automatic, mechanical, as his ingrained training and muscle memory take over. Divers using rebreathers are taught to change instantly to their open circuit backup tanks if they sense themselves starting to lose consciousness. Don has practiced the training drill enough times and taught it to hundreds of students. But this time it's for real.

Speaker 2:
[33:49] I do it completely by remont, completely without command. I just do it just like you would do when you're driving a car and you need to stop the car in an accident. So I did it without even thinking.

Speaker 1:
[34:05] Don's mouth closes around his scuba regulator and the gas flows into his lungs. But then, the world begins to spin. His vision blurs as he starts to rotate through the water. There is no knowing which direction he's facing or which way he's moving. He isn't aware of this now, but when Don switched to open circuit a tiny bubble formed in his left inner ear, completely disrupting his sense of balance and causing severe vertigo. He tumbles through the water, completely disorientated, pinwheeling helplessly in a void.

Speaker 2:
[34:44] Now I'm spinning around like a top inside this cave. I've got about 250 metres of water below me at this point. Not that that's actually going through my head, because I don't even know what planet I'm on at that point. So I'm under water and I'm going around and I'm on the roof, and it's a black roof, but I've got bright lights. So when the light hits the roof, it's like white. And when I carry on spinning, it goes into the black, so the light is going black-white, black-white, so I'm going around.

Speaker 1:
[35:14] The sensation is surreal. Extreme darkness and extreme brightness flashing through his vision. With no control over his movements and no sense of direction, the biggest risk is that Don will spin off into the black infinity of the chamber away from his shot line. And if that happens, he'll be lost in the chasm, unsure of which way is up or down. As he twists, something flashes across his eyes. It's his shot line, briefly glimpsed in the water. As he comes back around, he takes his chance. The shot line appears again, and he makes a desperate instinctive lunge towards it. A second later, his fingers close around the weighted rope.

Speaker 2:
[36:01] I managed to basically hook on to the rope. Otherwise, I'd just kept on spinning and going out of control and disappearing to the depths. So I hold on to the rope, and I spin around the rope. And this is all in a dream. I'm not thinking. It's just by instinct.

Speaker 1:
[36:20] Don hangs on with all he's got. But the grip doesn't stop his motion, and he continues to twist and flail. It's a crazy, confounding blur. Finally, he slows. His tight grasp on the lifeline still intact. Taking a moment and regaining some of his clarity, he is able to look at the dive computer attached to his wrist, which tells him his depth. Somehow, in his barely-lucid, discombobulated state, he has still managed to travel upwards along the rope. But he is at 35 meters. He has gone too high too quickly. He has to get his decompression schedule back on track. Moving carefully, Don retreats down the line to 46 meters. Now, totally unable to focus properly on his re-breather's controls, his safest option is to stay on his backup open-circuit tanks. But this will burn through his air supply. And with the time-consuming ascent still ahead of him, he's going to need more gas. Don reaches out for a cluster of cylinders, clipped to the line nearby. As he does so, his stomach does a somersault.

Speaker 2:
[37:40] So now I find every time I move, I vomit. Any time I do anything, pick a cylinder up and click it off, I vomit. I'm on open circuit and if you vomit, you tend to take the regulator out of your mouth, vomit and then put it back in, clear it and carry on breathing.

Speaker 1:
[37:59] When he is finally able to, he gingerly starts grappling his way up the line towards the next decompression stop. Above, a figure moves down towards him. A support diver is coming to check on his progress.

Speaker 2:
[38:13] He is coming down to see how I am. And I write on a slate, I'm having a hard time, nausea and vomiting. And I have to write it like that so they can't misconstrue what I'm saying. I've come out of that dream and I can control what's going on, but I can't move my body. I can't get my legs into the place I want to be. I can hold on to the rope, but I can't get myself horizontal. I can only stay where I am. And any time I try and do something, I spin.

Speaker 1:
[38:41] Rapidly, the news reaches the surface team. Don needs urgent aid. A tether is made to clip him to the shot line in case he loses consciousness and a rotor is agreed to ensure at least one diver remains with him at all times. But despite this, Don's situation remains dire. It's been a couple of hours since he entered the water, but as he nears the surface, his decompression stops need to become longer and more frequent, meaning he still has more than 10 hours to go. The climb is grueling. Don's throats and stomach are raw from retching, and it takes all his strength to maintain his grip on the shot line. But even as the edge is laboriously closer towards the light and air, this strength is fading. Too weak and dizzy to maintain a diver's usual horizontal position, which allows gas to flow directly into the lungs, Don is forced to breathe vertically. Soon, every inhale is a painful effort.

Speaker 2:
[39:51] As I got closer to the surface, I was getting to the point where I couldn't breathe anymore. Normally, when you're in the water, you want to be horizontal. If you suck gas in, and when you're in a vertical position, you have to use all your muscles to actually bring it down. So the intercostal muscles and the diaphragm are working with every breath to really suck the gas down. And I was getting to the point now where I couldn't breathe.

Speaker 1:
[40:15] Don is forced to press his regulator's purge button with each inhale, which helps to push a stream of gas into his lungs. It's all that's keeping him alive. And then, when the surface is tantalizingly close, there is another problem. He's struck by a new, terrifying pain. A sharp stab in his left knee, a classic sign of the bends. There's no more time. After some negotiation with the medics, Don agrees to cut his decompression in the water short and take his chances on dry land. And so, 12 and a half hours after beginning his dive, he finally lets the team pull him from the water and into the warm evening air.

Speaker 2:
[41:04] I just give myself over for them to control. I just let myself go and be taken care of. And I saw a video of me. I looked like a real mess when I got out of the water.

Speaker 1:
[41:16] Utterly depleted and unable to walk, Don is placed on a gurney, then hoisted up the slopes with a rope and pulley system and taken to the mobile recompression chamber above. He has made it out of Bushman's Hole, but that doesn't mean his battle is over. He remains in the claustrophobic, oxygen-rich chamber until the early hours of the morning. When he is eventually able to emerge, it becomes clear quite how serious his condition is.

Speaker 2:
[41:45] I couldn't walk unless I had someone to lean on. My eyes were crossed. I couldn't see properly. I couldn't balance in any which way. I could still talk and I could still think, but that was about it.

Speaker 1:
[41:58] Before he collapses in his bed, Don is briefly able to phone his wife, Andre, who has been kept informed of his situation throughout the day.

Speaker 2:
[42:06] I spoke to Andre and our standard greeting after any dive is I'm alive. So that's what I said to her on the phone, I'm alive. And when I spoke to her at 3 o'clock in the morning, she left where we are and did the 12-hour drive to Bushman's to come and see me. So that was the start of yet another journey really of getting better. And it took a long time.

Speaker 1:
[42:34] In the midst of the grief around Dave's death, there is one central question. What went wrong? As it turns out, it isn't long before an answer is revealed. In the days following the accident, some of the team begin retrieving the lines and gas cylinders that remain in the chamber. As they pull the shot line up, the movement dislodges Dave's body from the bottom of the cave and he floats up towards the surface. And suspended below him by a thin cave line tangled around Dave's scuba gear is Dion Dreher. After the bodies are retrieved, attention turns to the camera Dave was wearing. The footage shows his dive went entirely to plan until he tried to place Dion into the body bag, at which point both he and the body became unexpectedly ensnared in the cave line. During the struggle to free himself from the tangle, Dave's breathing grew heavier, increasing the amount of CO2 he was emitting into his re-breather.

Speaker 2:
[43:38] So the CO2 build up basically knocks you out. So what we believe is that the CO2 build up in his body put him to sleep. So he wouldn't have known what was going on any more than I would have known when I was spinning around. At 46 meters. Now, we've looked at that tape and we followed it through breath by breath. And I found myself breathing the same way or breathing with Dave. Because you could hear on the genuine tape, you could hear the breaths.

Speaker 1:
[44:18] As Don reckons with the loss of his friend, he is also struggling with his own physical recovery. The effects of his decompression sickness are so bad that it's feared he may never walk normally again, let alone dive. In the days that follow, he endures several sessions in the recompression chamber before Andre drives him for further treatment at a hospital in Pretoria. Though Don shows incremental improvement after each session, progress is dispiritingly slow.

Speaker 2:
[44:50] So each treatment I did, I got about 50 percent better with each time, but I still had a big problem with balance. I couldn't walk in a straight line. I could walk unsupported, but I couldn't walk in a straight line. I couldn't walk at night in the dark at the crawl. So if I wanted to use the toilet at night at the crawl, I'd hold conversations and I would have to concentrate so much on what I was doing, I'd actually forget the conversations.

Speaker 1:
[45:16] Yet, despite his debilitating symptoms, his determination to get back to diving propels him forward. Only a matter of months after the tragic events at Bushman's Hole, he tries reentering the water at Comarty Springs for the first time.

Speaker 2:
[45:33] I didn't even know if I could dive at that point. So I went into the water and found that I actually felt better in the water than I did on the land, because I'm an aquatic person. So I felt better there because I could actually sense things. But I still can't even now swim in a straight line. Even today, I still have a problem with balance. It's a problem I'll always have. So I've lost balance really in the left side, not completely, but what happened is you get used to dealing with it. So now I'm doing things, I'm running up and down all over the place and doing all the dives I ever used to do. I've considered myself recovered after that first year really in terms of diving, but in practical terms I'll always be damaged.

Speaker 1:
[46:18] Despite everything, Don has returned many times to dive at Bushman's. In the years since the accident, he's had plenty of time to reflect on his near-death experience there, and on what enabled him to survive.

Speaker 2:
[46:32] What I came to realize on that was there was absolutely at no point on that dive, did I ever think that I wasn't coming back? There was never even a question among mine. All I had to do was what I do, and I would work my way out. So, even at the point where I was adding the gas to breathe, or when I was trying, I was never thinking that I need to get out. All I was doing was living where I was. So now, one of my things is I say, you know, believe you can, because if you believe you can, you can do it.

Speaker 1:
[47:06] In the end, Dave did fulfill his promise to recover Dion's body, though he paid the highest price imaginable for it. At the behest of Dave's widow, Don scattered his friends' ashes near his home at Camarty Springs, the place where they first dived together, and where, two decades later, Don continues to dance in the water, both for himself and for Dave.

Speaker 2:
[47:33] In the army, we used to say, died with his boots on, died doing what he loved and what he wanted to do. So in that, it's a good death. That's the way I always look at it. Dave is always in my thoughts, not in a macabre way, but just like I'm expecting him to come around the corner and we can discuss the good things that we've just done. And that's still 22 years later. And so it's still very much an ongoing process and he still dives. No sense.

Speaker 1:
[48:13] In the next episode, we meet Mayan Sabag. In 2008, the 27-year-old is studying in the Chinese city of Chengdu. One day, her friend suggests they escape the hustle and bustle and head to a remote nature reserve. But while passing through a village nestled in the mountains, they suddenly find themselves at the epicenter of a terrible natural disaster, a magnitude eight earthquake that will go down as one of the deadliest in human history. When the restaurant they're sitting in collapses, Mayan is trapped in the pitch black, buried alive and so badly injured, she's unable to even call out for help. Even as she fights to free herself from this living tomb, up above on the surface, the situation is even worse. Escaping burial is just the beginning. That's next time on Real Survival Stories.