Eli5: Why is cave diving so dangerous ? To the point people with 20+ years of diving experience refuse to do so.
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Former almost cave certified diver here. Everyone’s mentioned the general dangers pretty well so let me give why I didn’t finish my certificate.
I took a two week vacation to visit a still renown cave instructor. Previously I had done cavern for a few years and even some wreck penetration, aka going into sunk ships. Never so far that I couldn’t reel my way out etc. I’ve done some deeper dives and all in all consider myself a very safe diver who knows his bounds and doesn’t push boundaries.
After my first cert dive I was feeling good. We checked in for the day after and I dropped my backup regulator(breathing mouthpiece) at a shop because it was having a very minor pressure issue after our dives. I swapped to my instructors back up and was good.
Next day arrives and it’s perfect weather perfect water. We get to site, I hook up my backups and take a quick breath underwater to make sure no more leak. We’re good across the board. We sink ourselves down about 60 ft before the underwater caves entrance, it’s about 8 ft wide and goes back 100 or so and doesn’t feed into any cracks or holes you can get lost in.
I go about twenty feet in and all of a sudden notice my regulators not giving me gas each breath. I crank it up and nothing is like breathing through a pinched straw. I grab my backup, take a breath and another and now I have some odd grease lining my mouth. I kick forward and tug on my instructors fin, giving him some sign language he passes me his backup and I take a breath but panic is already screaming through my veins. I signal to him, grab a backup bottle and ascended asap without thinking about how long I was down.
I surface, take my gear off and explain what happens. He disectrd my gear and my main appeared to have no issues, maybe a tiny bit cold but water was in 50s and it was not a cheap reg so probably not a freeze. My octo had been maintenance and it appeared something was leftover somewhere or perhaps the new line. I didn’t care enough to find out and I quit diving then. The instructor did take the gear and said he’d contact vendors if necessary etc.
So yea cave diving is crazy because so many things can go wrong, including yourself. I’m sure I could have checked these things and avoided them, as far as I knew at the time I was.
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