What exactly makes cave diving so risky, even if you have experience or are with a guide?
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It’s also important to note, if you’re in open water and if things go completely to shit, you can make an emergency assent to get to air. That’s not possible when cave diving.
A lot of good responses here, but I think no one has yet mentioned: without good visual cues, it’s easy to change your depth without you realizing it. If you sink down 40 or 50 feet, which is totally possible to do before you realize you’ve done it, you could very well use up most of your air since the deeper you go, the more air you use, or gotten so deep that you’ll have to decompress to prevent the bends and you won’t have enough air for the decompression so you’ll get the bends which could kill you or damage you, or gotten deep enough that you experience nitrogen narcosis (at depth, nitrogen acts like a narcotic and you start having trouble thinking, like you’re very drunk. You need all your wits about you in this emergency and you end up being unable to think straight. People with nitrogen narcosis, even very experienced divers, have been known to remove their regulator and drown due to confusion, even though they have plenty of air).
see, when you’re in the dark, you still have sense of where you are with your ears. A lifetime of experience will actually teach you to discern your voice as it bounces around a room, whether it echoes or not, how close you are to a war. If you’ve ever put your face an inch from a wall and spoke it does extremely different from when you’re facing an open room. You’re so used to this in your daily life that you don’t even think about it, it’s one of these minor clues that inform your knowledge of the world around you. This, combined with sight, and you’ve got a pretty good 3d grasp of the world around you, and that can inform how your limbs move you around. Even things like how your sleeves bend and press against your arms, or your leg hair as your legs swing forward, the folding of your socks, maybe your ponytail tugging slightly on your scalp. These things all contribute to your feel of gravity, of momentum, and you might not think about it because they aren’t necessary to function, but they’re data input points your brain definitely uses.
imagine none of that. Now, you’re completely numb to the world. No hearing, no sight, nothing. You have no sensory feedback as to where your hands are, you’re flying blind only with your own body’s muscles and nerves to hopefully get it right. If you aren’t used to this, you can’t ‘feel’ your way around. You might think you’ve got 3 feet in front of you when you’ve only got 6. That sharp left turn might actually be only 30 degrees. the wall is now 2 feet away from you when you swore it was right beside your hand, ready to grab. Everything lies to you and you have absolutely no way to get more information. You start to make shit up as your brain grasps for straws, so to speak, of info to cobble together whatever input it feels.
Suddenly you aren’t sure what way is up or down, you can’t feel momentum or inertia. Your only way to know, your ears, are second-guessing themselves now because you’re not getting any other input to back it up. You’re wrong all the time but that’s never been a problem because in case of conflicting info, you’ve got all these other ‘failsafes’ of contextual input to help you.
your entire understanding of the physical world is collapsing, and you have absolutely nothing to help you regain enough of it to make informed decisions. You might start backing up not realizing you’re actually going further in. And this whole time has been 30 minutes when you were sure it was only 30 seconds and you don’t know that your oxygen is getting dangerously low, because you’re using it up in your panic.
honestly, the risk isn’t even always with the cave itself. if you aren’t trained to deal with all of this, you’re fucked.
Diving is far from a risk free pursuit, but at the amateur level is done with the knowledge that you are generally swimming in open water, and if anything goes wrong you can just go up.
As you go to deeper depths and start doing more interesting dives, the risk increases further – from depth even just the act of going up can leave you in serious trouble if you do it too quickly, so you need the correct skill, knowledge and equipment to dive safely.
Cave diving takes all of this and then makes it even more complex and risky.
Because you are in a cave network, you can no longer just surface – you need to follow a specific route to the point you can safely surface. Get lost in any way and you cannot just sit tight and wait for your friends to find you – you are on a limited air supply and if that runs out it is game over.
And getting lost is easy. You are working in darkness with only artificial lighting, you are in an environment where visibility will vary and it could be very easy to completely blind yourself by disturbing sediment, and the route you need to follow has become 3d and far more complex than the 2d navigation humans are used to.
So while very simple cave diving can be done easily and safely, when it gets more complex the risks can pile up quickly – and it can be very easy for a simple dive to turn complicated very suddenly with little more than a wrong turn.
I once was in a cave in South Africa where you could squeeze yourself through a part that was called “Devils chimmney”. It was extremely confined as I would imagine cave diving but without all the gear. https://youtu.be/iubkptdDPYQ
I had had my only ever panic attack while stuck in that thing. I can’t for the life of me imagine this but under water.
because people don’t follow these 5 basic rules:
1. Always use a continuous guideline to the surface.
2. Save two-thirds of the total air supply for returning to the surface.
3. Carry at least three lights during the dive.
4. Limit dive depth to that appropriate for the gas being breathed
5. Be well trained in cave diving and mentally prepared for the dive.
If you are more curios there is a Youtube channel called Dive Talk and they break down movies, youtube videos, etc of people diving and break down what they did good and what they did wrong. They cover a lot of cave diving accidents.
Confined spaces are easy to get turned around in.
Undisturbed bodies of water have huge layers of silt on the bottom that get stirred up and prevent seeing ANYTHING around you.
Lower threshold for claustrophobia and panic when you’re suited up for diving.
Combine all three and you have a recipe for disaster. People have been known to even rip off their dive masks and lose their respirator because it gets so bad, even in open water if you go too close to the bottom.
It’s tough to imagine unless you’ve been diving, but when I was doing my open water test for scuba certification part of the testing was navigating using only our wrist compasses to find the dive instructors. We were in a shallow section of the lake, about 6-7 feet deep, but one instructor sat still in a spot while the others swam around and stirred up the bottom. They had those of us getting certified try to find him using predetermined headings from around the lake and swam around blind for probably 20 minutes. It didn’t count for our certification, they just wanted us to see how easily you can get turned around and lost when you can’t see at all. It’s spooky.
Basically it’s dark as hell like pitch black dark, the water is cloudy from all the disturbed particulates in it that were stirred up by you or someone else and a large majority of these caves are very tight and narrow which can lead to you getting stuck or turned around and to top it off if you or someone else gets lost or trapped there’s usually no way to mount a search and rescue op because of the aforementioned conditions and people not being willing to risk so many lives to save one. Basically if the worst case scenario happens you or whoever is boned and that cave will become your tomb.
This guest on Joe Rogan gave me such incredible anxiety to listen to his story about exactly that. https://www.google.com/search?q=joe+rogan+cave+diving&oq=joe+rogan+cavw&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0i13l4.4917j0j9&client=ms-android-samsung-gn-rev1&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8
Many things, but one of the biggest is you don’t have as easy of an out. In general, in Scuba you have all of these plans and backups in case of an emergency, but for recreational scuba, if all else fails in a no decompression dive, you just swim to the surface. Lose your buddy, can’t find your backup reg, just panic for whatever reason….surface. If you are following the rules times/depths, you will be fine. You may not be able to dive the rest of the day, but you won’t die. If you are half a mile in a cave, get lost, tangled, disoriented, you can’t just hit the stop button and surface like you can on most recreational dives.
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