What exactly makes cave diving so risky, even if you have experience or are with a guide?
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You can’t see clearly and, well, you’ve managed to put yourself in a big dark hole in the ground that stinks of bat poop
If you want a good narrative about why it’s an awful idea even if you are trained and equipped you should read “The Luminous Dead” by Caitlin Starling. 10 kinds of nope on both caving and cave diving.
Read the book “Agaisnt All Odds” about the Thailand cave rescue of the kids soccer team. Such a good book and gives a real insight into the dangers of cave diving
Cave diving is a type of overhead diving environment. Typical Recreational diving relies on the diver being able, in an emergency situation, of surfacing directly…. ( in an emergency, the now required safety stop for any dive can be skipped) Overhead diving of any sort would prevent this. Plus the potential loss of visibility, either because of a power failure, or suspended ultra-fine particles completely obliterating visibility. You have to know what you are doing!
Professional extended diving and some recreational diving situations rely on an expensive and complicated series of decompression stops, and support people and equipment with all emergency contingencies arranged for. For each type of overhead environment, there are a special set of skills needed and specific certifications are required. Ways to kick flippers,breathing and re breathers for minimal disturbance, Ropes, cords, and techniques to be trained In…navigation and really mental ability.
In a cave system, it is naturally completely dark, and a long difficult way to the surface. Been awhile, but I believe that overhead environments of any sort, wrecks, caves, etc. have by far, the highest mortality risk in diving. In fact the vast majority of injuries… regular diving has quite an impressive safety record when the basic rules are followed.
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
Had a coworker that did this. He and his buddy went through a small hole into a large chamber, they explored for a while and when they were ready to leave they turned back the way they came from and there were five nearly identical holes. Which one had they entered through.
recommend listening to Donald Cerrone’s story on Joe Rogan podcast, good depiction of the panic a loss of visibility can cause.
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.
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.
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