Cave Diving Statistics

[MikeFerrara]

That's the one.

 

[H2Andy]

You shouldn't be that far away and it shouldn't be too hard to find.

well... i have seen too many people keep missing the line by inches while conducting line searches (practice searches, of course).

if you are in zero vis and need to find that line, luck plays a part in finding it before
you don't have enough air left to get all the way out.

the Mexico accident involved two teams. one team was fine; the other took
a wrong turn and kept going.

inexplicably, they marked the line with a cookie, not an arrow. and then, they
passed at least four arrows pointing in the opposite direction before they
ran to the end of the line and turned back.

just odd... like their brains stopped working or something.

 

[H2Andy]

You are referring to one around Thanksgiving 2003. Two guys from Texas, I think around the Dallas area. They were the ones that were getting in just as my team was exiting and we had a brief PM convo about it...

i am not familiar with this one.

what happened?

 

[Cave Diver]

i am not familiar with this one.

what happened?

Thanksgiving trip 2003, me and some buddies were diving LR. As we were gearing up another vehicle with Texas plates pulled up and I ended up chatting with them for a few minutes. My team got in, did our dive and as we were exiting the water their team was preparing to get in.

As I recall, they were diving sidemount and scooters. I remember thinking something was odd about them at the time, but don't recall exactly what at the moment. I heard about the fatality later, and the details are a little fuzzy, but to the best of my memory it goes something like this.

They took scooters much further into the system than they should have. i.e. passageway wasn't conducive to good scooter technique.

Apparently one of them had a problem and they ended up silting out the passage pretty badly, causing them to get seperated. One buddy made it to clear water, I think he clipped his scooter off to the line and proceeded to swim out for unknown reasons. He presumed that his other buddy was ahead of him.

When he got to his deco stop in the cavern area, he realized his buddy was not there and presumed he had already exited. Upon completing deco and surfacing he found out that his buddy had not made it out yet. He was too low on air to attempt a rescue and another team preparing to go in found the body. For unknown reasons the buddy also clipped off scooter to the line and made a swimming exit. I believe he was only a few hundred feet past the area that was silted out when he was found.

This is accurate to the best of my knowledge of limited details available at the time. If I made any mistakes in the recounting, my apologies.

The scenario raised several questions in my mind, as well as the minds of several of my buddies, but I don't know that any of it was ever discussed in public out of respect for the family by the surviving buddy.

 

[H2Andy]

thank you

man... that just blows

 

[diver3523]

Hello vel525,

Your friend sounds like a highly intelligent individual. Nice avatar, btw.

 

[roakey]

the Mexico accident involved two teams. one team was fine; the other took a wrong turn and kept going.

Actually both teams took a wrong turn, when they discovered their mistake and corrected, one team didn't have the gas to exit, the other team made it out with the husband breathing off the wife's long hose.

Her low SAC was probably the only thing that saved the two of them.

Roak

 

[H2Andy]

roakey, there were two teams, a four-person team and a five-person team:

"Two teams of full cave certified divers (one 5-person team, and one 4-person team) arrive at Cenote Calimba in two separate vehicles.

[snip]

The 4-person team consisting of the two victims and two survivors started their dive at Cenote Calimba and reached the snap & gap line end of Calimba line in approximately 32 minutes. They turned left, swam 65 feet, and followed the pink gap line connecting to the Bosh Chen line with Victim #2 calling the dive to turn around. This four-person team made no other jumps and did not encounter the five-person team."

http://www.iucrr.org/aa.htm

the five-person team was fine and didn't make a wrong turn.

the four-person team made the wrong turn. as you describe, only two survived.

 

[roakey]

I use the term "team" a little more strictly than most people when I speak of "teams" of divers. I never consider more than three people a "team" -- two or three people make up a team, four should be organized as two teams of two each.

So, to clarify using my terms, one group of five consisted of a guide and four guided (but full cave certified) divers. The other group (four divers), all full cave certified, were with the guide previously in the week, but had made arrangements to do a dive on their own (and they had the training necessary to safely carry out dives on their own).

So the two groups (by choice not using the word "team" here) entered the system to execute two completely different dive plans. Ignoring the guided group (which executed their plan correctly) the other group consisted of two teams (my terminology) that chose to dive together (I know the husband and wife, and would consider them to be a standalone team).

Bottom line is I think we differ only in semantics. The four-person group I don't consider one team, but a group made up of two teams, which are the teams I’m referring to.

Much verbosity for a simple definition.

Roak

 

[serambin]

I don't have any exact numbers handy either (and I'm not a caver, but I read a lot about it because it fascinates me) but there have been several hundred deaths in Florida since the late 1950s (in the 400-500 range) but it was really bad in the 1960s/70s before there was any organization or training, and open water divers were dropping like flies. After the Exley/Skiles 5 rules came about, the overall numbers dropped dramatically.

Not to put too fine point on it, but in the 60's and 70's, there were no certified cave divers. In fact certified diver was about it. Not OW Or AOW or even AOW with bells on.

Stan