http://www.divernet.com/news/stories/150605gomes.shtml
Divernet News, dateline 15 June 2005
South African claims scuba depth record
Nuno Gomes, a 52-year-old South African, claims to have dived to 318m off the coast of Egypt, setting a new world depth record for open-circuit scuba.
Gomes descended down a 320m weighted line, with tags to be retrieved as proof of depth reached, along with dive computer records. Dangers included nitrogen narcosis, oxygen toxicity, adverse effects of gas changes, HPNS (a nervous complaint connected with rapid, deep descents), and dehydration.
The dive, recorded precisely at 318.25m, involved a 20-minute descent followed by some 12 hours of decompression. Gomes used a series of suspended stage cylinders, and was tended by nine support divers. He is reported not to have required recompression treatment after surfacing, but was put on oxygen as a precaution.
Gomes, a civil engineer from Gauteng, made a record attempt last July but suffered technical problems at 271m. He was lucky to get back to the surface unharmed.
The experience followed another close call in 1996, when Gomes got stuck in the silt at the bottom of Boesmansgat Cave in South Africa's Northern Cape. The 282.6m dive was a world open-circuit scuba record at the time, and remains a world cave diving record.
In 2001 a Briton, the late John Bennett, exceeded the magical 1000ft (305m) barrier with a dive to 308m in the Philippines. In 2003 another Briton, Mark Ellyatt, dived to 313m off Thailand.
