Verna van Schaik - Fatally Flawed--The Quest to be Deepest ()

nd Edition

Published by : Verna van Schaik atSmashwords

Copyright 2013 Verna van Schaik

All Rights Reserved

Dedication

• My Mom, Denise vanSchaik - for believing in me, always!

• My nieces, Michaela andAislin - for giving me a reason to come back

• Joseph Emmanuel - therewould have been no dive without him

• Gail Davidson - who wasthere for the whole journey and listened to all the tears

• Derek Hughes forgetting it all started, and staying to the end

• ScubaPro South Africa,in particular Rhys Couzyn and Steve Ruzsnick, who providedunbelievable support and service and the best equipment ever

• Allana Barber &Kirsten Emmanuel- who arrived late, but whose support has beeninvaluable

• Nuno Gomes - for nottaking responsibility and teaching me the basics that kept mealive

• Cherise Modlin and KarlThomas - without them I would never have started to see who I couldbe

All the people on both my dives - without them itwould neverhave happened.

It has been almost ten years and itseemed time to do a second edition. I hope I have caught the typosthat crept in first time round.

I haventchanged the original text this was how it happened for me. Thisis how I experienced it, warts and all. To those readers who havefound it too fluffy and that I should just get on with it avalid perspective, but not how I experienced it and for me a veryimportant part of the journey. The people who can just get onwith it are few and far between, this story is not for them. Thisstory is for those of you who think you can not. This storyhopefully will show you that maybe you can to.

I am not theperson who wrote this. I have changed and grown and I hope become amore grounded, confident person, one who lives dare in every momentrather than just in diving. That has been my adventure for the lastten years to understand the meaning of what I did and totranslate that into a habit I could live all the time.

I hope you findsomething in this story that connects and inspires you to reach foryour dream. It is possible. I know this because I did it and Iwasnt born with a natural tendency toward greatness.

Who you areisnt set in stone. It is a choice. Who you are has taken you towhere you are now, you may need to extend that and add to it to getto your there.

Normal peopleto extraordinary things go do something extraordinary. Go liveyour dreams! Go live with dare!

It is the 8th of January 2005 and what started withenthusiasm and optimism has turned into our worst nightmare. Dave Shaw isnot coming back and his buddy Don Shirley is missing. As surfacemarshall, I am suddenly the focus of attention. What happens now ismy decision and instead of a long, boring day waiting for divers toreturn, I have to use everything I know about diving to worldrecord depths to try and give the missing diver the edge that willget him out alive.

More menhave landed on the moon than have dived to sub-250 meters, where theres no room forerror and even less time to recover. This is the extreme edge ofscuba diving; a place where you not only find out how good you areat diving but who you are, and this day was to go down as one ofthe most notorious dives in the history of deep diving. Dave Shawhad chosen to retrieve the body of a diver who had been lost forten years. The dive would take Dave to 272 meters and cost him hislife. For his buddy Don Shirley (who tried to go and help before hefound himself in trouble), the price would not be quite so severe -only his balance and short term memory. This is what it took to getworldwide recognition for deep diving - the death of one man whodid not believe in limits.

How did Iget to be there, on that dive? Deep diving is hard to break intoand getting onto a dive like Daves even harder. Getting acceptedis as much about your ability underwater as it is about how wellyou get on with the deep diver himself. I was there because I knewwhat it took to dive deep (I am officially the deepest woman in theworld). I was there because they needed someone who could make theright decisions on the surface if something went wrong. I was theiredge if anything went wrong.

LikeDave, I am an explorer, relishing the challenge of going to new places and doingthings that have not been done before. We both understood thatlimits are choices (more liquid than fixed) and that limits change.For those of us who choose to test the limits, death is somethingto be accepted, not feared. Like Dave, Ive made the decision todive even if it might mean I die. I thought I knew what it took tobreak records, but what I hadnt understood was the true price ofthat ambition. When I am the diver, I am isolated from the trueconsequences and their effects on the people I might leavebehind.

On thatfateful day I would experience deep diving from the other side of the fence and for thefirst time in almost a decade inside the world of deep divers Ifound myself asking whether dying for a dive was really worth it.More than that, I started to wonder why risking possible death fora deep dive held such powerful attraction.

I findmyself in a group of men and woman who choose to challenge not onlytheir own limits but also those of the world, yet we have little incommon other than our choices. Are we real life explorers? Whatdrives a person to place their life on the line? Why do we want sodesperately to be the deepest?

Are we fatallyflawed?

Namingthe divers who have dared to challenge depth in scuba is not hard - it is a small, select,group of men and women who dare. Deep diving is also a fairlyrecent phenomena, having started to gain popularity in the late 80swith Sheck Exley and his quest to find the depth limit.

Shecksis a name that is synonymous with deep cave diving, and for manyhes the founder of both. Hes also one of the many divers who paidthe ultimate price of being first - he died sub-280 meters whilstattempting to bottom Zacaton, a cave in Mexico. His buddy, JimBowden, survived, setting (briefly) a new world record at 281meters.

Anothername that is synonymous with deep diving is that of Nuno Gomes whois the current world record holder and is not only the deepest manin the world but also the deepest man in a cave. Hes a trulyremarkable diver not only as a result of his depth records, butalso because hes the only man to successfully dive deeper than 250meters four times. In 1994, he set a new world record for depthwith a dive to 282 meters in Boesmansgat (the third largestunderwater cave in the world, located in South Africa). This deepcave record held until 2001 when John Bennett went to 308 meters inthe ocean off the Philippines. Regrettably, Bennett died laterdoing a shallow wreck dive. His body was neverrecovered.

Not to bedismissed, Nuno went back, this time to dive in the ocean where he set the all time,definitive depth record with a dive to 321 meters in 2005. His 1996dive to 282 meters in a cave remains unbroken - no one has beendeeper in a cave than Nuno Gomes. The only diver who has come closeis Dave Shaw, with his dive to 272 meters in Boesmansgat on are-breather. More incredibly, no one has ever dived as many timessub-250 meters as Nuno. Most divers do one deep dive, get therecord and then never go back. Nuno went back not once, but threetimes.

Noaccount of the divers who dive deep can exclude Dave Shaw whose epic adventures atBoesmansgat have set him apart from those who came before. Insteadof chasing a number, Dave took things one step further. He decidedto explore and swim at depth, something that I doubt any opencircuit diver would contemplate. Tragically, he died trying torepeat a dive to 272 meters and recover the body of a fellow diver,Deon Dreyer. The irony is that he was that he had already done thedepth once before, when he discovered Deon. That dive was (andstill is) a world record for depth for re-breatherdiving.