Cave Diving Offers a Unique Opportunity to Explore a Hidden Underwater World
Imagine diving in a confined space with little or no surface access, limited visibility, and the possibility of a total blackout. For many, this may sound like a nightmare rather than an experience that one would intentionally seek out.
Cave diving holds a natural appeal for an experienced open-water diver. It offers new physical and mental challenges. Most of all, it invites the trained diver to enter an underwater world that very few will ever experience. Divers can have the rare pleasure of experiencing remarkably beautiful, unspoiled places.
Cave Diving Is an Extreme Sport
Regardless of experience, not all divers are suited to the rigors of cave diving. You will need special training as well the ability to develop and practice new skills. It is expensive and you will be investing in lots of new technical equipment required to dive. As in other spheres of life, there are some things money can buy and some things that are only available through effort. Cave diving demands a specific level of mental readiness. Your psychological state is as critical as your gear, and no amount of money can impact that.
The dangers of cave diving are real. It is said that in cave diving, there are no accidents, only fatalities. In 1979, Sheck Exley published Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival. In his book, he set forth a system of accident analysis that is now part of all cave-diving training courses. As the cave-diving community embraced this approach in an effort to standardize safety for the sport, five key rules have emerged.
The Five Rules of Accident Analysis
1. Training
Training prior to cave diving is non-negotiable. Many of the fatalities associated with cave diving happened when curious divers decided to check out a cave and found themselves in a situation where they were unprepared to navigate safely.
Training is conducted in stages. Each stage increases divers’ ability to manage stress and prepares them to calmly handle unexpected events at depth without panicking.
2. Guideline Maintenance
Maintaining a guideline from a fixed point in open water through the cave is critical to surviving a dive when something goes wrong. Divers often underestimate how easy it is to get lost in a cave and to navigate back to open water. Imagine having to do this in total darkness caused by light failure or silt out.
3. Depth Rules
Experienced technical divers understand that they can never exceed the operational depth of the gas that they are diving. Diving at depths beyond your gas tolerance can increase your risk of nitrogen narcosis.
Nitrogen narcosis is a specific risk to cave divers because it impairs your ability to make decisions, slows your response time, and enables an otherwise small hazard to quickly lead to catastrophe.
4. Air: The Rule of Thirds
This simple rule is a technical diving standard: one-third air for entering the cave, one-third air for exiting, and one third for managing a buddy breathing emergency.
Each portion of the dive is calculated and planned according to penetration distances based on air consumption. Planning your dive and diving your plan is the golden standard.
5. Lights
All cave divers carry three lights with them on every dive—a primary light and two backup lights. Each light must have the capacity to burn for the planned duration of the dive. In total darkness underwater, your flashlight can be the difference between an exhilarating dive and a fatal dive.
With the right training and preparation, cave diving offers the possibility of a thrilling dive, an adrenaline rush, and the reward of seeing something otherworldly and new.