Here’s a sobering, long read for the early days of the new year. Tim Zimmermann wrote a detailed piece for Outside magazine in 2005, recounting the remarkable events that took place in October 2004 at a deep freshwater cave called Boesmansgat. A team of crack technical divers executed a mission to raise the body of a young man who had died while diving the cave ten years before. Things did not go according to plan, and I can’t explain to you how remarkable and tragic the outcome of the dive was.
The events described in the article were the subject of the book Diving into Darkness/Raising the Dead by Philip Finch and are also mentioned in Verna van Schaik’s book, Fatally Flawed.
Read the full article here. If you’re not familiar with the incident, or if you are but enjoy gripping long form journalism, it’s well worth a read.
