Quarries filled with water are very often used for diving. Some have terrible visibility whilst others seem to have reasonably clear water given the right conditions. Just outside Brits (a one horse town close to Pretoria) lies such a quarry and this is called Miracle Waters.
Safety first at Miracle Waters
The maximum depth is 33 metres and the visibility is between 5 and 10 metres most days. There are training platforms at various depths for all training levels and I think that perhaps 75% of the divers in the greater Johannesburg area do their qualifying dives either here or at a place called Bass Lake south of Johannesburg.
Miracle Waters
The area is well laid out with campsites, chalets, a picnic site and braai areas. There is a filling station with a compressor big enough to handle the numbers so a weekend away here for diving is possible. Night dives are also a possibility. Cylinder hire is available but you must book . The shop has food, snacks, gear rental and gear sales and is open 7 days a week.
Wired magazine profiled a fascinating character called Bill Stone in 2004. An inventor and explorer, he has invented both diving and robotic gear, mostly focused on reaching inaccessible locations. The article describes both his inventions, and an expedition into a cave in Mexico to recover the body of his companion. Shades of both Sheck Exley and Dave Shaw! The full article is here.
I linked to this article in my review of Sheck Exley’s book Caverns Measureless to Man, but it really deserves its own post because it’s such a fascinating read. Jerry Shine of Wired Magazine describes Exley’s cave diving activities in Mexico (and his ultimate fate) while giving a readable introduction to the growth of cave diving as a sport, and scuba diving in general.
We have had a lot of lousy weather lately resulting in the boat diving being cancelled almost every week since the beginning of the year. With a Deep Specialty in progress this has been a huge setback. With the prospects of a deep boat dive diminishing we decided to do a deep dive in the quarry.
Blue Rock Quarry
Blue Rock Quarry is situated just outside of Somerset West and is so named for the blue rock harvested there years ago. When it fell into disuse, it was filled up with water and now plays host to a range of watersports and recreational activities.
Blue Rock Quarry - looks inviting, yes?
We chose a spot that had a depth of close to 50 metres as we were looking for a maximum depth of 40 metres. The water looks clean and inviting from the surface and in fact the visibility is very good despite the total darkness that surrounds you from around 30 metres.
Buoy line dropping to 25 metres
Cecil, Clare and I entered the water here, where a line goes down the wall to a ledge at about 25 metres. The water is clear providing you do not rub a fin, finger or bubble on the walls as this results in a cascade of silt and fine rock rubble which takes a fair amount of time to clear.
Rocky slope
We had planned to stop at 20 and again at 30 metres on the way down but due to the poor visiblity we stopped a few more times just for me to make sure Clare and Cecil were still above me on the line.
Cecil descending down the buoy line
At 30 metres we encountered a tree. The branches sticking out in all directions are a huge hazard in low visibility as entanglement is a real possibility. We moved away from the tree and picked up another cable that I reckon runs down to nearly 50 metres.
Dark diving in the quarry
At 34 metres the water was very dark, and visibility was reduced to almost zero due to the silt dislodged by us on the cable. I stopped at 34 metres and shone my light down; directly below me was another tree.
The walls of Blue Rock quarry
We could move away from the line and descend further or turn the dive here. We did the skills required for the dive at this depth and started our ascent. Ascending was slow and deliberate, with planned stops at 20, 10 and 5 metres.
Tree stump at 5 metres
We did not see any life except for one small freshwater crab spotted by Clare. You don’t do this dive to sightsee!
Cecil doing his safety stop
Things to remember for a fresh water dive: weighting is critical, and you must remove weight for this dive. A good dive light, a back-up and cyalumes or strobes are also required plus a detailed dive plan. The quarry is also used for wake boarding and cable water skiing and a circular raised cable drags the skiiers around the perimeter so an ascent off the line is out of the question.
Dive date: 26 March 2011
Air temperature: 25 degrees
Water temperature: 12 degrees (much warmer on the surface, over 20 degrees)
Maximum depth: 34.4 metres (33.6 metres according to the dive computer, adjusted by 2.5% for fresh water)
Visibility: 4 metres
Dive duration: 23 minutes
As a facility for training the quarry is an option but having dived many quarries in my life I would much rather choose an angry dirty ocean to a quarry.
Fatally Flawed: The Quest to be Deepest – Verna van Schaik
Fatally Flawed
Verna van Schaik holds the record for the deepest dive on scuba by a woman, to 221 metres in a water-filled cave called Boesmansgat in the Northern Cape. If the name Boesmansgat rings bells, it’s probably because you heard about it as the cave that claimed the lives of Deon Dreyer in 1994, and, more recently, the Australian diver Dave Shaw, who went to recover Deon’s body. The story of that mission is recounted in Raising the Dead (also called Diving into Darkness).
Verna van Schaik was present on the day when Dave Shaw died – she had a critical support role as the person managing all the divers from the surface. She describes her emotions and how difficult it was to know what to do in the situation that arose. Her account of the build-up to Shaw’s dive, the actual unravelling of events, and the aftermath, is fascinating when read in conjunction with Raising the Dead, because she was actually on the team, whereas the other book is written with the apparent objectivity of a third party. Van Schaik criticises Dave Shaw and Don Shirley for going ahead with the dive – she says that they hadn’t slept enough, and that there had been several critical equipment failures the night prior to the dive which made it a desperately risky undertaking.
The book traces her career as a female deep diver. It includes her struggles to be accepted in this very male-dominated sport, her struggle to find and keep a trusted dive buddy, and numerous descriptions of the difficulty of managing a team of divers engaged in high-risk record-seeking endeavours.
She describes the fear she has felt on some of her record-setting dives, and the experience of becoming entangled in her line while at the bottom of a cave, all alone. Very deep dives are of necessity solo dives – there simply aren’t enough people who can and want to dive that deep for buddying up to be an option, and when every single small decision is a choice between life and death, having a buddy can be more of a liability than a help.
Van Schaik does, however, stress that very deep dives require a team of support divers who meet the deep diver on his or her way up from the deepest point. She prefers continuous support (never leaving the deep diver alone during the long decompression) but Shaw and Shirley, for example, planned for divers to be with them only for ten minutes of every hour.
It’s a quick read, could have done with a spell-check, but, especially if you’re familiar with the Dave Shaw story, I recommend it.
Sheck Exley is a legend in diving circles in general, but his status is particularly for cave and deep diving. He was one of the originators of the sport of cave diving, driving around Florida in the 1960’s in his Beetle and diving in submerged springs and aquifers.
He put in place many of the basic safety features of the sport, such as the one thirds rule (penetrate the cave using one third of your air, and then turn around; this leaves a safety margin for emergencies). He was also a pioneer of extremely deep diving (akin to that practiced by Dave Shaw in Raising the Dead/Diving Into Darkness – Exley even dived Boesmansgat in 1993).
Caverns Measureless to Man
Exley set numerous records, both for depth dived and distanced penetrated into a cave. He died when he was only 45, attempting to dive to over 300 metres in a cenote (a fresh water vertical cave) in Mexico. The cenote project continues with many of his former team members – long before I became a diver, I found the El Proyecto de Buceo Espeleologico México y América Central website, and was fascinated.
This book is part memoir, part manifesto on cave diving. I was particularly interested to see how far scuba gear has come in the last half century. Some of the gear these guys used was DODGY! A lot of it was self-made or jury-rigged from conventional scuba gear. As a pioneer of a new sport, there was not sufficient demand for equipment manufacturers to justify building the kind of kit that was required. The photographs are hilarious… To a man, the divers all had a LOT of hair. And those masks must have taken eight or ten breaths to clear!
There are several lessons one can learn from Exley. The main one for me was that he did thousands – over 4000 in his 29 year diving career – of cave dives. That is why he was so good: he practiced. Constant repetition, staying in top form so that he could do what he loved, and do it well.
The second object lesson is hinted at in the title of the book. It is taken from a line in a Samuel Taylor Coleridge Poem, Kubla Kahn. Here’s the first few lines:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
The essence of what appealed to Exley, and what attracts many technical divers to the sport today, is the opportunity to go where no one else has gone – to reach new depths, to walk on the moon or the top of Mount Everest, in the sense of being part of a very elite group of adventurers. This seems like an incredibly arrogant aim, but when you read Exley’s memoir you realise what a humble and grounded man he was. There was no swagger, or bravado, or careless abandon with his kit or his dive planning. Quite the opposite – the man was deadly serious about what he did, and I think that is why he lived so long. I am grateful every day that no one I love is a technical diver pushing the limits of the sport the way Exley and his team did… I feel that if you do this sport long enough, it’s what you will die doing. The dangers are extreme.
There’s a super Wired Magazine article on Sheck Exley and his diving partner Jim Bowden, here. It describes Exley’s final dive, providing a lot of background along the way. If it doesn’t make you want to read Exley’s book, then I have no hope for you!
I was totally obsessed with the Dave Shaw and Boesmansgat story when it happened in 2004. Boesmansgat is a water-filled sink hole on a farm in the Northern Cape, approximately 270 metres deep. An amateur diver, Deon Dreyer, lost his life there in 1994. His body was never recovered, but ten years later Dave Shaw, a highly experienced record-setting cave diver, encountered Dreyer’s still-grieving parents and decided to mount an expedition to recover the body.
Raising the Dead – Phillip Finch
The series of events that followed couldn’t have been dreamed up by a Hollywood scriptwriter. I remember as this unfolded in 2004, reading the news daily for updates. The video recording of Shaw’s final dive is available here, but I warn you it’s upsetting.
The kind of diving that is required to descend to depths of 100 metres and more is hazardous, requiring intense training, a calm mind, and complex equipment. The slightest over-exertion at depth can lead to lethal gas buildup, convulsions, and death. Hours and hours of decompression are required. The actual time spent at depth is of the order of a couple of minutes. Most of the time on the dive is spent ascending, slowly. It’s lonely, and tests one to the limit. Finch details the preparation, explains the technicalities in accessible terms, and paints full pictures of the characters of the people involved in the expedition and support team.
Tony and I both read this book in almost one sitting. The mindset of deep technical divers is quite different to that of recreational scuba divers, partly by necessity (they have far more complex equipment and greater dangers to contend with) and partly because many of them are involved in the sport in order to push limits – their own, and their equipment. (Being risk-averse, I prefer to operate well within my limits most of the time!) This book made me grateful that none of my loved ones are into this very extreme sport – I couldn’t bear waiting for news while my family member was on a 12 hour dive to insane depths, in a completely isolated location.
The book is available here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise click here. If you want to read it on your Kindle, go here.
It was also published under the title Diving Into Darkness. Highly, highly recommended, even if you’re sure you’ll never put on a rebreather or enter a water-filled cave. My father (definitely not a scuba diver) read it too, and found it gripping.
