Deep, Dark And Deadly

Two photographers use their telephoto lenses to close in on the women in the water. What they see makes them stop snapping frames. "Oh, my," one of them says. He lowers his camera and passes it to me.

I bring into sharp focus the tearstreaked face of Mary Ellen Eckoff, who once held the women's world scuba depth record and is the longtime companion of Sheck Exley. Just then she looks up and screams, "No!"

The shout echoes from the limestone cliff walls and dies in a sob that the wind carries to us all.

In 1993 more than 6,000 people were certified as cave divers by the National Speleological Society Cave Diving Section, in Branford, Fla. According to Joe Odom, chairman of the society, there are now more than 14,000 certified cave divers, compared with just a thousand in 1984. Yet from rank novices to experienced explorers, all cave divers are continually faced with their own mortality.

Cave diving is to open-water scuba as flying an F-16 is to piloting a Cessna. The difference is that the weekend pilot can't get at the stick of a fighter, while Joe Scuba needs only to find an underwater hole and swim in. In this sport nearly all errors are fatal. Most cave divers with more than five years' experience have participated in at least one body recovery. Sheck Exley made 36 recoveries.

The dead are usually open-water divers, sometimes even dive instructors, who were unaware of the special hazards of submerged caves: loose ceilings; vertigo induced by huge irregular chambers; mind-numbing cold and depth; flashlights that won't operate below shallow depths; silt that rises from the floor of disturbed passages to darken water that was transparent going in. Bodies have been found within 10 feet of a silt-obscured entrance, fingers scraped raw from a last, desperate attempt to claw through solid rock.

Sometimes untrained cave divers panic and drown for no discernible reason. At least four died in the past decade with more than 30 minutes of air left in their tanks and an easy way out.

Those who make it through proper cave training and certification enjoy a safety record far better than that of open-water divers. Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival is one of the first manuals read by prospective cave divers. To bring home the danger of the sport, each chapter begins with an account of an accident, illustrating how the flouting of a particular safety procedure cost a life (or several). Such reading can make even the laziest student suddenly attentive.

The author of this and six other cave-diving texts, and hundreds of published cave-diving articles, is Sheck Exley.

June 29, 1968