An Australian deepwater diver has discovered the 10-year-old remains of a dead fellow diver while setting a new world record today. Australian David Shaw found the skeletal remains of Deon Dreyer, who died in 1994 inside Boesmansgat near Danielskuil in the Northern Cape at a depth of 271m.

Shaw broke the former world record of 242m for diving with rebreather equipment instead of the normal scuba diving equipment set by three German divers. He says he wanted to go further, but had to stop when he discovered Dreyer's remains.

It took Shaw nine and a half hours to complete the dive, most of this time taken up by decompression. Verna van Schaik broke the world record for women on Monday when she reached a depth of 221m at Boesmansgat.

http://www.sabcnews.com/south_africa/gener...2,90943,00.html

Thanks for the info!! If you want to keep up with the story and how they are going about recovering the body of Deon Dreyer here is a link to David Shaw's site. It gives daily information.


http://www.xtremedream.org/

It is sad that Shaw went missing, and is presumably dead in his effort to bring the remains of Dreyer to the surface.

http://iafrica.com/news/sa/402595.htm

Its all over the news here about that. Is there any way of getting a submersible down there to retrieve the two unfortunate divers or is it too difficult to access?

I don't know about how accessible cave is. It is way inland, so transporting the submersible could be a problem. I've been wondering about the submersible myself. If you want to check out more, the cave is Boesmansgat, sometimes it is called Bushmansgat. The town closest to it is Kuruman.

Here is the full report on what happened in this tragic tale. Both bodies are recovered.

http://www.cdnn.info/news/industry/i050125.html

http://www.iantd.co.za/home.html

Scroll down to nearly at the bottom of the page for some opinion from medical doctors about what happened.

Thanks so much for posting that, that was incredibly indepth.

I recall seeing a movie on deep diving some years back called "The Big Blue" and found it fascinating that people can do that but also saddened when those few who die doing it. snor: