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Cave Diving - History

The beginning

Jacques-Yves Cousteau, co-inventor of the first SCUBA equipment, was both the world's first SCUBA diver and the world's first cave diver. SCUBA diving in all its forms, including cave diving, has advanced in earnest since he introduced the Aqua-Lung in 1943.

US history

Sheck Exley was a pioneering cave diver who first explored many Florida underwater cave systems, and many other underwater cave systems throughout the US and the world.

Cave Diver Fatality

Navy Lieutenant Murray Anderson was twenty-eight years of age, a resident of Fort Valley, Georgia. His experience as a diver amounted to 200 hours of underwater exploration.  Anderson died in May 1955 while exploring an underwater cave in Radium Springs, Georgia. The cavern was previously uncharted. An electronics technician, Donald R. Gerue, was assisting the Lieutenant in the cavern dives. Gerue was from Pontiac, Michigan and was associated with a Naval Reserve unit.  Anderson and Gerue began exploring the "silt-filled maze" around 6:30 P.M. on May 14. They used aqualungs. The two men discovered the cavern a distance of seventy feet below the surface. It is one of many which form an intricate honeycomb at Radium Springs. Mr. Gerue said that visibility was only six inches, even with the use of powerful lamps.  Lieutenant Anderson was married and the father of two small children.  Divers found his body near a guide rope, which would have led to safety for him. Four US Navy diving experts from Charleston, South Carolina spent the night of May 15 searching in darkness prior to locating him. A coroner's jury was preparing to investigate Anderson's death.

The 1970s

In the 1970s cave diving greatly increased in popularity among divers in the United States. However, there were very few experienced cave divers and almost no formal classes to handle the surge in interest. The result was a large number of divers trying to cave dive without any formal training, which resulted in more than 100 fatalities over the course of the decade (including several experienced open water SCUBA instructors). The state of Florida was close to banning SCUBA diving around the cave entrances. The cave diving organizations responded to the problem by creating training programs and certifying instructors, in addition to other measures to try to prevent these fatalities: posting the signs, no-lights rules, and other enforcement.

The 1980s onward

Prevention measures to reduce diver fatalities have been greatly successful, and today it is rare for an untrained diver to die in an underwater cave, despite later surges in popularity in the 80s and 90s.

The 1980s saw a few refinements to the equipment used for cave diving, most importantly better lights and smaller batteries. In the 1990s equipment configurations became a little more standard than they had been in the past, due mostly to the WKPP's adaptation and popularization of the Hogarthian rig, a concept credited to Bill "Hogarth" Main.

Many sites today have strict rules about diving within one's level of training and requiring proof of that level, more so than most recreational diving sites elsewhere in the country.

Today, the cave community is most focused on training, exploration, public awareness, and conservation. Different organizations place different emphasis on these priorities.

UK history

The Cave Diving Group (CDG) was established informally in the United Kingdom in 1935 to organize training and equipment for the exploration of flooded caves in the Mendip hills of Somerset. The first dive was made by Jack Sheppard on 4th October 1936 using a home-made drysuit surface fed from a modified bicycle pump, which allowed Sheppard to pass Sump 1 of Swildon's Cave. Swildon's is an upstream feeder to the Wookey Hole resurgence system. The difficulty of access to the sump in Swildon's prompted operations to move to the resurgence, and the larger cave there allowed use of conventional "hard hat" equipment which was secured from the Siebe Gorman company. The left photograph on the standard diving dress page will give some indication of the scale of operations this entailed. In UK cave diving, the term "Sherpa" is used without a drop of irony for the people who carry the diver's gear, and before the development of SCUBA equipment such undertakings could be monumental operations.  Diving in the spacious third chamber of Wookey Hole led to a rapid series of advances, each of which was dignified by being given a successive number, until an air surface was reached at what is now known as "Chamber 9." Some of these dives were broadcast live on BBC radio, which must have been a quite surreal experience for both diver and audience.  (Normal practice in UK caving is to number sumps and sections of open cave, not exploration limits, but Wookey is a special case. At the time of writing, Wookey is still at limit 25 in the eighth sump. At the other end of the system, Swildons has been pushed to sump 12 and is still giving people "interesting times.")  It is also worth noting that one of the front-line divers in these early operations was a woman, Penelope Powell ('Mossy'), which must have created quite a lot of comment at the time.  The number of sites where standard diving dress could be used is clearly limited and there was little further progress before the outbreak of World War II reduced the caving community considerably. However, the rapid development of underwater warfare through the war made a lot of surplus equipment available. The CDG re-formed in 1946 and progress was rapid. Typical equipment at this time was a frogman rubber diving suit for insulation (water temperature in the UK is typically 4°C), an oxygen diving cylinder, soda lime absorbent canister and counter-lung comprising a rebreather air system and an "AFLOLAUN". That's "Apparatus For Laying Out Line And Underwater Navigation", a god-awful contraption of lights, line-reel, compass, notebook (for the survey), batteries, and more. Progress was typically by "bottom walking", as this was considered less dangerous than swimming (note the absence of buoyancy controls). The use of oxygen put a depth limit on the dive, which was considerably mitigated by the extended dive duration. This was the normal diving equipment and methods until approximately 1960 when Mike Wooding (and others) developed new techniques using wetsuits (which provide both insulation and buoyancy compensation), twin open-circuit SCUBA air systems, helmet-mounted lights and free-swimming with fins. The increasing capacity and pressure rating of air bottles also extended dive durations.

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Reference material for this scuba diving related informational article: wikipedia – the free online encyclopedia, scuba diving category

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