Dive-Monster Rhoody

In Part 4 of Raising the Dead it is all about the last days before the “Big Dive”. The last words of Dave Shaw to his wife; the arrival in South Africa, the preparation at Bushmans hole and the last briefing with his crew…. with words which became dramatically true.

Raising the Dead - Part 4

IN NOVEMBER 2004, back home in his apartment in Hong Kong, Shaw was in almost daily e-mail and phone contact with Shirley. The Big Dive, as they started to call it, was set for early January, and one of the most elusive questions was the condition of Deon’s body. The forensics experts they consulted weren’t sure but guessed the corpse would be mostly bone. Shaw decided he’d better try to get it into a body bag for the trip to the surface or risk having it fall apart. Together with Ann, he designed a silk bag with drawstrings, long enough to fit over Deon’s fins.

Ann, a 49-year-old deputy head principal at Hong Kong’s German Swiss International School, was nervous about the dangers her husband faced. “I want someone to ring me as soon as you are on your way up,” she insisted. Shaw agreed but gave Ann the impression the dive would be taking place a day later than scheduled. That way, he could just call her when he was back on the surface and say, “Don’t worry. It’s all over and I’m fine.” If he wasn’t fine, he gently told Ann, he would arrange to have someone call Michael Vickers, their minister at Hong Kong’s Anglican Resurrection Church.

On the evening of Saturday, January 1, Ann made the 45-minute drive to Hong Kong’s Chep Lap Kok airport with 250 pounds of dive gear in her car. Shaw had been flying that day, and she met him at the Cathay Pacific offices and drove him to the departure area for his flight to South Africa. They sat together in a coffee bar. “You’re not crying, are you?” he asked. “No,” Ann replied bravely. Shaw got up to leave for his flight. He didn’t say, “I love you.” He didn’t need to. She knew.

Shaw arrived in Johannesburg six days before the dive. His first stop was Komati Springs, where he practiced getting a body into the bag underwater, with Shirley playing the part of Deon’s corpse. At 66 feet, it went smoothly, taking Shaw only a couple of minutes. A day later, he and Shirley drove to Mount Carmel, where seven South African rebreather divers, handpicked by Shirley, and a police team from Cape Town and Pretoria (since there was a dead body involved) were assembling. The dive would go off on the coming Saturday, January 8, and Shirley’s dive plan was like an underwater symphony. Shaw was looking at a dive that would last roughly 12 hours, and would hit the water around 6 a.m. All the other divers would key off Shaw’s dive time and head for specific target depths either to help look after Shaw or pass Deon’s body to the surface. The first diver Shaw would meet on the way back up was Shirley, at 725 feet. He would hand the body bag over, and, if things went well, Deon would be out of the water about 80 minutes after Shaw’s dive had started.

Shirley had done everything in his power to minimize the risks. He planned to have 35 backup cylinders of gas in the water—enough so that he, Shaw, and even some support divers could survive total rebreather failure. He arranged for a rope-and-sling system to be set up that could haul a diver on a stretcher up the cliffs of the hole to a recompression chamber that the police trucked in. To cope with any medical emergencies, Shirley had recruited a doctor—Jack Meintjies, a specialist in diving physiology at the University of Stellenbosch, outside Cape Town—to be on hand. When Meintjies realized that up to nine divers would be in the water, and learned the depths they would be going to, he almost backed out. “There were too many potential bodies. You are dealing with multiple divers going deep, and that’s serious,” Meintjies says.

Shaw, for one, was quietly confident. At Mount Carmel, he stressed repeatedly that the effort was an “attempted” body recovery. “The dive is huge,” he told a collection of reporters and cameramen gathered a day before the dive. “No one has ever attempted anything even vaguely approximating a body recovery from these sorts of depths.” He also talked about his motivation with the team. “I think what you are doing for the Dreyers is great,” said Peter “Big B” Herbst, a 42-year-old dive instructor and the owner of Reef Divers, a dive shop and tour operator in Pretoria. Shaw looked at him, winked, and said, “Face it, B, we’re doing this for the adventure of it.”

Shaw did have one wrinkle to sort out. He had partnered up with South African documentary filmmaker Gordon Hiles to chronicle the recovery of Deon. Hiles had designed an underwater camera housing for a lightweight, low-light Sony HC20 Handy- cam and attached it to a Petzl climbing helmet. Shaw was not used to wearing a helmet. He liked to carry a high-intensity light on the back of his hand, and if he needed both hands underwater, Shaw would normally sling the light and cable around his neck so it wouldn’t snag on anything. The helmet cam would make it hard to do that. Shaw tried the device in the swimming pool at Mount Carmel and decided he was comfortable with the design and weight. He told Hiles that, instead of slinging his light around his neck, he would occasionally set it out to the side.

Three days before the dive, Shaw carried the camera on an acclimatization dive to 500 feet. It came out in perfect running order. “A very impressive bit of gear,” Shaw said to Hiles. “I’m sure you’ll be impressed with my video footage as well.” Everyone laughed.

The divers gathered for one last briefing on Friday. It was a warm, beautiful evening, and Shaw had some final points to make. “The most important person on this dive is you. If you have a problem, deal with your problem and forget about me,” he told the team. “It’s better to have one person dead than two.” He had a separate, private conversation with Shirley, who had upgraded his rebreather for the dive with an oil-filled Hammerhead controller so he could get all the way to the bottom of Bushman’s if he had to. Shirley had asked his friend, “If you have problems, do you want me to come down?”

Shaw considered the question and answered, “Yes, but only come down if I signal.”

Shirley and Shaw had one last message for the gathered team. “If Dave doesn’t make it, if I don’t make it, we stay there,” said Shirley. “That’s the end of the story. We don’t want to be recovered.”

Next Part will cover the “BIG Dive” of Dave Shawn down to 271 Meters to rais the dead body of Deon Dreyer… Hold your breath…

Rhoody

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Just finished another great week of diving and teaching. While my friends in Luzon complained about bad weather, it couldn’t be much better here in Dumaguete.  Blue Sky, flat water and great visibility in the whole area.

Mike from the Adventure Dive Shop called me up last Sunday to teach some classes for him so I started Linda from Australia and Nicky from England to teach them the Open Water course.

The whole week together was just a blast and I had so much fun with that lovely couple. They were well prepared and paid attention to everything. I am sure the great conditions and the turtles on their very first open water dive was also encouraging them to run through the theory and skills with flying colors.

Midweek Dave from England joined them to do a refresher after some years of being out of the water. The week ended with a great trip to Apo Island. We were guided by some dolphins on our way to Apo Island, were the two finished their last course dive at chapel point, a nice wall with wonderful coral-gardens on top to do the safety stop.

So it was time for the first real fun-dive. I decided to go with them on a drift-dive, as they I was sure they are confident in the water and stay close to me. When we came to the huge school of Jackfish, I grasped both at the tank-valve and pulled them into the middle of thousands of Mamsa (Local term for Jackfish). Nose in the current and hard fining we spend a couple of minutes in the middle of these beautiful creatures.

The third dive on Rock Point was relaxing and just before we went on the boat to head back to Dauin, a turtle passed and waved us bye-bye.

Well, back at Mikes Diveshop we finished the paperwork and I signed the log-books. Here is where things started to become a bit weird.  I am really not sure what made Linda and Nicky drawing that stuff in their Log-book, but I guess they will have to answer this question each time they enter a Diveshop…

Hope you two guys have a great time in Palawan…. and don’t forget body position and exhaling are the secrets of diving… Thanks for diving with me… I had a great week with you two

Cheers

Rhoody

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This is the 3rd part of raising the dead. I want to mention again that it is a copy-paste. In this part you can read where Dave Shaw comes from and how he got into extreme-diving. When he met Don Shirley and how they became partners on numerous adventures.

Raising the dead - part3

IF RECOVERING DEON from the bottom of Bushman’s Hole was a feat of extraordinary ambition and danger, combining extreme depth with demanding work, Shaw and Shirley were just the guys to pull it off. On his first dive, in 1999, with his then-17-year-old son, Steven, in the Philippines, Shaw had found a sport whose challenges he couldn’t resist. He quickly pushed past the standard reef tours and went wreck diving. Soon enough he discovered the caves, and he was hooked.

As an airline pilot, Shaw could dive all over the world—in Asia, the United States, Mexico, and South Africa. He was born in the small town of Katanning, in Western Australia, and from the age of three, when he built his first toy aircraft out of cardboard, Shaw knew he wanted to fly. By the time he was 18, in 1973, he was working as a crop duster. That same year he met the Melbourne-raised Ann Broughton at a youth camp in Perth. He took her up in an airplane on their first date, and 20  months later they were married. In 1981, Shaw became a missionary pilot, moving with Ann to Papua New Guinea, where Steven was born. A daughter, Lisa, followed in 1983, and the Shaws relocated briefly to Tanzania before moving to New South Wales, Australia, where eventually Shaw began flying corporate jets. In 1989, he settled in with Cathay Pacific, moving his family to Hong Kong.

Shaw loved to poke around deep underwater, so he was committed to the closed-circuit rebreather for its remarkable efficiency and the warm, moist gas recycling produces. The oxygen supply is automatically monitored and adjusted by a digital controller strapped to a forearm, and pretty much the only oxygen consumed is that which the diver metabolizes. In contrast, divers using traditional open-circuit scuba (the majority of divers today) inhale ice-cold mixes and exhale huge volumes of gas into the water. (Rebreather divers like to call them “bubble blowers.”) As a result, extreme open-circuit divers often need a dozen or more gas cylinders, constantly court hypothermia, and, without automatic control of their oxygen levels, end up breathing—and absorbing—more helium and nitrogen, running up a greater decompression tab. When Nuno Gomes went to the bottom of Bushman’s Hole on open circuit in 1996, he didn’t hang around at all, used more than 54,000 liters of gas, and had to spend almost 12 hours in the water. When Shaw went to the bottom on his rebreather, he tooled around exploring, used only 5,800 liters of gas, and got back to the surface in nine hours and 40 minutes.

The chief drawbacks to rebreathers are that they are expensive (upwards of $5,000), require the diver to constantly monitor the digital controller settings (open-circuit divers just have to breathe), and, until Shaw came along, had not been proved at great depths. But Shaw was convinced that rebreathers were the future of diving. In 2003, he purchased a rare Mk15.5 rebreather, developed by the U.S. Navy for deep submarine evacuation, and modified it with a Hammerhead controller that he filled with paraffin oil, as a sort of internal shock absorber that would help the components withstand intense pressures. Then he set about diving his custom rig to successively greater depths.

Don Shirley

Don Shirley, an understated man with steel-frame glasses and a scraggly beard, was a kindred spirit. He grew up in Surrey, England, and spent 22 years as an electronics specialist in the British Army, which took him through the Falklands War and to the Persian Gulf. He dived every spare minute he had, specializing in deep wrecks off the coast of Britain. In 1997, he retired from the army and moved to South Africa, looking to start a new life as a technical-diving trainer in an exotic English-speaking land. He and a partner set up the South African franchise of IANTD, alongside a deep, flooded asbestos mine in the beautiful grassy hills a couple hundred miles east of Johannesburg. He dubbed the spot Komati Springs, spent hundreds of hours a year in the water, teaching technical and cave diving, and developed the mine, with its deep shafts, into a premier dive site. In 2003, he married Andre Truter, a feisty 38-year-old Afrikaner with short brown hair and a sly smile. Together they live in a thatch-roofed bungalow, surrounded by a pack of rambunctious dogs with names like Sheck and Argon.

In the fall of 2002, a bearded man with an Australian twang appeared at Shirley’s dive center. “Hi, I’m Dave Shaw,” the man said. “Do you mind if I go dive your hole?” Shirley sized up the bluff Aussie and liked what he saw. Soon Shaw was flying in regularly to dive, and Shirley went with him whenever he had time. In October 2003, at Komati Springs, Shaw set a rebreather cave record of 597 feet, with Shirley diving backup. Two days later, Shirley, with Shaw just behind him, became the first diver to reach the very end of the mine’s deepest shaft, at 610 feet. Shaw and Shirley had logged more than a hundred hours underwater together in the nearly two and a half years they’d known each other. “It was stunning being in the water with Dave, very relaxed,” Shirley says.

Shirley introduced Shaw to the enticing depths of Bushman’s in June 2004. Shaw turned up with his modified Mk15.5 and dived it to 725 feet, another world record for a closed-circuit rebreather in a cave. His DUI drysuit and Thinsulate underwear kept him warm. He peed happily into the water via a valve in his drysuit that had a catheter running to a condom (informally known as “the Urinator”), and topped up, intermittently pulling his regulator out of his mouth, on candy bars and water lowered in a string bag at shallow decompression stops. He fell in love with the place.

The Next part will cover the preperation to the dive… so stay tuned…

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As a Scuba Diving Instructor (or to be exact PADI-MSDT), I can teach up to Dive-Master or Master Scuba Diver at non professional Level.

I am just a little scared that my Dive – Association will include the trainings aid below as a requirement in the Rescue/EFR course. They are known to throw things on the market which are pretty useless, for me even sometimes too hard, to remember the Acronym of that thingies. Be honest, who in the wide wide world of Scuba Diving needs a eMLRDP. If you don’t know what an eMLRDP is, just forget it right away and never ever think about it again, unless you want to become a Dive-Master, Scuba Diving instructor or higher.

The trainings aid I am talking about here is supposed to help against drowning.  Hmm… If I read the original description I doubt that it works that way.

My theory is that: If you blow enough smoke, the drowned victim get’s so buoyant, that he pops up to the surface like a fully inflated Surface Marker Buoy.

Nevertheless, my decision is done. If my scuba dive association includes THAT trainings Aid in the Rescue or EFR course, I stop my membership and make a crossover to another agency…  at least if I need to demonstrate more than the smoking part … haha.

Having said that, I know some Dive Shop Manger and Course Directors in Puerto Galera and Dumaguete who are used to stick with their head up to the shoulders in the rectum of their boss to search for some Brownie Points since years anyway…

I am sure some of the Dive Center Staff in Puerto Galera and Dumaguete will love that little toy… diba Mr. P.M ???

Have a great weekend and cheers

Rhoody

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Another wake up call to our Filipino people…?

There is  a lot of time I’m asking why  Filipino are like that…

“like what?…..” Filipino are …..?????????

Yes.. I cant say…. “why” because I am also Filipina but still in the thinking stage why some Filipinos  love the show wowowee, and for sure not only here in the Philippines, some of our Filipino people are in other country…they are  called TFC subscriber.. they’re  subscribe in a channel that they can watch the Television programs  here in the Philippines ,while they are out of the country and far from their families….

I experience watching this show wowowee on TV… its nice and sounds real…. Real as some of the contestant   tell their stories how life is difficult …  “again  sounds so much Drama diba?” but that’s Filipino, its so hard for most of them to get apart from  their Family some of them are also Filipino workers in other counties….  As a Filipino, and like everybody else suffer of being lonely, alone and nobody to tell or  can voice out their problems, being home sick, and  the feelings how that its hard to get apart from your love one.

Thought watching this program they can see some Filipinos life and they can relate and see their self and similarities of life experience… … plus a change that they can see their relatives on TV performing witch not unusual to them, and show their talents.. and some of them they can really perform as they are not performer or its not their job in real life….. plus when the contestant speaking their dialect from witch province they from…. Its really sounds real and not descript but real person real life…   then trough this showing this talents on one of the games in this wowowee called  “ welie of fortune “  its bring them to smile and happiness same as  for the audience too..and for those families aboard its gives them  encouragement to work hard abroad and stay still strong and not being lonely or home sick…

This wowowee afternoon program on Filipino channel is now the daily rotten and part of everyday living…. And even its has the record of having 71 people died and 800 were hurt and injured  according to the news report I’ve watch  and article I’ve read in other website,about the  celebration of Wowowee’s first anniversary  instead of happiness  they speck it became a traumatic tragedy for the family of those who died and got hurt on the stampede out side the ultra the place where they will  celebrates their first anniversary….

I also watch  sometimes this  afternoon show,….But today, my attention was caught by Wowowee after  I watch again the news about  this tragedy  its  long time ago. But its still give pain and disappointment and ask my self  ” why its happen”  I think its happen last  February 4 2006….. It just saddens me that the lack of discipline among some Filipinos could be the reason of other peoples death and  besides the fact that they could already see the people getting hurt and worst, grasping for breath, they are still pushing each other just to make it inside just to enter and be a contestant in this show.. its sad…. And ….

That  is way  more disgusting, and  because of puberty  I can’t think of any other word to describe  this,it many Filipinos try their luck and hope that they can get money or prizes from this show… We could not blame the people who went there in the first anniversary  of wowowee in the hope of winning cash prizes even dough some of them went there just to have fun… but this all torn in to opposite happened.  This should be a wake up call not only for the government, but also to every Filipino, that we should do something to stop poverty and learn the meaning of word  “discipline”. But I know I cant blame anybody as I also can’t do anything to help and improve my self in the way I want for my self…  on other hand  and  after that tragedy  couple of years  ago its still not close case or unfinished case… .

But ,at the present, this show   wowowee make  some people  happy and give  good prizes from the games in this show. This tragic event  was the pass and I wish not to happen again in any event or programs for the futures… this shows wowowwee  would be the show of Filipino showing that filipino are strong and can fight for every tragedy comes in their lifes…. And even its really ,indeed many poor Filipino families here in this country.

We better think and do something for our self “ Or we could help in our own little way “ AND  we give our hearty , heavenly wish and  pray  for those who died and get hurt and for their families as well.

We make a new good way… and  we make many  reasons  why to be proud as a Filipino…..

Be strong and smart  with a  word “discipline” in our heart and daily life as a  Filipino…

Rechel

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I don’t know if it is political correct to make a website for an 8 year old girl with the website address www.picture-monster.com, but to be honest, I absolutely don’t care. I bought this domain and weather Daisy will use it for her diary, it is mine and I would have other ideas with it if she is losing interest (what I definitely don’t believe)

The name picture monster comes from my friend Kim, also known as the Beermonster when meeting Daisy a long time ago while she was taking hundreds of pictures about just everything and thousand more of herself… of course she is Filipina…

The primary reason why I bought the domain is simple. I want to introduce her early to work with a computer, starting with simple tasks like writing small stuff in Word, learning how to “play” around with pictures (color management, cropping, and and and) … just to make her familiar with the way things are working; to teach her how to write things (yeah I know I am not the best in it, but still about 17,63 times better than the crap some people try to teach about computer at local education facilities to students)

For the moment she writes some stuff and I will upload it in her diary. In a few weeks I will teach her how to do that by herself. Mama and I are controlling it but do not take any influence on her style to write and express herself.

If she stays interested I am sure that it will be a great diary when she looks back in a few years. Additional I am thinking to include some small advertising on the page. Each single centavo it would earn goes into a bank account where Daisy has access when she is 18.  I do believe that this fund can fulfill quite some of her dreams then in 9 years, when she reaches that age.

Daisy just started 1 week ago it takes her a time to find all the letters on a keyboard and the right words, but it is great to watch her enthusiasm. For sure much better and more useful than watching Wowowee and all that useless waste of time on TV… ooops I forgot, we don’t have a TV at home anyway ?

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