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R/£ Video shows how diver died
January 13, 2005 Edition 2
Jonathan Ancer and Gill Gifford
Grim retrieved video footage shows diver Dave Shaw, who died on a mission to recover the body of a fellow diver, stopped moving and breathing exactly 26 minutes into the dive.
Shaw's last minutes in the Boesmansgat cave, near Danielskuil in the Northern Cape, were captured by a helmet-mounted camera he had been wearing during his final dive.
The remains of 20-year-old Deon Dreyer and of Shaw were brought to the surface yesterday - with the camera.
Gordon Hiles, a TV cameraman and scuba diver, who was filming the dive mission for a documentary and who designed the camera Shaw was wearing, today described the retrieved footage.
"The way we had the camera set up shows everything in front of Dave as well as all his hand movements," Hiles explained.
The film shows Shaw entering the water at 6.14am on Saturday and then submerging in the cave depths.
"He gets to the bottom and moves towards Deon's body and pulls out the specially made bodybag.
"He goes through the activity of getting the bag around the body.
There's a bit of silt that blocks the view for a while, then you see him rotating the body and realising (Dreyer's) tanks are not jammed (in the bottom of the cave), they're loose.
"So he attempts to get the bag over the tanks as well. Then at that point there's no more activity and then Dave goes back to the shot line (the main rope to the surface) to start his ascent," Hiles said.
"But then exactly 26 minutes into the dive all activity stops and then his breathing as well. Nothing specific shows what kind of problem he was having, but the footage will be reviewed by various experts to try and determine exactly what is going on."
Experts will examine Shaw's retrieved equipment.
Diver Peter Herbst, one of the two divers who recovered the bodies with police diver assistance yesterday, also saw the video footage.
He said: "On the tape you can hear Dave breathing. Harder and harder and harder. Then there's silence. It's much too soon to say exactly what went wrong but, from the bit of footage I've just seen, it appears that Dave was working too hard.
"At first it looks like everything was going fine. He'd got to the body and he was working. From the footage it appears that Dave's breathing then started to get worse and worse.
"It looks as if he ran out of time. It looks like he tried to give up and get out, but he got entangled in the cave line (a side rope attached to the main line).
"He kept trying to cut the line, but he couldn't. He was breathing faster and faster."
Yesterday the bodies floated up together on a line left underwater in October after Shaw found the body of Dreyer, who died in the cave 10 years ago.
The bodies were found at a depth of 20m in the freshwater cave.
Shaw was stuck against the roof and Dreyer's remains were dangling below, suspended by the entangled cave line.
They were dislodged during the bid by Herbst and Petrus Roux, assisted by police divers, to recover the dive tanks attached to the shot line, which had been left in the cave after Saturday's bid by Shaw to recover Dreyer's body.
Shaw discovered Dreyer's body in October and then told Dreyer's parents that he would try his best to retrieve the body - and bring closure after their son's death a decade ago.
At the time Shaw attached Dreyer's body to a cave line so that it could be found again.
The plan was for Shaw, a 50-year-old Australian pilot and ace cave diver, to roll a body bag over Dreyer, up to his waist.
He would then cut him free from his tanks, and roll the body bag over Dreyer's head.
Shaw would have had five minutes to do this before coming up to meet his back-up, Don Shirley, who was waiting for him at 220m.
But Shaw never arrived.
Shirley, who nearly lost his own life in the fatal bid to recover Dreyer's body, said last night: "He died a noble death, if there is such a thing. He tried his best."
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