What it takes to cave dive

Cave divers Deighton Parris and Tom Taylor take a photo before a dive in the cave called Mayan Blue in Mexico.
Cave divers Deighton Parris and Tom Taylor take a photo before a dive in the cave called Mayan Blue in Mexico.

DEIGHTON PARRIS has one piece of advice for any Trini caught in a cave and that is to do exactly what the Thai children and their coach did “just stay where you are.”

“If you are not trained to go through a cave environment, it would probably kill you,” Parris said.

Parris, 53, has been cave diving since he was 41, having been certified to cave dive in 2005. Before that, he has been scuba diving since the mid-90s.

Media reports state that the 12 boys and their coach of the youth football team the Wild Boars were trapped in the Tham Luang cave.

A July 14 BBC article said, “The team and their young coach were ready to celebrate teammate Peerapat “Night” Sompiangjai birthday.

“They had often ventured deep into Tham Luang, sometimes as far as 8km, for initiation rites where they would write the names of new team members on a cave wall.

“In high spirits they clambered into the cave with just their torches. They didn’t need much else- after all, they were only planning to be there for an hour,” the article said.

But soon the cave began the flood and the group had to travel deep into the cave which saw them trapped in there for 18 days. The children first became trapped in the cave on June 23.

Parris has been cave diving for about 12 years with 350 plus cave dives under his belt in places like Mexico and the Bahamas.

He got into cave diving, he said, “kind of by accident.”

His interest in cave diving began when he did a “Cenote dive, which is basically called a cavern dive.”

Parris wants people to know that there is difference between cave and cavern diving.

The difference being that when a cavern dive is done “you can always see daylight” but “cave diving means that you cannot see daylight any more.”

He added while there are lots of cave systems in the world the Mexico ones are particularly attractive to cave divers “because they are relatively shallow.”

“The caves in the Bahamas start form right about 25 metres. There are cave dives in Mexico that are five metres deep. Not all of them. Some get into the 20/30 metre range, in general shallow is good for cave divers because you can stay a bit longer,” he said.

For the experienced cave diver a number of things went wrong on with the Thai children and their coach, the first being entering a cave which, when it rains, gets flooded.

Parris said the caves he dives in are always flooded so there is no surprise flooding.

“They are always underwater. It does not matter what time of year, hurricanes, it does not matter. They are always flooded. It is like being underwater,” he said.

It is very easy to get disoriented, Parris said. In most cave systems, even the bubbles coming off of your regulator, when they go up to the ceiling, knock off silt, he added.

It is easy to get screwed over, he said, inside of a cave. “So you can easily swim in and ‘hey I can see everything’ but as your bubbles go up and hit the roof, silt comes down and when you turn around there is a black cloud of silt that you can’t see through and you can’t get back out.”

Experienced cave divers know that coming out of a cave means that “you pretty much have to feel your way out.”

“When I was trained, they trained us to feel our way out,” he said. Parris was trained in Mexico by cave diver Kate Lewis.

To be a cave diver, for the particular organisation, Parris had “a minimum of 12 dives and spent at least 16 hours in a cave underwater.

He said all sorts of drills were done where they took their masks off so they could not see and had to feel their way back to the entrance.

For the unfamiliar, Parris suggests thinking of a cave like downtown Port of Spain where you are just dropped off on a street somewhere and told “you need to find your way to the lighthouse” and “you cannot talk to anybody.”

He added, “You just have to look at signs and try to figure it out. You are breathing off of a scuba tank so you have an hour and you have no idea what direction to go or anything else.”

Caves, he said, were exactly like downtown Port of Spain but bigger with cave systems in places like Mexico “hundreds and hundreds of miles long.”

In his time cave diving, Parris said, he has had two ‘oh my gosh’ moments. “Once I squeezed through a hole and when I came back, I could not figure out how I got through in the first place. It took me five minutes to undo that one.”

He added that there are five rules in cave diving. First, have a continuous guideline to the surface which means running a nylon string from when you start to dive all the way in so they can all follow it back out.

“It is like breadcrumbs because there is no way to just...it is not like walking...oh there’s a building here and there’s a building there...caves don’t look like that so we literally follow a string called the guideline.”

The second rule is “if you’re going with 3000 psi of air, the rule of thirds. You use a third of your air in and you use a third of your air out so when get back to the surface, you should still have a thousand pounds of air. Why? Because if something goes wrong and you have to figure it out those thousand pounds of air is to figure it out.”

Thirdly, have at least three lights because if one goes, you have another one.

Fourthly, have a minimum of two scuba tanks because if “one ruptures or something goes wrong with it and the tank is empty, you’re in trouble if you don’t have another one, you’re going to die.”

But critically, “If you’re going to go cave diving make sure you are properly trained.”

He also wanted TT to know that cave divers use air tanks. While international media said the divers use oxygen tanks; largely experienced divers use oxygen tanks. Experienced divers, he said, use oxygen tanks when they do decompression diving. “If someone tried to dive with pure oxygen once they got past 21 feet, their body would go into convulsions and they would drown. They would lose control of their muscles.”

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