Dave Not Coming Back | FULL DOCUMENTARY

Who’s here because of the Maldives diver’s fate?

If I'm Deon's family, I am telling Dave and his team not to go for the body. It's not worth risking lives for a dead body. If Dave still wanted to go down then I'd tell him not to do it for us or anyone else, only himself.

44:46 - "The safest thing that a diver can do on a dive, is not dive"

This a really sad story, but beautifully told ❤ Rest in peace Dave

incredible that it took so little for it all to go so wrong. thanks for this documentary

Even in death Dave did what he said he would do and that was to bring Dion home to his family 😔

Dave was a bit of an odd character. He's a bit before my time, but I know people who knew him, and his story is pretty odd. Most advanced technical divers have been diving for decades, I'm 49 and have been diving since I was 16, and it was 10 years before I got into any kind of tech diving, 16 before I got into caving. But Dave started diving late and rapidly advanced into tech diving and on to caving just in a few years. He had some kind of natural aptitude for it and it seemingly was just right for him, and he kept successfully pushing the boundaries. However, if you're an advanced diver, specifically a cave diver, you know that the very idea of what he tried to do is extreme, many would say foolish. I've never been as deep as Boesmansgat, but I have been on a few very deep dives, and when you get to depths like those, you don't think about pulling off any sort of advanced maneuvers. Most depth records are just touching the target depth and then immediately turn around, for several reasons. First of all, gas consumption, where you burn through gas at shocking rates. Even with a rebreather this can become an issue. And the related issue is decompression, where every breath you take at such a depth earns you 20 minutes of additional deco. Then there's the factor of the breathing loop mixture when diving with a rebreather: briefly, when breathing normally, or using an open loop diving system, you inhale gas - air if at the surface - and exhale. The exhale gas is slightly lower in oxygen content and slightly higher in CO2 content than what you inhaled, but there's plenty of oxygen left in it that you, on an open system, just expel into the water as bubbles and it's wasted. With a rebreather, the gas goes through a CO2 scrubber that removes the CO2, and then you inhale it again, and once the Oxygen level gets to low, more is added. This ensures that you use the oxygen you're bringing much more efficiently, and thus you can stay at depth longer and don't have to carry as much gas with you. However, when you're diving deeper, the gas mixture of surface air containing 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen and 1% other gasses doesn't work; the pressure makes for several effects, for example does nitrogen become narcotic, and oxygen can become toxic if the concentration is unaltered. So instead of normal air, we breathe a mixture of oxygen, nitrogen and helium, and balancing those for the depth you're going to and the length of the dive is a huge part of the skill that goes into technical diving. And as we get really deep, there's no optimal mixture that makes us function just as well as we do at the surface; there will be some level of narcotic effect, and the oxygen concentration is optimized for balanced breathing. So when on a rebreather, basically the scrubber, the distribution system, the breathing tube and your lungs for a closed system filled with a finely balanced mixture to keep you alive. However, if you start doing physical work, increasing your breathing rate and changing the composition of what your body expels from the lungs, this can cause this balance to break. So, trying to perform any sort of challenging task at that depth, on a rebreather seems extremely risky. Now, at the surface, or at shallow depth, something like getting a body into a bag isn't that difficult. But at 280+ meters, Dave would have been narced to the point where it would feel like having had just come home from a very wet night out, messing up both his coordination, ability to reason, and sense of self preservation. Add to this the fact that the body didn't behave like he expected as it was buoyant and started to float, and this became to much for his diminished reasoning abilities at that point: Of course he should have just given up, and the body would have floated up by itself, but when you're in that state of mind, you can't think, you just do what you planned, which was "get the body in the bag". Then you hear him starting to breathe more rapidly and heavily, and at that point it's probably already over, this upsets the mixture which further deteriorates the reasoning abilities, and it rapidly takes away the physical abilities as well. To me, it seems like Dave had gotten a bit to used to always succeeding when pushing the limits of his diving. Yes, he had the skillset to be able to pull off the recovery, but the plan called for nothing going wrong, which is a bad way of planning when dealing with something so dangerous as diving at those depths. But of course, most extreme records have been set by people who have been willing to risk their lives to a plan that relies on everything going as planned, which is probably why I will never be a record holder in anything. My background as a military leader has instead drilled into me that plans never really hold up to contact with the enemy, so you should always plan for the plan to fail.

Wow even with Dave dead he still was able to bring the dead guy back

I lost my brother cave diving in 1973. Second recorded death in the state of Florida for cave diving. They looked for five days and couldn’t find his body. My dad stopped them from looking essentially told them we’ve had enough deaths. We need to stop now. Later he said he wish you told him to stop earlier. Thank God nobody else died. Three of the six people on that rescue team all died of cave diving the subsequent years.

Watching this I felt so grateful to be sitting on my living room couch

I'm blown away by the commitment. I'm also frustrated that a man lost his life and another was seriously injured. This is a great lesson.

Thank you, Don, for sharing this information with us. Thank you to all who participated in the making of this video. Cheers and Tears from Michael. Australia.

We are one weird species of ape.

Decompressing for 12 hours! How bored would you get, that would drive me mad

What a great man kept his word even though it cost him his life rest in peace

I have mad respect for Don Shirley. Seems like someone everyone looks forward to diving with, working with, and just hanging out with. Him and his wife have a YouTube channel, called "The Shirleys" if anyone is interested in keeping up with them.

Notice how he says the word “ attempt” around 34 minutes into the video…. This man knew the risks and still tried for this family. Rip Dave

I mean it seemed so difficult to do. The whole bag scenario having to unclip those snaps, take off the guys gear, get the body in the bag, all while the body the line and the gear are floating all over the place and don’t forget to mention doing all this while in complete darkness except for a little light u have that is also floating all over the place

Don is one tough SOB.. just an amazing man to fight for his life

Snorkeling is deep enough for me😂