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Palmer - accomplished explorer, cave diving for years, ran
epeditions, wrote two books, nice guy , British, got mixed up with
idiots and died deep on air diving with a collection of strokes.
Parker - long time cave diving explorer , friend and team member of
Palmer's, British, died diving deep on air with stroke rig.
Exley - accomplished long time cave explorer, great guy, always
ready to play, died trying to set deep record with a stroke.
McFaden - cartographer for the WKPP, a surveyor for the State of
Florida, died diving deep on air , almost killed diver who went to look
for him.
These people were considered accomlished, experienced divers, and
they were killed diving narcotic mixes combined with other stupid
things. Exley dropped to 400 feet on air before switching to trimix for
the rest of his decent. I call it a narcotic , or deep air death.
McFaden got silted out at 220 and lost, and by the time he found
his way to the line, he was low on gas. He ran out, and ran Bill Gavin (
who went back to find him from the entrance - Gavin was solo diving in
another part of the cave) out of gas.
Parker ended up dead following some kind of charlie foxtrot on
air, and Palmer died diving deep on air in the Red Sea, despite the
bullshit stories about him having a heart attack and falling overboard -
we have that from the people who were there who later changed their
story - look in the archives for yourself.
Deep air is stupid enough, but the peer pressure applied by the
strokes is amazing. I phoned Exley when I saw a report on BBN saying
that Ann Kristovich, a nobody in cave exploration was going to attempt
to break Mary Ellen Echoff's deep cave diving record ( which was an
incidental record done just exploring much like the records of the WKPP)
and that Jim "Bat Man" Bowdin was attempting to break Exley's record,
and told Exley that they can go to ten thousand feet and they are still
nobodies who have not done the exploration he had done, and he is still
Exley, but I guess he did not believe me. Even he had to succomb to that
peer pressure.
In the case of Palmer is is really bad since he is the only one of
that crowd he was wtih who had ever done anything in their entire diving
lives worth even talkning about, and he had a written history of distain
for that type of activity.
In the case of Parker he was likely just trying to decompress, but had
not thought out the whole dive, and was diving with an amateur, on
storke gear - however , this is the same kind of configuration insanity
that we see so many dive intructors in the US recommending. I saw one
moron on Compuserve offering to send out a "paper" on how to do this,
and I hear there are others recommending this, and we see
self-proclaimed "big time divers" out there writing articles of how they
dove deep on air. We have itiots out there teaching trimix while diving
air themselves and bragging about it like air is some kind of
achievement.
With McFaden, this was the deciding event that caused the WKPP to
cease all deep air diving. Gavin changed the rules in our standards at
that point, and a serious effort was made to convert to gas. We had had
several incidents prior to this, mostly involving "blackouts" like what
was reported with Rob Parker. Gavin was working on mixed gas rebreathers
for the Navy, Turner was working with Dr.Bill Hamilton on deompression
recommmendations, and the south Florida guys were jsut experimenting
with helium based mixes using Bulhmann's algoithms in marcros on a 1-2-3
spread sheet or D Base. The driving factor was the need to go deeper and
longer, the same need that has developed all of our other equipment and
methods.
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