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> Rich, I watched your other video of the volcano underwater. > That was really great! Thanks. Far & away the most intense diving of my life - hands down, no bullshit scary stuff. I'm not kidding when I say the multiple 360-foot air dives were weenie-dive compared to the lava flow stuff. Not that the lava stuff is dangerous per se, just that it's REALLY fucking scary to be there, making it difficult to concentrate on anything. (like dive gear...which is why we kept it extremely simple). Rich Had to jump in sometime ! I normally would have posted this to you directly but I thought the tech divers might like to read. we made the front page of the Honolulu Advertiser on this little adventure! 12/6/86 copy. I personally forgive the #!5$?* language in your posting. It is one crazy thing to do. I have to tell you this event scared the hell out of me. I dove the flow only 1 more time after this mostly to get my confidence back. I take it this refers to diving the lava flows on the Big Island. Years ago (1986) I was doing a lot of underwater work out on the lava flows at Kapaahu off volcanoes national park . We were doing lots of filming stuff both still pictures and film, as a matter of fact we took in one of the early IMAX cameras. I put in about 10 days diving on the flow with Dr. Lee Tepley . He was the first one to ever actually attempt this in 1970 filming the Mauna Ulu eruption. This took lots of guts. He did it first in 1971 and made a documentary called" Fire under the sea" It is still a classic geology film. Anyway on December 5 1986 we were again on the flow and Lee wanted to get some real "action stuff" so we picked a spot where the lava was flowing the strongest. The flow had been going into this same area for a number of days and the shoreline underwater was very sheer. When the lave delta gets this vertical it is also extremely unstable. We knew this but it looked o.k. and the sea was the calmest we had for weeks. We went for it!! After working up to the base of the flow from deeper water we settled in at the base of an active vent that was pumping out the largest amount of lava we both had ever seen. We had 2 safety divers along from the park service. The safety divers job (in theory) was to bring us up if we had an underwater explosion close by and were knocked out. This did happen once but not a full knockout just a little dizzy. We had been working the lava flow for about 5 min. when 2 underwater explosions erupted close by. I had just swam up slightly to move to the other side of the flow when all hell broke loose!!!! The whole face of the wall collapsed and tons upon tons of rock started down the slope. Lee was right on the bottom and did not seem to notice anything he was so engrossed in filming. I started to move his direction to get his attention when he got completely covered by rock. Not just a little but by about 5 feet of it. We were both at only 40ft when this happened. Lee was gone completely out of sight. Seconds later I was kicking away for all I was worth as the rock slide was dragging me into it. I swam as hard as I could to keep away from it but was dragged along by the suction. I ended up in about 160 feet of water before I made any headway at all. Lee was no where to be seen and neither were the safety, they had boogied at the first tremor. I relaxed for a few seconds and got my wits together. We had only been down for a few min. and I still had air so I went looking for Lee. I dropped down to where I could make out the bottom (actually it was dust and debris from the slide) at 250 feet . I tried to find Lees bubbles but there were bubbles everywhere from escaping gasses. I looked around for awhile then looked towards the surface. The safety divers had finally shown back up and were at the 100 foot level motioning for me to come back up. I tried to communicate that I needed to search for Lee and they made a motion towards the boat. I was just about out of air so I went up.I knew that I needed some decompression so I was hopeful that the boat would be nearby with spare tanks. I did not want to think about the next dive to try and recover Lees body. The boat was only about 50 feet away when I surfaced and there was Lee!!!!! They had pulled him out of the water outside of where I came up over about a 300 foot bottom. Lee was shook up of course and bleeding fairly heavily from a gash on his knee. We had to tie a tourniquet to stem the flow. His hands looked like they went threw a meet grinder. I did not discuss the details of his experience to much then as I was trying to convince him that we had to get back in the water to deco. We did a drift decompression using the fly by the seat of your pants tables. we had no idea how long we had been down or how deep just that we had made it. We decompressed for a full tank. Back on the boat Lee related his side of the story. he said that he was totally unaware of the danger till the lave / rock slide had engulfed him. He remembers desperately trying to claw his way out of the rock. Due to the rock movement it just carried him along down the slope and eventually just kicked him out. He moved the few debris that were restraining him and started to swim up. The water was completely black and he said he needed a few moments to even know where up was. He followed his bubbles. It took him about 2 min. to get into clear water and 5 to swim the rest of the way up. Unbelievable as it sounds he still had the movie camera with him. It was attached to the lanyard on his wrist. The movie footage is quit dramatic. You can see the wall slide and the camera stops as he gets buried. The last frames were of hot lava hitting his dome port ! James D. Watt Kona Hawaii
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