The Most Dangerous Dive Site in South Africa

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On the surface, it's just an unassuming murky green pool at the bottom of a cliff face. Look under the water though and it changes entirely. The water is crystal clear and it extends far deeper than the cliff face above. In fact, it is considered to be one of the deepest known freshwater caves on earth, and that fact alone also makes it one of the most dangerous. So in this video, we're going to go over the horrifying instance that have taken place here. In early August of 1993, some of the world's very best cave divers arrived in South Africa for a particularly special expedition. They were there to dive a sinkhole known as Bumunzgut or Bushman's Hole, which happens to be the third largest freshwater cave known to man. And more importantly, they were there to set a new record for the deepest ever cave dive. Among those invited to the expedition was South African cave diver, Boutishun, who was familiar with South African sinkholes, and so his experience was invaluable. But he brought his friend even laden along with him. Even had him actually been invited on the expedition, which initially created some concern. These types of dives, as you might imagine, are tightly controlled, so just showing up with an extra buddy seriously violated the group's protocol. It's not entirely clear, but it seems that Boutishun may have vouched for even skill and so the issue was dropped and even was allowed to dive alongside him. It's also possible that it was allowed simply because their dive wouldn't be the actual world record attempt, as that was being left up to Shek-X-Lee. If you followed the channel for any elective time, you probably know Shek-X-Lee as one of the pioneers of cave diving. But in any case, prior to Shek's attempt to the world record, Boutishun and Ebens suited up for an exploratory dive into the water. From the surface pool, they made their way through the vertical tunnel toward the first bend. Then past the bend, everything was going fine until the relatively narrow entrance tunnel opened up to a massive chamber at around the 197-foot mark or 60 meters. Just before that point, is a spot where divers can stop for a brief check-in before heading deeper. The two men stopped and always clear for them to continue on, so Boutishun led the way further down. When he reached 197 feet though, he suddenly noticed Ebens was nowhere near him. He looked around and then he spotted Ebens flashlight beam bouncing back and forth frantically through the darkness as if he was desperately searching for something. What Boutishun didn't know at the time was that Ebens had already gone through his first air cylinder completely, violating one of the most fundamental rules of cave diving, which is the rule of thirds. Basically, this is a guideline for how to consume your air spliger in a dive. One third should be used in the way in, another third on the way out, and the last third for emergencies. For some reason, before they had even finished their descent, Ebens need to switch to his second tank, but his backup regulator wasn't accessible. It had slipped behind him when he suited up for the dive and became pinned under the harness for his twin cylinders. And despite the checks of their equipment before they descended, no one seemed to notice this, and by then, Ebens was completely out of air. And then unable to reach the regulator when he needed, he went into a full-blown panic. Instinct then took over in the worst way possible as Ebens tried to bolt upward toward the surface, which was a huge problem. Very rarely in cave diving is the exit directly above your head. In Bushman's hole, the ceiling stretches far overhead in an area that two divers were in, and it contains many small openings that lead to nowhere. Realistically, a dive could search endlessly without ever finding the true exit, but that didn't even matter. By the time Boutishun reached him, Ebens had already stopped moving. Then unfortunately, despite Logan him, there wasn't much he could do. In order to ensure his own safety, Boutishun had to complete a series of decompression stops to avoid decompression sickness, otherwise known as the bends. That meant he had to sit there knowing his friend was without air, and there was nothing he could do. Once Boutishun finally reached the surface with Ebens body, the team sprang into action and spent more than 90 minutes performing CPR on him. Their efforts pushed far beyond the point where most would have given up, but it was helpless. When a doctor erupted the site, Ebens was pronounced dead. Unlike many of the notoriously dangerous dive sites covered on the channel, Bushman's hole hasn't claimed a staggering number of lives, yet the instance that have occurred there are legends in the dive community. Bushman's hole is a massive submerged sinkhole in South Africa's northern cape right on the edge of the Kalahar desert. It sits on the Mount Carmel Game Farm, which is an 11,000 acre property that's remote enough to make every dive there a logistical challenge. The sinkhole itself also doesn't look like much at first glance. After hiking down a steep rocky slope, divers arrive at a small pool often covered in green duckweed. The water also looks murky from the surface, but once you drop beneath the layer of algae, it turns remarkably clear. The thing that makes it so striking though is that the sinkhole below the surface is enormous. The main chamber stretches 833 feet or 253 meters long, 259 feet or 79 meters wide, and runs close to 927 feet or 300 meters deep. This chamber is large enough that divers say you could fit a structure as large as the Isle Tower inside. Then, at the very deep bottom is a soft baron mix of silt and mud. Because of this immense depth, the cave has a long history of extreme deep diving, and no one knew its true depth until the early 1980s, when a man named Nuno Gomez began exploring it. On his first visit in 1981, he reached about 250 feet or 76 meters and confirmed the existence of the massive chamber below the tight area at 150 feet or 46 meters. The big milestone though came during the 1993 expedition that claimed Ebb and's life when Shaq reached a record 863 feet or 263 meters. During this dive, he touched down on the high part of the slope bottom, and that set a mark that Nuno became obsessed with beating. Nuno, who was a civil engineer from Johannesburg, returned to Bushman's Hole a year later to attempt a new record, but on two tries he reached 755 feet and 827 feet. On both occasions, he experienced serious decompression issues that forced him to back off. But even still, the challenge never left his mind, and in 1996 he returned again with a full support team that included 8 divers and one doctor. On this third attempt, as he dropped to the shaft at a rapid pace, the bottom appeared far sooner than he anticipated. By that point, only half of his legs were still functioning as the pressure adept had literally crushed the other two. And because he was sinking faster than he realized, he didn't have time to add air to his buoyancy gear, and he hit the cave floor on his hands and knees. The impact of this kicked up a huge cloud of silt, instantly wiping out visibility. Here's what's even more horrifying though. He hit the bottom so hard that he became stuck in the mud. Surrounded by a thick cloud of sediment and unable to see it, Nuno was also dealing with the effects of deep diving, namely nitrogenarcosis and literal tremors, brought in by helium in his breathing mix. It was so oriented that the bottom of Bushman's Hole, Nuno tried to swim upward, but couldn't get anywhere and start to feel lightheaded. Instead of panicking though, he paused for a moment to gather himself and inflate it as buoyancy wings. That small adjustment lifted him out of the mud and upwards enough for him to escape the silt cloud and regain control of dive. Despite the rough landing the conditions he had to fight through, Nuno reached a depth of 927 feet or 282.6 meters, a mark far beyond Shex record. And to give you an idea of how technical and difficult this dive attempt was, the entire thing from the moment Nuno disappeared under the water until he resurfaced again took 12 hours and 15 minutes. Of that total time that it was sent to the bottom lasted only 14 minutes and it took him 4 minutes to get himself out of the mud. The rest was spent on a long cold decompression on the way back up. Rewinding a bit though, to just before Nuno's second attempt at the record in 1994, the phone rang at the Department of 20-year-old Dion Dreyer. When he picked up, he could hardly believe who he was talking to. It was Nuno on the other line, and even before he set the record at Bushman's Hole in 1996, he was known as one of the few elite deep water divers on Earth. Nuno was apparently put in together a support team for a second attempt and he wanted Dion to join him. Despite his age, Dion was a highly experienced diver who would log more than 200 dive hours. Nuno then explained to Dion that the dive was set to take place at Bushman's Hole around Christmas when the support team members would be on break from their everyday jobs. With this being the opportunity of a lifetime, Dion immediately agreed. When he hung up the phone, Dion called his parents to share the news, but he was surprised by his mother's reaction. She had always worried about his hobbies, but she never gave him any grief about Dive's before, so it caught Dion offguard when she started sounding nervous about his involvement in Nuno's dive. This apprehension apparently only grew as the dive date drew closer, and she even got to the point of begging Dion not to go, but it was no use. Dion wasn't going to let this opportunity pass him by, so he did his best to sue their concerns and assure that everything would be just fine. On December 17th, 1994, Dion arrived at Bushman's Hole for the first time and got himself prepared for the dive that day. This wasn't going to be the world record attempt though, this was just a practice dive, which would allow the support team to get familiar with the layer of the sinkhole and each other. Dressed in his dive suit, Dion put his tanks on and along with the other divers descended into Bushman's Hole. Their descent went perfectly and the team seemed to be working well together. When they reached their target depth, they stopped and began their descent, which as always would include numerous decompression stops. The divers checked in on one another periodically during these stops and flashed the okay hand signal to each other. This happened again around the 200 foot mark and everyone reported they were fine, but when they advanced to 164 feet or 50 meters for the next stop, they found that one of the divers was missing. When they realized this, they looked down to see a light fading into the darkness below. Nuno looked at one of the other support divers who then drew his finger across his throat, which is a signal no diver ever wants to give or receive. That falling diver was Dion and by the time Nuno started chasing after him, Dion had already fallen about 100 feet below him and his descent continued quickly. With no other choice, Nuno had to stop and go back for his own safety. Had he continued any further to try to save Dion, there might have been two divers not coming back instead of one. Later that day, a knock came at the door of Dion's parents and when they opened it, they were all shattered. It was a police officer notifying of their son's death at Bushman's Hall. It's unknown for certain what happened that caused his uncontrolled descent, but it's believed that Dion blacked out due to a condition called hypercapnia or carbon dioxide poisoning. It's possible that Dion was feeling the effects of hypercapnia but tried to shake them off and continue to die. Since it doesn't take much to go from perfectly fine to blacked out though, by the time Dion noticed anything was wrong, it was likely too late. Then unconscious, he sank to the immense bottom of the cave. Few divers knew the dangers of the conditions and extreme deep diving better than Nuno, Shek and a diver named Dave Shaw. All three seem to have some sort of superhuman ability to tolerate these conditions. In the early 2000s, only seven divers that ever successfully reached 820 feet or 250 meters beyond, yet all three were in that club. Originally from Australia but living in Hong Kong, Dave didn't start diving until his mid-40s when he and a 17 year old son tried scuba diving in the Philippines. From that point forward, his passion for the sport grew and he started diving shipwrecks. When he went into his first underwater cave though, he knew he found what he was meant to do. Dave would then quickly go and hold several records of his own. In 2004, Dave finally got a chance to dive at Bushman's Hall for the first time and he wasn't going to miss the chance to reach the bottom. Dave was going to try to beat Nuno's mark and set a new world record, but what made his dive unique was that he was going to do what no other diver in the world had done. He planned to make the dive using a closed circuit re-brie there. This was a system that had never been taken to the kind of depth he was aiming for. A re-brie there works by recycling the gas and diverg's hails and removing the carbon dioxide from it. The unit also maintains the correct oxygen level to her computer which means the diver doesn't need to switch tanks on the way down. So instead of the large cylinders you'd expect to see on a traditional setup, a re-brie there is a compact back mounted unit that keeps the diver's profile small. But despite all of these advantages, the technology is not without limits. When the day arrived, Dave, along with his dive partner Don Shirley, entered the surface pool of Bushman's Hall. At a depth, Dave and Don agreed on before the dive, Don stopped and waited as Dave continued to the bottom. At around 886 feet or 250 meters, Dave touched down on the slope bottom of Bushman's Hall. Guiding him all the way down was a long rope with a sinker attached to it. Once he hit the bottom, he still had a bit deeper to go to break Nuno's record, but first he needed to clip a secondary rope to the main guidelines so he could get back to it. As he was connecting the two ropes, Dave glanced to his left and about 50 feet away from him, he saw the body of a diver lying on its back with its arms extended upward. He immediately knew in that moment that it was Dion. Because Bushman's Hall is so deep, there was never an attempt to recover his body. Immediately though, Dave abandoned his record attempt and swam over to Dion's remains. When he got close enough to see him better, he realized that Dion's head was nothing more than a skull after a decade of being at the bottom of Bushman's Hall. Dave then tried to pull him upward, but Dion wouldn't budge. Over the years, as air tanks have been covered in sediment and now he was stuck in the mud. Still, Dave continued to try to free him until he realized how fast his breathing rate had gotten. So, deciding it was too difficult and dangerous to bring him to the surface right then, Dave tied his secondary line to Dion's air tanks before returning to the mainline to begin his ascents. It was less than an hour later when Dave made it back to Don without beating Nuno's world record. He did however set a record for a re-breather, but it was the furthest thing from Dave's mind. Don flashed the okay hand signal to Dave to make sure he was fine and Dave returned it before gesturing for Don's slate, which can be used to write messages under water. On it, Dave then wrote that he found a body. Don read the message and extended his hand to shake Dave's. Finding Dion was something that was thought to be impossible, yet Dave somehow managed to do it. Throughout the hours of decompression stops both men had to make it, Dave couldn't get the thought of Dion out of his head. He felt like he was so close to recovering him and he knew that he made a concerted effort and planned it out, he could bring Dion home to his parents. So, two days after the dive, the phone rang at Dion's parents house with Dave on the other end. He then informed them that he found Dion and that he was going to recover his body for them. Apparently, they were so overcome with joy and grief by this that Dion's parents immediately broke down in tears. The dive to recover Dion's body was scheduled for the start of the new year and Dave spent every day planning some aspect of it. During that time, he met with forensics experts to see what he could expect in terms of the state of Dion's body. The consensus was that Dion would most likely be completely skeletal, so Dave knew that picking him up and carrying him to the surface could cause the body to crumble. So, to compensate for this, Dave planned to use a body bag that he could slip over Dion to keep his body completely contained within it. Dave's wife then fashioned a custom bag with drawstrings and on a new year's date, thus the five, she drove him to the airport first flight to South Africa. When Dave landed, Dion picked him up and brought him to Cmody Springs, which Dion operated as a dive center. Then in the weeks leading up to the dive, Don had selected seven divers to serve as a support team. Leading the surface team would be Verna, the woman's world record holder at the time for depth, which she said at 725 feet or 221 meters in Bushman's hole. Also part of the crew was a documentary filmmaker named Gordon and several cameraman. If Dave succeeded in bringing Dion back to the surface, it would be the deepest body recovery ever completed, and everyone involved one of the documented. Gordon then talked Dave into allowing him to build a piece of custom equipment so that Dave could wear a camera during his dive. Dave agreed and Gordon later showed up with a climbing helmet with a camera rig to the top. During an acclimation dive, the rig worked just fine, and Dave only had to make minimal adjustments to compensate for its size and weight. Dave also usually liked having a light attached to his hand during dives, but whenever he needed to use both hands for something, he'd put the light which was attached to his string around his neck. The helmet, however, prevented him from doing this, but Dave figured he would just adjust by setting the light aside whenever he needed to use both hands. Dave and Don then held a meeting with the support team the night before the dive to go over any last minute questions or concerns. Before he dismissed them all, Dave emphasized something very important. If either he or Don or both of them got to trouble and died during the attempt, they wanted to remain there. After the meeting, Dave and Don met privately to go over the dive plan again, which calls for support divers to be sent into the water at staggered times during the dive to wait for Dave at various depths. Don would be the first to go in the deepest among them. He'd descend to 725 feet, and when Dave reached him, Don would take Dion from him and transplant him up to the next diver, while Dave began what he estimated would be about 10 hours of decompression stops. During this conversation, Don also asked Dave what he wanted to do if Dave got himself into trouble trying to get Dion into the bag. Dave replied that he should only come down to help if Dave gave him the signal to, otherwise he should just stay at the 725 foot mark. At around 5am, the next day, the two loaded up the car and headed for Bushman's hole. Over the next hour, the rest of the team, filmmakers and even police showed up. Since the dive included a recovery of a body, law enforcement had to be involved and they were welcome addition to the effort. Then when the time came, Dave and Don shook hands and promised they'd see each other again soon. At 6.30am, Dave slipping at the surface and began his solo descent, which he expected would only last about 15 minutes. From there, he'd have a few minutes to free Dion's body and loaded into the bag before we'd have to start making his ascents. Outside Bushman's hole, just minutes after Dave descended, Dion's parents showed up. They didn't want to arrive too early and risk putting any undue pressure on Dave, but at the same time, they needed to be there for Dion. 13 minutes later, at 6.26am, a Verne gave Don the go ahead to descent and he began his journey to 725 feet. When he got to around 500 feet, he was happy to see that the water conditions were clear enough to see Dave's light below him, but any relief he might have felt, vanished the moment Don realized that the light was still. The timing of every detail of Don was synced up so that Don would be arriving just a few minutes before Dave got there, but Dave hadn't begun his descent yet. A few moments later, the light still wasn't moving and Don suddenly noticed the absence of air bubbles passing him on their way to the surface. At this point, although he hadn't received the signal to go down and help Dave, he wasn't about to wait. He continued his descent beyond 725 feet and when he reached 800 feet or 244 meters, he'd officially been deeper than he'd ever gone before. It was at that moment that he heard a crack as if something had broken under the immense pressure. This was the sound of his re-breather controller being crushed and the loss of it was devastating. With that, any hope of getting to Dave had to be abandoned. Without that automatic controller, he'd have to spend the next 10 hours in the water, carefully manually monitoring and adjusting his air mixes. It was an emergency and Don had no choice. He had to start ascending and just hope that Dave would make it. While all of this was going on, the dive to myth the surface was continuing to execute the dive plan. Two support divers were sent in 2 492 feet or 150 meters to take Dion's body and ensure Don was okay. They were immediately alarmed when they closed in on their target depth and didn't see any lights below them. The protocol said they had to wait 4 minutes before beginning an ascense. They then remained there for 6 with no sign of Dave or Don below them. One of the divers then pulled out a slate and wrote on it that Dave and Don were not at the expected depth when they suddenly spotted a light beneath them. They then amended the message to say there was only one light below them and they didn't know who it was. When they ascended to the next support diver, they then handed the slate off to begin ascending to the surface. When it reached about 275 feet or 84 meters, support diver Peter, who was one of Dave and Don's closest friends, read it and immediately handed it back to the diver he got it from and started descending fast. When Peter reached 400 feet or 122 meters, he saw Don and felt a rush of relief. Peter then held up the okay hand signal as a question and Don flashed it back to him before Don jestered 4 meters' slate. Peter then handed it to him and Don began to write down the information about his new decompression plan since his controller broke. But above it all, he wrote four words, Dave not coming back. As you might imagine, every minute of the assent for Don was excruciating. After hours, he was at a decompression's up around 200 feet or 6-1 meters when another of the support divers came to check on him. He gave the okay signal on the diver return to the surface, but once Don reached 164 feet or 50 meters, he started to feel funny, almost like he was going to black out. Stinking quickly, he decided to switch from his re-brother to a tank of tri-mix, which was one of the many that had been strung up and down the main line for emergencies. Whatever the mix was that he started breathing though, he became severely dizzy almost right away. He didn't know at the time, but a helium bubble had formed in his inner ear, bringing on a severe case of vertigo. As he was dealing with this, he suddenly realized he wasn't on the main line anymore and started grabbing for it as he spun around. If he couldn't relocate the line, Don might not be coming back either. He slowly drifted further from the line when he was forced to deal with an arm's reach of it and one of his blind grabs connected with the rope and he held onto a firmly. This brief distraction also caused him to lose track of his depth and when he checked on his dive computer, he was 40 feet higher than he should have been. He then immediately descended again, but by the time he was at the proper depth, decompression sickness had already set in heart and he was overcome with nausea. He then began a cycle of pulling his regular out of his mouth, vomiting and putting his regular back into his mouth until his stomach was empty. Then the dry heve set in. He got to a point where the symptoms would calm when he was stationary, but the moment it was time to ascend to the next stop, the dry heaves would come right back. When the next support ever reached him, Don wrote about the changes conditioned on the slate and sent to the surface. After receiving the message, Verna started cycling divers in and out of the water to make sure someone was with Don at all times. When Don reached 10 feet or 3 meters, he looked at his dive computer and saw that it calculated this decompression stopped to last 2 hours and 20 minutes. By that point though, he developed a sharp pain in his leg that he immediately recognized as worsening decompression sickness. He then sent another slate to the surface with this status and Verna decided to pull him up early. In the time that Don first let them know what was going on, the police had transported a decompression chamber to Bushman's hole. Once it arrived, Verna sent a support diver to bring Don right to the surface and he was inside the chamber within 20 minutes. Long before the dive came to its end though, Deon's parents had left. The moment they heard about Dave not returning, they broke down. Not only did a diver lose his life trying to recover their son, it was a virtual certainty that they'd never see Deon again. Around the same time, one of the cameraman went to the top room of Bushman's hole where he could get better self on service. Prior to the dive, Dave told the cameraman that if anything should happen to him on the dive, to call a man named Michael. Michael was Dave's pastor and if the worse happened, Dave won his wife to find out from him. When she answered not expecting to ring at the door later that night, she was immediately confused by the sight of Michael and his wife. They had never just stopped by an announce before and she could tell by their faces that something was tragically wrong. In the sad days that followed, Peter was responsible for staying in Bushman's hole to retrieve the rope and cylinders from the cave. On one of these days, after returning to the surface, one of the police divers asked Peter and his dive partner if they had seen Dave and Deon. Confused by the question, they replied that they hadn't. The police then told him that their divers spotted two bodies around 66 feet or 20 meters. After a brief rest, Peter went back into the water and the moment he got to that depth, there was Dave floating upright against a rock ceiling. Attached to him was a rope and on the other end of the rope was Deon. It seems that Dave had brought Deon back after all. Peter and his partner then recovered the two bodies and still attached to Dave's head was the cameraman to a helmet. Gordon was still filming on site and Peter handed the helmet to him. After making a copy of the tape for police, Gordon, Peter and Don sat down to watch it in the day's following Dave's death. They watched as Dave descended to the bottom in about 11 minutes, a few minutes faster than anticipated. Dave immediately located the rope tied to Deon on the previous dive and made his way to the body, pulling the body bag out on his way. When he reached Deon, a puff of silk obscured the camera's view, but when it was cleared, Deon's now lifeless body was floating. It's uncertain how Deon suddenly came loose, but this was not a sneer that Dave and Don had even considered or practiced for. In their meeting with forensic experts, they were told that Don read mostly bone, if not all, which meant there was no way for him to float. Underneath his dive suit, however, Deon's body had mummified and retained a neutral buoyancy. Dave's breathing rate then started to increase as he tried to slip the body bag over Deon's fins, but he struggled and put a lot of stress on his body. The more his breathing rate increased, the more carbon dioxide he would exhale into the re-breather. As Don watched, he couldn't help but beg Dave to abandon the dive and none of them could initially figure why he didn't. As signs of nitrogen and arcosis began to show up, it suddenly made sense to Don. When a diver has symptoms, their disorder thinking caused a diver to have tunnel vision on a single task. It was clear to Don that Dave's sole purpose was to get Deon's body back to the surface. For more than five minutes, which was much longer than planned, Dave fought to get Deon in the bag. When he finally realized that he needed to leave, he started to ascend but came to a quick stop. Turning back to where Deon don saw what the issue was, Dave's light was snagged on rope. Dave then moved slowly after he noticed this and tugged at the rope in an attempt to free the light before pulling out a pair of shears, only he didn't cut anything. The sound of his labored breathing started to slow and fade at this time. 22 minutes into the dive, Dave blacked out and eventually drowned. The very camera that was capturing the last moments of Dave's life seems to have played a role in his death. Had he been free to put the light around his neck as he used to dead, he might not have died in bushments whole that day. Don went undergo a series of decompression treatments for a total of 27 hours after the dive, but he still ended up with permanent damage to his inner ear and he lived with constant vertigo. However, he would eventually return to the water and was overcome with joy to know that the damage he suffered wouldn't keep him from the hobby he loves so much. As for Deon's parents, 10 days after the bodies were recovered from bushments whole, they held their mains of their son one last time. Bushments whole isn't like the other dangerous dive sites featured on the channel. There are no massive death tolls or impossible features and it's far less successful than some of the others. But as evidenced by the very few people who have ever reached its immense depth and the problems those few have encountered, it remains one of the most dangerous and legendary dive sites on Earth.