- [Narrator] What is up, EWU crew?
Today, we're covering
the true scary story of Dave Shaw.
The human body naturally feels fear of the dark.
It's coded into us from the beginning of time.
Our evolution, our species survival has relied
on fearing the creatures out there in the dark.
Most children go through a phase
of fearing the dark in their own rooms.
Their brains, remembering this programming,
conjure up a monsters in their closet
or lurking under their bed.
We can look back with objectivity
and know that there were no monsters.
There was no danger.
But what if there was?
What if there was really something sitting
and waiting out there in the darkness?
In adulthood, most of us no longer feel
that innate fear of the darkness.
But maybe we should.
If Dave Shaw, an Australian man who died
trying to recover the body of a fellow diver
had feared the dark,
he might still be alive today.
The first dive.
October in South Africa is spring time.
The waters of Bushman's Hole in the Northern Cape province
are warm this time of year.
At least at the surface.
This incredibly deep sinkhole
has turned into a freshwater cave over the millennia,
becoming one of the most popular diving spots
for those who don't value their own life.
Because it's more than 1,500 meters above sea level,
it is twice as difficult
to dive a 100 meters into Bushman's Hole
than it is to dive a 1000 meters into the ocean.
This is what attracted Dave Shaw to the dive, the challenge.
If he could break the previous dive depth record,
he would be famous.
It took Shaw just over 10 minutes
to reach the bottom of Bushman's Hole.
He was using a rebreather which recycled his own breath
instead of pumping new air into his system,
to both provide him with enough oxygen
and help weigh him down.
He dove with six extra cylinders of oxygen.
Because he was using a rebreather,
he didn't even create bubbles
as he worked his way down the line
towards the bottom of the cave.
As he touched it down in the sticky mud,
he became the first person in the world
to dive that deep wearing a rebreather.
Having achieved what he came down here to do,
he attached a new line to himself and to the shot line
and decided it was time to explore the bottom of the cave.
He wanted to take his time, even though he knew
that at dives this deep every minute he spent underwater
meant it would take him longer and longer
to decompress as he rose to the surface.
But still, when you've just broken a world record
it makes sense
that you would want a bask in it for a moment.
He let out his line
spooling out across the sloped bottom of the cave.
He wasn't looking for anything in particular.
Except he knew that there was a body
of another diver down there somewhere.
It wasn't the purpose of his dive,
but it was understood among the diving community
that if you were going to dive Bushman's Hole,
you would keep your eyes out for Deon Dreyer's body.
They knew it had been floating somewhere in the depths
for more than a decade.
If someone happened to spot it,
it would be nice to return him to the surface.
And Dave did spot it.
As he swept the depths with his light, he spotted a body
floating on its back about 50 feet
from where he had touched down.
It was a haunting site.
Out there in the dark,
his hands and head had been exposed to the water.
His skin and flesh was long gone,
leaving just his skull.
It was still wearing his divers mask.
Dreyer's wet suit encased his body.
But Shaw assumed that it too was nothing but bones.
Shaw approached Dreyer's body carefully,
still towing his gear behind him.
He pulled on the corpse trying to free it
from where it stuck to the bottom of the cave,
but it was no use.
The battery pack for the deceased diver's light
and man's useless air tank were encased in mud.
Shaw had already been under for too long
and he needed to start his ascent.
If Shaw was going to return the man to the surface,
he was going to need to return,
and he was going to need to return with help.
He tied off the cave line to Deon Dreyer,
and then worked his way back to the shot line.
It took Shaw over eight hours
to completely decompress from his dive.
When he reached the surface,
having prevented himself from getting the bends,
he and his support diver Don Shirley began working on a plan
to retrieve the dead body.
Shirley recalls, Dave felt very connected with Deon.
He had found him, so it was like a personal thing
that he should bring him back.
The second dive.
Deon's story is an unfortunate one.
Even at the young age of 20,
he had already completed over 200 dives
by the time he attempted Bushman's Hole.
Because he dove alone,
no one knows exactly what happened to him.
But the other divers in his community
could guess at what happened.
He stayed under for too long,
carbon dioxide built up in his system
and he blacked out.
No longer able to struggle for the surface,
he essentially suffocated down there in the pressing deep.
Shaw had no such worries, as he and Don Shirley
began planning the recovery of Dreyer's body.
Not only was Shaw even more experienced
than Dreyer had been at the time of his deadly dive.
He had already successfully made the dive once before.
They planned for over two months,
consulting forensic experts and other divers
to make sure their plan was rock solid.
The condition of Dreyer's body was the big question.
Would it actually be mostly bone
or would the dive suit have preserved most of his body?
In the end, Shaw decided not to take the chance
that it would be mostly bone
and have the body fall apart,
as he tried to bring it to the surface.
He and his wife sewed a custom body bag out of silk,
that would be large enough to encase the body,
including the fins Dreyer was still wearing.
Shirley and Shaw practiced with the body bag.
They gathered a team of seven other elite divers
familiar with rebreathers.
They met at Cape Town, escorted by a team of police
who were already briefed on the situation
and were prepared to receive the body,
when Shaw made it back to shore.
They had 35 extra cylinders of gas,
just in case someone's rebreather failed,
in case all of the rebreathers failed.
As Shaw prepared to go into the water,
he told the team that this was going to be
an attempted body recovery.
If they failed this time, they would just try again.
Shaw said, if he died trying to recover Dreyer
that they should leave them both in the water.
It would be a sign that the darkness won
and they should leave the bodies in the darkness.
The dive started just after 6:00 A.M. on January 8th, 2005.
He would make the first descent on his own.
The seven other divers would wait and then would begin
to descend the shot line after him,
scheduling their descents, so they could meet up with him
at specific points on the line to provide support
and help guide the body up to the surface.
Shaw's descent was faster than his first dive,
as he remembered exactly where Dreyer's body was.
When Shirley dropped into the water,
just 13 minutes after Shaw,
he saw Shaw's light exactly where he expected it to be,
except Shaw wasn't moving.
His friend, the man he had been diving with for years,
should have been on his way back up the shot line,
but he wasn't even moving.
Shirley made a split second decision
and broke from protocol.
He continued descending
knowing that if Shaw wasn't moving,
he was almost definitely in trouble.
Just as he began to reach the bottom.
The piece of equipment that monitored his oxygen levels
failed and shattered.
Meaning on top of everything else,
Shirley would have to monitor his own oxygen levels
at a depth he had never dove before.
In that moment, looking down at Shaw,
he knew that if he tried to join Shaw, he would die too.
As the members of the team took their places on the line,
each of them discovered in succession
that Shaw was not ascending.
They knew something was wrong immediately.
But they knew they had to stick to the plan
or risk even more death.
As each of them pier down in the depths of Bushman's Hole,
all they saw was a crushing darkness.
They knew that it had taken Shaw
a decade after it took Dreyer.
Over the next few days,
the dive team tried to decide what to do.
Finally, a few of the divers volunteered
to descend and attach buoys to the line
in an attempt to get the bodies
to float back to the surface.
But as they headed again down the shot line,
they discovered that the bodies were floating,
waiting for them only 20 meters below the surface,
they were pulled up to dry land.
It was clear that before Shaw died,
he had managed to get Dreyer
inside the custom made body bag,
but it was still not clear what had happened to Shaw.
Luckily he had been wearing a special helmet
equipped with a deep water camera.
In just a few hours time
they would know exactly what happened to Dave Shaw
down there in the dark.
Don Shirley reviewed the tape.
What he found was a full video
of one of his best friends dying.
Here's what he saw.
- [Dave] I (indistinct) see Deon now, as Dion's legs.
All right, we're still on plan,
everything is going good.
We're working hard.
I'm gonna do the bag and put it over the legs.
Everything's good.
Checking everything's right.
Breathing heavily, still jogging, still jogging.
Okay, could assume that I'd expect that.
I'm doing the bag and I'm trying to slide it up the legs.
- [Narrator] When Shaw got down to Dreyer,
the second time and attempted to put him in the body bag,
Dreyer's body finally came unstuck
from the muddy bottom of the cave.
This made it much more difficult to get the bag around him.
Shirley could hear his friend's breath beginning to quicken.
As the body begins to drift,
Shaw tries to get control over it.
In his attempts he gets tangled in the line,
connecting him back to the surface.
As more time passes, far more time than it should have taken
to get Dreyer into the body bag.
Shaw's condition continues to worsen.
Every little action is a huge effort.
His body is succumbing to the pressure
of more than a billion gallons of water,
but he's still moving forward.
Until his light gets snagged on the line.
He knows he's caught on something,
but he's too exhausted and too disorientated
to figure out what it is.
He's towing the weight of another person with him.
He pulls out a pair of sheers to free himself
from whatever is holding him back,
but he never even gets the chance
to figure out what it is.
His breath is coming in short harrowing gasps.
His lungs are full on only carbon dioxide
and his body is shutting down.
He knows he is dying and is starting to panic,
but there's nothing to do.
He slides into darkness and dies
alone at the bottom of Bushman's Hole.
In the end, Dave Shaw's death was a noble one.
He was trying to help a fellow diver,
but the effort took too long.
He refused to deviate from the plan,
even when Dreyer's body came loose
and could likely have floated back to the surface
on its own.
But the darkness was beating in around him.
The pressure of the water, the quiet,
the fear, each took their toll.
And in the end, it was too much
for even an experienced diver like Shaw to handle.