Adrenelin junky? Probably not like these people

[masraum]

Holy carp!

[masraum]

For something a little different

[rusnak]

Needs more cowbell. Got bored by 1:30

[911SauCy]

That one kid, who likes to hang off high things...he won't be around long.

[HardDrive]

I can't watch those videos of people on people on top of buildings. They make my stomach churn. Funny thing is, I'm not afraid of heights. But seeing other people do that gives me the willies.

[Oh Haha]

I need to get one of those flyin' squirrel suits. That looks like a complete hoot.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Oh Haha

I need to get one of those flyin' squirrel suits. That looks like a complete hoot.

I agree. I suspect that's as close as most of us can get to being superman without having come from Krypton. And I don't even think I'd have to fly through a hole or crack in a mountain to think it was awesome.

This is still one of my favorite wingsuit videos, the video and the music are brilliant together. This is much, much better than the music video for the song.


this is also cool

[Nostril Cheese]

I've been up at this very spot and this video doesn't do the altitude justice..

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Nostril Cheese

I've been up at this very spot and this video doesn't do the altitude justice..

Fuchs that! Over 3000' high. Yeah, that's over half of a mile up. Clearly that guy has a parachute. It'll pop right out of his arse.

[Nostril Cheese]

It amazes me what guys are doing on dirt bikes these days..

[Nostril Cheese]

Amazing...

[stealthn]

Fine line between gutsy and stupid.

[ckelly78z]

Man, I could see doing the solo gliding/soaring bit and having a blast at it. The hanging off buildings to one up your friends just sounds like Russian roulette with worse odds. I'm glad I don't need those kind of thrills to make my life seem complete.

[wdfifteen]

The video of those guys on the buildings give me the creeps. I start edging away from the computer screen.
There was a story on This American Life this morning that fits the thread. Here's a transcript. I'm sure there is a podcast of it, the story was sad and fascinating at the same time.

Julia Dewitt
Out in the desert scrublands of northern South Africa in a place called The Karoo, there's nothing-- no trees, no water-- for as far as you can see.

Don Shirley
You're in a primeval landscape.

Julia Dewitt
This is Don Shirley. Why he knows this place so well will become clear in a minute.

Don Shirley
You see a little rise. And when you get to the little hill, there's actually a big hollow there where the ground has collapsed. At the bottom of a very steep slope, you actually have a sheer face in front of you.

And at the bottom of this sheer face is a puddle. So you think, oh, this is just a little puddle that doesn't go anywhere. But when you take the duck weed off the top, it's actually clear water.

Julia Dewitt
Which means that this isn't just standing water. This water is filtering down to somewhere.

Don Shirley
Now, if you go into this puddle, there's a small slot that goes through, which is just wide enough for a man's body to go through. After 20 foot, you're now starting to enter the cave, and gradually the cave gets wider.

Julia Dewitt
Down below you is 900 feet of water. This is Bushman's Cave.

Don Shirley
It's a huge cave. Now, if you take the Eiffel Tower and stand it on the floor of Bushman's Cave, the top of the tower would be just about coming out of the water.

Julia Dewitt
The cave is almost 1,000 feet deep and 2 and 1/2 football fields wide. The main thing that lives in the pitch darkness is a species of strange little blind white cave shrimp. Otherwise, the cave is dark, deep, and dead. This cave is a dangerous place for humans. And it's basically totally inaccessible to almost all of us. But for deep water divers, this is heaven.

There are only a very few divers on the planet that have ever been anywhere near the bottom of this cave. And only about a dozen recreational divers ever dive to these kinds of depths, period. Don is one of these extreme divers. He met another of these deep water divers, a guy named Dave Shaw, back in 2002. They were immediately friends. And a couple of years later, Don took Dave to dive Bushman's.

On dive day, they got to the puddle, and Dave went in first. Dave swam down through the slot, and the cave opened up below him. While he was going down, he was doing something called laying a shot line. Basically, he was leaving a trail of rope in the total darkness. This is the only way he knew how to get out of the cave.

Don Shirley
You're in pitch black, absolute pitch black. So if you shined a light in any direction, it would disappear. The darkness will eat the light. Basically, being 900 foot in a cave, you might as well be on the Moon. In fact, I think more people have walked on the Moon than have actually been to those sorts of depths in caves.

Julia Dewitt
This sounds unbelievable, but it's true. More people have been on the Moon than have been to the depths that these guys have. Now, Dave was exploring on the bare floor of the cavern. There's nothing to see but his light in the black and the white rope that he dragged with him. Then suddenly--

Don Shirley
His torch caught the remains of Deon Dreyer.

Julia Dewitt
No one knows exactly what happened to Deon Dreyer. But a decade earlier, Deon was diving with a team in Bushman's. When they stopped to take a headcount, Deon was gone. People had been looking for his body ever since.

Don Shirley
He was still in his wetsuit, still wearing his cylinders-- a collection of bones inside a wetsuit. And at the time, he tried to move the body. But the body was stuck in the silt. He was panting, and he said, I shouldn't work hard at this depth. It wasn't in the plan. So I needed to leave the body there.

Julia Dewitt
Deon was 20 when he was lost in Bushman's. Dave didn't take finding Deon lightly.

Don Shirley
He thought of it more of a mission to actually-- his task to bring this body back.

Julia Dewitt
So when Dave came up, he told Don he was going to come back and get Deon's body.

Don Shirley
He phoned up Deon's parents and said, I'm going to retrieve your son's body.

Julia Dewitt
The thing is that a dive like this is a major operation. It took them months to plan.

Don Shirley
You're at 900 foot under the water. There's a lot of risk involved in that. Every 33 foot that you go down effectively doubles the risk. When you're down at those depths, anything that goes wrong is an issue.

Julia Dewitt
Combining extreme depths with the hard work that Dave had to do to get Deon's body into a body bag came with a lot of risk. At depth, too much nitrogen is kind of like a narcotic. Basically, it feels suddenly like you drank five martinis in a row.

Too much helium can give you twitching fits. If you breathe too heavily, like Dave might have to while he's moving around Deon's body, you pass out. And then, of course, there's the bends.

Don Shirley
If you come too quickly, it's like opening a Coke bottle once you've shook it up. And it fizzes. And then, you would have problems with bubbles in your blood.

Julia Dewitt
To prevent the bends, Dave would take several hours to come up to the surface. So they recruited a team of support divers that would go into the water intervals to check on Dave at various depths while he came up.

Don Shirley
And the rule was, no one will go deeper than the depth where we actually plan for them to be.

Julia Dewitt
Don would go the deepest.

Don Shirley
But as far as Dave and I were concerned, basically what we said is if Dave has a problem, he would signal me. And in caving, when you flash a light, you wave a light around, that's a distress signal.

We got to the day that we're actually planning to do the main dive. And we went down early in the morning. It was still dark. The sun was not quite up yet. And at 6:15, Dave went under the water. I followed 14 minutes later.

Julia Dewitt
Don followed the shot line down through the slot and into the cave.

Don Shirley
So as I was going down, falling through this black space, I was expecting to see some rising bubbles as I was going down. Also I would see Dave's light where he was coming back. When I was going down, I didn't actually see any bubbles coming back. What I did see-- in the area where I thought he would actually be, I did see a light. It was one light, a solid light just shining.

Julia Dewitt
But the light wasn't moving.

Don Shirley
Something is not quite right. And he's spending longer doing something. And then I knew that I would probably be going down to the bottom.

Julia Dewitt
Don dove past 800 feet, deeper than he had ever been before.

Don Shirley
Now, I went past my target depth. But the problem was, as I got to 833 foot, I actually had my own personal problems go on then.

Julia Dewitt
He heard a sharp crack.

Don Shirley
My rebreather controller actually imploded.

Julia Dewitt
This just means a piece of his breathing apparatus broke. Don trained constantly for moments like this. So he knew exactly what to do. He would just add oxygen to his gas mixture manually.

Don Shirley
But at that sort of depth, any oxygen that you add makes a hell of a difference. And I pushed my oxygen pressure much too high inadvertently. Now, that's very unhealthy at that depth-- very unhealthy. So now, I was liable to actually pass out very quickly.

Julia Dewitt
Don knew then that this was it. It was the end of the line. He had to turn around and go back.

Don Shirley
The surface is not somewhere that you can actually go to solve a problem. When you have a problem, you have to solve that problem there where you are. And if you don't solve that problem, you don't come back. You have to put the brakes on, as it were, at that point. And I was thinking, OK, Dave might come back. He's either dead, or he's working his way back. But all I could deal with was what was in front of me.

[wdfifteen]

Part 2

Julia Dewitt
Don knew that he now had over 10 hours in the water ahead of him. Don slowly ascended up to the roof of the cave. At this point, he started to pass out. And then, he got a helium bubble in his ear.

Don Shirley
And that made me lose balance completely. I'm over this extreme depth of water. You then have no-- absolutely no-- sense of up, down, sideways, or anything. And I didn't really have any sense of really where I was.

Julia Dewitt
Don lost grip on the shot line. And as he was passing out, reviving again, and passing out, he started swimming in these little circles, spinning around looking for the line. Remember, this line is the only way Don knows how to get out of the cave.

Don Shirley
And I'm in this void, the black. I had an extremely bright light in my hand. And where the light was going into the black, I was seeing black. And where the light was hitting the roof, I was seeing light, white. And then, I'd keep spinning around like that. So I was seeing black, white, black, white, black, white.

And then, I caught the line, the white line, in my torch. And the next time I spun around, I grabbed hold of the line. The trouble was, now I had vertigo. And that makes you vomit, right? So now, I was vomiting underwater as well, vomiting in between breaths, effectively. As time went on, I couldn't breathe anymore.

Julia Dewitt
Don eventually stabilized himself. And he started his ascent again towards the surface. He met a support diver. And using a waterproof pencil and one of these slates the divers use to communicate underwater, Don wrote him a message.

Don Shirley
I said, I'm OK, and Dave's not coming back. But still, in my mind, I had a hope that he would. From that point on, the guys had a task, which was to support me.

Julia Dewitt
For hours, the team up above waited to see if he would make it out alive. His only job was to breathe. Dave's light down below had disappeared.

Don Shirley
If you see the videos of me coming up, you would think, this guy's half-dead. It had been just over 12 hours in the water. I couldn't actually really do much for myself other than breathe. My head was like a marshmallow.

Julia Dewitt
Don was put into a decompression chamber and then taken in the morning for more treatment at a hospital in Johannesburg. Dave did not come up that night. Dave was dead. And then, a week later, Don got some news.

Don Shirley
I actually was told that Dave's body had come up. During that week, there'd been lots of speculation as to what had happened. Dave was carrying a camera on his head. In retrieving the camera, then we could piece together really what happened.

Julia Dewitt
As the camera rolls, you see Dave trying to get Deon's body into a body bag.

Don Shirley
One of his lights had actually got tangled up in the line and smashed. So now, bearing in mind you're in the pitch black, his main light had actually been broken. So he couldn't really see so well.

Julia Dewitt
Then Dave also gets tangled. He pulls away. But now he's tied to Deon's body.

Don Shirley
And you could see that he was working trying to get himself out of this line. He was cutting with the scissors. But his scissors weren't even getting anywhere near the line.

Julia Dewitt
Listening to the video, you can hear Dave's breathing start to get shallower and shallower as he starts working harder and harder.

Don Shirley
Dave passed out from too much carbon dioxide. He worked right up-- right up-- to the very last breath that he ever took trying to get out. And then the camera just carries on recording until the batteries run out.

There's barely a day goes by where I don't think of Dave. And really, there are a lot of times I turn around-- I do a fantastic dive, and I just want to say, did you see that? And Dave very much did die nobly doing what he did. He did everything that he should do.

And he died, as they'd say in the military, with his boots on. When Dave's body had come up, hanging underneath Dave's body, cocooned in the line that Dave originally had laid, was Deon Dreyer's body. So Dave actually achieved what he wanted to do.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

The video of those guys on the buildings give me the creeps. I start edging away from the computer screen.
There was a story on This American Life this morning that fits the thread. Here's a transcript. I'm sure there is a podcast of it, the story was sad and fascinating at the same time.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by wdfifteen

And Dave very much did die nobly doing what he did. He did everything that he should do.

And he died, as they'd say in the military, with his boots on. When Dave's body had come up, hanging underneath Dave's body, cocooned in the line that Dave originally had laid, was Deon Dreyer's body. So Dave actually achieved what he wanted to do.

Wow, chilling story. I can't even begin to comprehend or put myself in that position.

[Baz]

I just watched the video and am blown away - I never knew about this diving incident.

I don't even have words to represent what I'm feeling right now. I totally respect Shaw for trying to recover Dreyer's body but obviously not everything was anticipated.

Here's another video with some different perspective....

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Nostril Cheese

Amazing...

OK, I may have to see that if it ever gets released.

[Bill Douglas]

Umm, fun but they fished the body of a 20 year old guy from the harbour here in Wellington this morning who was doing stunts on one of those very high wharf cranes.