[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.