**Cave Diving Skills and Procedures:**
– Emphasis on navigation, gas management, and confined space operation
– Importance of continuous guideline for finding exit and decompression tailored to depth changes
– Skills include buoyancy control, various finning techniques, navigation in darkness, emergency procedures, and communication signals
– Line management procedures such as laying, marking, recovering, and securing lines
– Gas planning and management for calculated reserves, suitable breathing gases, and monitoring during dives
**Cave Diving Techniques and Training:**
– Gas management protocols, communication techniques, propulsion techniques, reel and guideline handling, and teamwork importance
– Equipment selection, risk management, cave conservation ethics, gas planning, and propulsion techniques in training
– Certification offered by diver training organizations, discouraging self-taught approach, and further training in cave surveying and mapping
– Progressive stages of education, certification based on three cave zones, and importance of psychological education and emergency management protocols
– Exploration, surveys, mapping, and contribution to understanding cave geology and hydrology
**Cave Diving Hazards and Safety:**
– Hazards like restrictions in vertical swimming, navigation challenges, varying visibility, strong water currents, and perception as a deadly sport
– Safety rules emphasizing training, equipment, and situational awareness, accident analysis, safety protocols, and continuous learning
– Factors influencing the perception of cave diving as dangerous and the importance of adherence to safety guidelines
– Accident analysis to identify common factors contributing to incidents and preventing panic in emergencies
– Continuous learning and adherence to safety protocols for cave divers
**Cave Diving Exploration and Mapping:**
– Exploration as a significant aspect, surveying, mapping, guidelines, and understanding cave geology and hydrology
– Mapping techniques including data collection, challenges in mapping, surface coordinates, survey methods, and technology utilization
– Artifacts recording through photography, preservation, underwater archaeologists’ techniques, and digital documentation for conservation
– Contribution of competent and enthusiastic cave divers in exploration, surveying, mapping, and understanding cave systems
– Use of guidelines, permanent markers, and databases for analysis in underwater cave mapping
**Cave Diving Statistics and Analysis:**
– Perception of cave diving safety influenced by training and equipment, claims suggesting safety compared to recreational diving, and limited statistical evidence
– Unusual circumstances contributing to fatalities in incidents and adherence to accepted protocols and equipment standards
– Statistical analysis supporting the safety of cave diving, stringent requirements, and reduced accident risk with adherence to protocols
– Influence of lack of specialized training and equipment on the perception of cave diving as a dangerous sport
– Claims suggesting cave diving is safer due to stringent requirements and adherence to accepted protocols
Cave-diving is underwater diving in water-filled caves. It may be done as an extreme sport, a way of exploring flooded caves for scientific investigation, or for the search for and recovery of divers or, as in the 2018 Thai cave rescue, other cave users. The equipment used varies depending on the circumstances, and ranges from breath hold to surface supplied, but almost all cave-diving is done using scuba equipment, often in specialised configurations with redundancies such as sidemount or backmounted twinset. Recreational cave-diving is generally considered to be a type of technical diving due to the lack of a free surface during large parts of the dive, and often involves planned decompression stops. A distinction is made by recreational diver training agencies between cave-diving and cavern-diving, where cavern diving is deemed to be diving in those parts of a cave where the exit to open water can be seen by natural light. An arbitrary distance limit to the open water surface may also be specified.
Equipment, procedures, and the requisite skills have been developed to reduce the risk of becoming lost in a flooded cave, and consequently drowning when the breathing gas supply runs out. The equipment aspect largely involves the provision of an adequate breathing gas supply to cover reasonably foreseeable contingencies, redundant dive lights and other safety critical equipment, and the use of a continuous guideline leading the divers back out of the overhead environment. The skills and procedures include effective management of the equipment, and procedures to recover from foreseeable contingencies and emergencies, both by individual divers, and by the teams that dive together.
In the United Kingdom, cave-diving developed from the locally more common activity of caving. Its origins in the United States are more closely associated with recreational scuba diving. Compared to caving and scuba diving, there are relatively few practitioners of cave-diving. This is due in part to the specialized equipment and skill sets required, and in part because of the high potential risks due to the specific environment.
Despite these risks, water-filled caves attract scuba divers, cavers, and speleologists due to their often unexplored nature, and present divers with a technical diving challenge. Underwater caves have a wide range of physical features, and can contain fauna not found elsewhere. Several organisations dedicated to cave diving safety and exploration exist, and several agencies provide specialised training in the skills and procedures considered necessary for acceptable safety.