| Wacky cave diver attempts Guinas |
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| Written by Staff Reporters | |||
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World champion deep diver, Nuno Gomes is at Guinas for a week with a German TV crew to film his exploration of the cavern at the bottom of the lake.
Gomes, a civil engineer by profession, hails from Johannesburg and is an icon of the daredevil sport called cave diving. He has set the record for the deepest cave dive in August 1996 at Bushman’s Cave in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province and in January 2005, he set his lifetime record by becoming the first, and only, human to dive to a depth of over 318 metres in the Red Sea.
Guinas forms part of a system of subterranean lakes of which Otjikoto is the most famous since the German troops dumped their cannons and ammunition there in 1915. Guinas is a deep large hole in the ground some 30km west of Otjikoto. What makes Guinas trickier is the fact that the cliffs around the lake are about 30 metres high and go straight down from the ground’s surface to the water’s surface. There is no natural access as with Otjikoto. All the gear including the support systems for the divers as well as the camera equipment for the film crew has to be lowered from a gantry constructed by Thinus van Wyk of Walvis Bay following the instructions of logistics man Theo van Eeden. Compression and decompression are the two technical aspects that influence the success of a dive most. As both descent and ascent take several hours, only one dive can be attempted on any given day. At Guinas, Gomes will spend about three hours descending, then only 12 minutes on the bottom, and then several hours for the ascent. Gomes intends on two dives to a depth of 60 metres and then a final dive to the bottom. The film crew will go down to a level of 30 metres where they film the preparations for the rest of the dive. After several hours, the crew meets Gomes again at 30-metre depth. For dives at these impossible depths, the diver breathes a mixture of compressed air, pure Oxygen and Helium. The mix is critical, and although experienced divers do all preparations, Gomes checks every cylinder himself. At 95-metre depth, the diver reaches the bottom of Guinas. As far as cave diving goes, this is not very deep but Guinas has a number of lateral caverns at the bottom, which have never been explored. Van Eeden told the Economist that Gomes has already dove twice before at Guinas and was the person who first accurately determined the lake’s depth. |
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