Sheck Exley

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Sheck Exley (April 1, 1949-April 6, 1994) was a cave-diving pioneer.

Exley is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of cave diving,^{[citation needed]} writing two major books on the subject: Basic Cave Diving: A Blueprint for Survival and Caverns Measureless to Man published by CAVE BOOKS, (ISBN 0-939748-25-8), and establishing many of the basic safety procedures used in cave and overhead diving. Exley was also a pioneer of extreme deep water diving.

Exley began diving at the age of 16 in 1965. That very year he entered his first cave and was hooked on cave diving for the remaining 29 years of his life.

He is often credited with developing the 'Octopus', a secondary regulator that divers can use to share breathing gas with their companion if there is an equipment failure or their companion runs out of breathing gas.

He was the first in the world to log over 1,000 cave dives (at the age of 23): in over 29 years of cave diving, he made over 4,000. He is one of the few divers to survive a 400 ft dive on compressed air, despite the fact that Nitrogen and Oxygen become highly toxic at those depths.

He died at 45 on April 6, 1994 while attempting to descend to a depth of over 300 metres (1,000 feet) in a cave called Nacimiento del Rio Mante in Mexico. His body was only recovered because he had hooked his arms in the descent line, perhaps to sort out gas issues. His wrist-mounted dive computer read a maximum depth of 879 feet.