Sheck Exley

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

[edit] Biography

Exley is widely regarded as one of the pioneers of cave diving,^[1] 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 in 1965 at the age of 16. 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 122 metre(400 ft) dive on compressed air.

He died aged 45 on April 6, 1994 while attempting to descend to a depth of over 300 metres (1,000 feet) in a cenote called Zacatón in Mexico^[2] , he was about 10 meters away from the bottom of the cenote. His body was recovered only 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 268 metres (879 feet). It is not certain what caused his death; team members concluded the causes "...could include stress of HPNS exacerbated by the narcotic effects of nitrogen at that depth". ^[3]