Yet again, a new world record.

[tekmac]

South African scuba supremo Nuno Gomes is the deepest diver in the world. On Friday, after 12 hours and 20 minutes of Red Sea time, Gomes surfaced with a new world record under his belt.

Official measurements revealed he had reached a depth of 318.25m.

Gomes, a 52-year-old engineer, reached a depth the length of the Eiffel Tower, including the aerial at the top.

Even though he had planned to go to 320m, his plunge was still enough to beat Mark Ellyatt's 313m record set in Thailand in 2003.

It took Gomes about 20 minutes to reach that depth and 12 hours to surface in order to decompress.


Gomes is one of only a handful of divers who have been below 250m.

In fact, more people have gone to the moon than have gone to that depth.

He now holds the world records for the deepest sea and deepest cave dives.

In 1996 he descended into the inky blackness of Boesmansgat, in the Northern Cape, 282.6m under water.
Source-Cape Times on June 13, 2005

[Argo]

WOW 52 yrs old and he managed that............... hope for me yet ;D

[LSDeep]

well argo, 325m is calling your name ;D! i am happy to be part of the support team.

[LSDeep]

ORMOC, Philippines (29 May 2005) -- A nine-man technical diver team has set a new deep wreck scuba diving world record of 193 meters (633 feet).

Lead diver Rob Lalumiere reached the deck of the USS Cooper this morning at 8:22am, seven minutes after starting his descent, and placed a memorial plaque on the shipwreck to honor the 191 officers and crew who went down with the ship when it was torpedoed by the Japanese during the Battle of Ormoc Bay on December 3, 1944.

Over five hours later, as Lalumiere was completing his last required decompression stop at a depth of three meters, surviving USS Cooper crew 81-year-old Henry "Hank" Wagener asked to be taken from the surface support vessel to the top of the descent line which was connected to the ship he served aboard 60 years ago.

There Wagener waited for Lalumiere to surface as he held the descent line to "touch the souls" of his fallen comrades.

At 1:45pm, exactly five and a half hours after the dive started, Lalumiere resurfaced and shared an emotional embrace with Hank Wagener followed by high-fives and handshakes from the many tired but elated team members who worked for many months planning and preparing for the dive.

World record dive

Lalumiere, the eight other members of the technical diving team and the surface support crew downplayed the record.

"While world records attract a lot of attention, that's not what this dive was about...we just wanted to pay our respects to the brave men who came before us and made the ultimate sacrifice at Ormoc Bay in 1944," said surface support team manager Roscoe Thompson of Action Divers in Puerto Galera.

"On the technical side, deep dives are always extremely demanding and this one more so because it was deeper than any previous wreck dive on open circuit scuba," Thompson added. "But again, the true significance of the depth of the dive is not the record...it's the fact that we are gradually expanding the envelope so that research and wreck divers throughout the world scuba diving community can safely explore sites that have always been considered too deep even for the most proficient technical divers."

Search for the missing destroyer

For decades, the exact location of the USS Cooper remained a mystery. Official documents seemed to indicate the destroyer was in relatively shallow water but despite many dives in the area, the wreck had never been found.

Enter deep wreck technical diver and World War Two history buff Rob Lalumiere. Determined to find the missing destroyer, Lalumiere teamed up with Ron Babuka, the son of William Babuka, a crew aboard the USS Sumner during the Battle of Ormoc Bay.

Babuka plotted the track the three destroyers took as they entered Ormoc Bay and engaged the enemy in battle. Using Babuka's work, official logs, and action reports from the surviving USS Sumner and Moale, Lalumiere targeted probably locations, mapped them from the surface with a depth sounder and then started a series of deep dives.

In early 2004, nearly 60 years after the USS Cooper sank, Lalumiere found the wreck at a depth of 220 meters (720 feet) and immediately started planning the world-record dive that would honor the 191 officers and crew who went down with the ship.

source: cdnn

[Argo]

admin said:

well argo, 325m is calling your name ;D! i am happy to be part of the support team.

Thx for the offer man BUT my days of deep diving are long over, My deepest was 181mtr but that was back in the days I worked the oil platforms and bell diving was at its peak. Today I'm not really interested unless there's a special reason to go there, e.g. a nice unfound wreck for example.

Argo

[LSDeep]

CORSICA (9 July 2005) -- Just weeks after Nuno Gomes set a new deep diving record of 318 meters, technical diver Pascal Bernabe reached 330 meters on open circuit scuba.

Bernabe, 41, descended to the record depth in 10 minutes but needed 8 hours and 49 minutes to resurface in order to avoid decompression illness.

The Frenchman trained for three years to set the record and finally succeeded on his fifth attempt.

The support team of 30 people included 12 divers who were actually in the water for the record dive.

Bernabe was the primary support diver for free diver Audrey Mestre when she died attempting to set a new no limits free diving record on October 12, 2002.


argo you got to hurry, it just gets deeper mate! i will be still a happy part of your support team , sure i can find you a wreck in this depth range

[Argo]

d**n !! LOL you beat me to it with the Frenchman........ I just dbl posted..........**'**!!