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R/£ Joburg engineer dives to world record
August 08, 2006 Edition 1
Jonathan Ancer
Nuno Gomes is the world's deepest man - and he has the certificates to prove it.
Last week, the 53-year-old Johannesburg civil engineer opened an envelope that had come from Guinness World Records.
When he read that "the deepest scuba dive was achieved by Nuno Gomes of South Africa. 318,25m (1 044 feet) in the Red Sea on June 10 2005", he grinned broadly. It felt almost as good as when he came out of the sea a year ago.
"I'm thrilled. I knew I had the record, but I couldn't quite believe it until the certificate arrived. It's like the piece of paper that tells you that you have a degree."
Gomes had set out to reach 330m, but settled for - officially, at least - 318,25m, which is the height of the Eiffel Tower, including the aerial on top. His plunge was enough to beat Mark Ellyatt's 313m set in Thailand in 2003.
But why does he do it?
"I do it for the same reason people go to the moon. To see if it's possible to get there and then come back."
Gomes now holds both Guinness deep diving records - the deepest sea and deepest cave dives - after he went to 282,6m at Boesmansgat in the Northern Cape on August 23 1996.
"It has never been done before that someone holds both records," says Gomes.
Gomes took the rope that he used in the dive to an engineer at Pretoria University, who measured how much it would have stretched under water and worked out that Gomes had actually reached 321,81m. But Gomes is happy with his 318,25m record.
"I was only 8m short of my target. When I reached the mark, I knew I couldn't go another metre deeper. If I'd gone any deeper, it would have meant my death. The high pressure nervous syndrome was so bad that my whole body was going into convulsions.
"I was in danger of losing the regulator out of my mouth, and I was not sure I could retrieve it and place it back in my mouth. I knew that at that depth, if you stuff it up, you die. I wasn't prepared to die.
"I went very close to what was physically impossible. But I didn't think I was going to die. I had to make it. There was no choice."
On June 10 last year it took Gomes only 20 minutes to get to his 318,25m mark. But it had taken him more than four years of preparation to make sure that he surfaced safely.
Gomes, who started diving 28 years ago, says everything had been worked out to the minutest possible detail: the gas mixtures, the equipment, the timing of the dive, the decompression.
"We studied the dive from all angles. It was an exercise in minimising the risks to the lowest degree possible. It was also a self-examination of what one can and cannot achieve.
"It was about pushing the limits of science and technology. The appeal for me is to challenge the knowledge of what the human body can do, how far you can push yourself - and survive.
"My body took a hammering … It took me a few months to get back to the fitness level that I had before the dive."
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