Cave dive is equipment intensive. Life support is always paramount in any type of diving, but the inaccessability of an air surface during a cave dive requires a heavily modified configuration.

Mitigating the risk of loosing one's sight, thru light failure, siltout, disturbed halocline or mask loss, compounds the need for gear that is usually absent when diving in open waters.

When cave diving you carry two tanks, with independent air regulators. The tanks are commonly connected thru a manifold, in such a way that if one regulator fails, the gas in both tanks is still available thru the remaining functioning regulator. One of the regulators second stage is on a 2 metre hose, so that you can still share gas even if you are negotiating restrictions that do not allow divers to pass side by side.

Effectively you carry gas for you and for your buddy. So our systems are quadruply redundant from a gas perspective.

We carry 3 light sources each. So you would have to have a sextuple failure to be left in the dark. We carry safety spools or reels for emergency searches. We carry spare masks. We carry line cutters. We carry markers to bread crumble our way out. We carry dual depth gauges. We carry dual manometers. Decompression tables and computers. Slates to write and communicate.

You can see all the paraphernalia here:



This amounts to well over 30kgs of gear.The real risk of cave diving is not to perish deep inside a cave, but to break your back on your way in or out...