The only sound is the hiss of air, the ‘phutt’ of the demand valve closing and the gurgling bubbles of escaped breath, which seem to explode if the roof of the passage is close above. An air cylinder strikes a protruding rock and there is a hollow, reverberating-yet-muffled clang. The diver is in a tiny pool of light, filtered and distorted by the waters around him. His only point of reference is the bed of the passage. He is like the lunar module, skimming the surface of the moon, pebbles and rocks replacing craters, yet there is life in this strange world. A shoal of freshwater shrimps, transparent and colourless, stampede through the beam of light, but the diver is in an environment more alien, more threatening than the cold dark waters of the North Sea, as remote as the emptiness of space, for the waters he penetrates are contained by solid rock. He has swum through long corridors, wriggled through constrictions in a fog of mud, forever fearful of a cylinder jamming against a protruding rock, a hose being caught or torn, mindful his next breath might suck water not air. He does not know where the passage leads, does not know what might be beyond the limits of his beam of light. His only way back, along a maze of waterlogged passages, is the guide line he has laid behind him. Should his equipment fail or should he lose that line, a dark, lonely death will inevitably follow. He must keep cool in a situation which is a scenario for most people’s nightmares.
Cave diving is at the extreme end of caving and it allows the cave explorer to venture where otherwise he would have had to admit defeat. The sport of caving has never had as wide a following as more visible and easy to publicise activities. It can boast no obvious Everests, for it can never be known for certain if one cave is indubitably the deepest or the longest in the world. There might always be another just waiting to be found. And yet this is also the fascination of caving, for on a planet that has had its surface thoroughly explored, whose every mountain peak is known and almost all the highest ones climbed by at least one route, and whose every ocean has been crossed, caving still gives vast scope for exploration, not just in distant parts, but beneath the gentle, rolling hills of the Yorkshire Dales, the Mendips and South Wales. Wherever there is limestone there are also caves, sinuous passages, gaping chasms, gigantic chambers, rivers, torrents and lakes, all formed by the slow, pervasive action of water on the calcium carbonate of limestone. Cavers use what artificial aids they can devise to help their exploration; they dig and even blast their way through blocked passages, but the amount of technology that can be used is strictly limited by the nature of the caves themselves. Everything has to be carried, shoved and pulled through narrow passages, down flue-like holes. This in itself defeats most modern technology. Man is still the most effective machine in the close confines of a cave.
In the early 1950s cavers were intrigued by a system in the Yorkshire Dales between the villages of Dent and Ingleton. Skeletal outcrops of limestone, whitened by weathering, give a hint of what lies beneath; streams vanish into the hillside and then reappear lower down the slopes. One of these streams emerges in a pool at Keld Head in Kingsdale. A large team had drained the pool, hoping to penetrate the passage that led into it, but they were stopped after a few metres by flowing water filling the entire passage. Cave diving was still in its infancy. The Yorkshire cavers were prepared for short sections of waterlogged passage, which they free-dived, relying on coming up for air after only a few metres. It was a very frightening game, for if there was no air pocket, the diver then had to turn round, or if there was insufficient room, back out and return to the surface before he ran out of breath.
Keld Head was left alone for nearly thirty years, its questions remained unanswered. The pattern of water inlets and caves explored around the high hill mass of Gragareth, extending over the three county boundaries of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire, showed that all these systems must somehow be linked underground with many kilometres of passages, many of them waterlogged, but, equally, with many of them drained and empty, just waiting for the explorer to find them. A map of the caves already discovered was a little like an early map of Africa, with the spidery routes of European explorers slowly creeping forward into the dark unknown. Keld Head was of special interest to the cave diver for here there were clearly two caving systems, about two kilometres apart, linked by flooded passages.
Geoff Yeadon was one of the cave divers who was to play a major part in linking them together. In appearance he has an uncanny resemblance to Mick Jagger, with the same large sensual mouth and slightly protruding jaw, framed by shoulder-length hair. Born in 1950, just before the first effort was made to penetrate the mysteries of Keld Head, he was brought up in Skipton and went to the local grammar school, where he was fortunate enough to be introduced to caving at the age of eleven by one of the teachers, David Heap, an enthusiast who had started a caving club. In the early 1960s the neoprene wetsuit had not yet been developed and the caver made do with a pair of overalls and layers of woollen clothing underneath, that soon became soaked in a wet cave. But Geoff Yeadon never looked back. He took being saturated for hours on end completely for granted. He explored most of the difficult known caves in the Yorkshire area, helped discover a major caving system in Arctic Norway and in 1970 joined an expedition to the Gouffre Berger, which had only just lost its title as the deepest known cave in the world. Descending such a cave was like a Himalayan expedition in reverse, for it required thousands of metres of fixed rope and electron ladders, all of which had to be manhandled down narrow passages and deep shafts. It also meant camping on the way down, since it was too long a system to complete in one push. The main party had reached the second camp, in a huge chamber, and were all asleep, when another member of the team, Oliver Statham (known as ‘Bear’ because of his size and strength) came plummeting down the rope on his way to attempt the first complete descent and re-ascent in a day. In fact, Statham had come down prematurely, for they had not yet rigged the lower part of the cave. However, Geoff Yeadon decided to accompany him for the final push down, both on grounds of safety and to help carry the ropes. They managed to establish the record and, at the same time, started a partnership that was eventually to lead them from caving to one of the boldest cave dives that has ever been made.
Oliver Statham came from a very different background to Geoff Yeadon. Son of an ambassador, he had gone to Sedbergh School in North Yorkshire (now Cumbria) in the midst of superb caving country. He also had started caving while at school. Both of them had gone on to art college and had specialised in pottery. Geoff was now at the Bath Art College and Oliver was working in his own pottery in Skipton.
It was around this time that Keld Head came back into the picture. Oliver Statham had met a cave diver called Mike Wooding who had just undertaken one of the longest and boldest dives made so far in Britain. He had tried to penetrate Keld Head, diving over 300 metres into a labyrinth of water-filled passages. Somehow he had missed the main watercourse and had ended up in a cul-de-sac. Oliver Statham became intrigued by the challenge of cave diving and passed on his interest to Geoff Yeadon. Oliver’s introduction was characteristic of his personality at that time. His first dive, without a full mask, flippers, or any form of training, was through a twenty-four-metre sump. It was a matter of putting an air bottle on his back, clenching the mouthpiece for the air line and valve between his teeth, and following the line through.
Geoff Yeadon was attracted by the idea but approached it slightly more cautiously and methodically, joining the Cave Diving Group to borrow equipment and going on regular training sessions, starting in the swimming baths of Bristol University. At the end of his period in college, Geoff came back north to do his teacher’s training in Leeds. He and Oliver Statham were now able to cave dive together. They could afford to buy their own aqualung equipment and compressed air bottles and chose Boreham Cave in Upper Wharfedale for their first major exploration. Their initial attempt was abortive and very nearly fatal. The first sump, which was forty-six metres long, had already been dived and they knew that it was quite straightforward. Oliver, therefore, did not bother to fit his spare demand valve, but carried it packed away in an ammunition box. He dived first, followed by Geoff. They were very nearly through when Geoff saw Oliver’s light coming back towards him. As he came up to Geoff, he made a few frantic gestures towards his valve to indicate that it wasn’t working. One emergency procedure is to share a mouthpiece, taking alternate gulps of air from the same apparatus. This, however, needs very cool nerves and a high level of practice and understanding. Oliver, his lungs already bursting, couldn’t afford to wait and swept past Geoff in a desperate bid for air, but on the way the tube leading to his mouthpiece caught round Geoff’s cylinder, so that Oliver was now towing Geoff. Geoff quickly unhooked his tube from the valve to free himself and Oliver shot off like a torpedo. Geoff followed, hoping that if his friend did lose consciousness before getting back to the surface, he might just be able to tow him to safety and revive him. But Oliver made it and when Geoff followed to the surface, he was already lying on the side of the pool gulping in the air with great, agonised gasps. He had swum over thirty metres under water without the benefit of his air supply.
Nothing daunted, they returned to Boreham Cave a few weeks later. Another cave diver had started through the next sump in the early 1960s. There were reports of a narrow squeeze, so tight that you had to take off your cylinder and push it through in front of you. This time Geoff set out, leaving Oliver sitting at the side of the underwater stream where it vanished into the rock. The role of support diver is more psychological than anything else, for there is little he can do if anything goes wrong. It is not like being second man on a climb. If his partner does not come back within the prescribed time, he has to plunge into the water and follow the line to find out what has happened. It is just possible that the first diver could have run out of air or experienced a technical fault and has managed to find an air pocket in which to wait for help. But if there has been a serious delay, it is more likely that he has drowned.
The tension is always less for the leader. Geoff was now engrossed in finding a way through the first squeeze, as the walls converged around him. Getting himself and his bottles at the right angle, he was able to slide through the hole. This was the first time he had been underwater in an unexplored cave.
‘I remember being incredibly excited by the size of this huge tunnel, the water all blue, stretching away from me, with no other lines going into it except the one I had in my hand on the line reel. I just finned off into the distance and the tunnel wound round. Occasionally there were lower bits to one side that I vaguely noticed, but I was so excited that everything was a bit of a daze. I didn’t really take it all in.
‘Eventually I popped up into an air space. It was tiny and I had to wriggle along sideways. I really wanted to go back then, but I had no excuse. There was plenty of line on the reel and I still had enough air. I was well within the thirds safety margin used by cave divers. That is, a third of your air to go in, a third to come out and a third for emergency. There was no reason to go back except in my head. My head kept telling me I wanted to go back, but I carried on.’
He dived back into the water through another hole, came to another air space, slithered down a waterfall into yet another sump, this time twenty-four metres long, with another air space beyond that, and so it went on until at last, 165 metres from the start, he had run out of line and had an excuse to turn back. On the way in, the water had been beautifully clear, but he had disturbed the fine sediment on the bed, so that going back it was like being in a dense fog. His light bounced back on the myriad particles held suspended in the water and he could see little more than a few centimetres in front of his mask. It was a question of following the life line, since he had no sense of direction or scale, but he now found that the root above him was closing in, pressing him down on to the bed of the cave.
‘I remember thinking it definitely wasn’t this low. I had my head on one side, grinding over pebbles. I couldn’t see a damn thing and, with my head on one side, occasionally I’d get a gulp of water which made me very aware that I was underwater and a long way from home. I had to keep stopping to calm down because my breathing rate kept going up and I knew that if I didn’t calm down and slow my breathing rate down, I wasn’t going to get out.’
Geoff had made one mistake on the way in which could have cost him his life. He had omitted to anchor the line down on the outside of the corners he had turned and, as a result, it had been pulled tight round the bends in the narrowest part of the bedding plane. He had to keep hold of the line somehow, for, once lost, he would never have found his way back. But by dint of resting, wriggling and easing the line from the tightest edges of the passage, he finally managed to get back to where his partner was waiting by the side of the pool. This was the last time that Oliver Statham went cave diving for a period of six months. Even so, he needed the stimulus of risk in his life and sought it in the sky instead; he took up hang-gliding.
Geoff Yeadon’s first exploratory dive was considerably bolder than almost any that had been made in Britain at this time and he had learnt a great deal from the experience. He returned to Boreham Cave a few months later, anchored the line to keep it in the wider parts of the passage, and swam into the further recesses of the hole.
‘It was like a cresta run, only underwater. It was a beautiful feeling, just flying through this tube without touching the roof or floor, banking over at the corners, with the line reel ticking out. There were beautiful curves, just like a snake with smooth silt banks on either side. I kept glancing behind me and could see this cloud of silt coming up after me. It was a good, safe passage with no nasty nicks in the corners – it was more like an arched tunnel. Then a peculiar phenomenon occurred in front. It was a layer, like a cloud of brown water approaching at roof level and I was in clear water underneath. Then this gradually came down until I was entirely in brown water, and then, unfortunately, the line ran out.’
The only explanation seemed that there must have been an inlet, carrying running water, flowing over the still water through which he had been swimming.
Geoff Yeadon continued his exploration of Boreham Cave, stretching his own limits and developing the techniques that were later going to stand him in good stead in Keld Head. His club bought him a larger air bottle to give him greater range, and to combat the debilitating cold he wore three wetsuits, as he embarked on progressively longer dives, finally making one of 762 metres down the outlet that he had sensed was there when he had encountered the ceiling of discoloured water. It was cave exploration at its best and it was this facet that intrigued Geoff as much as the element of making records. He was mapping the cave as he dived, noting compass bearings and distances on a small slate.
It was around this time that Oliver Statham began caving once more. He and Geoff got on well as friends, eventually working together in their pottery, and soon most of their cave diving energies were directed into solving the problems of Keld Head. This was to become a long drawn out siege over a period of years rather than months. In their approach to it they now worked as one, developing techniques and equipment to cater for the sheer scale of a challenge which was at the extreme limit of cave diving expertise.
There was always the problem of funds, for they certainly couldn’t afford to purchase the specialised equipment, but here the record nature of the dive became useful. Oliver Statham managed to persuade a diving manufacturer to supply them with specially modified dry suits on reduced terms. Dry suits work on a different principle from wetsuits, for they seal the body in a cocoon of air which can be adjusted to allow for different levels of buoyancy by means of an inlet valve from the breathing system, and an escape valve to release excess air. They are not only warmer than wetsuits but, perhaps more important, they insulate the diver from the water around him, making him feel that he has the security, however illusory, of being in a submarine. Using these suits, Statham and Yeadon made a series of forays into Keld Head, taking it in turns to run out the full contents of a reel before turning back to allow the other to follow it and then run out another length.
The downstream entrance of Keld Head was a labyrinth of waterlogged passages festooned with the guide lines of previous attempts. One of the first jobs was to clear these out of the way to avoid dangerous confusion. They got some help from fellow cave divers in doing this and it was during the clearing operation that the body of Alan Erith, a novice cave diver who had lost his life about four years earlier, was found. Geoff Yeadon and Oliver Statham helped in the recovery operation before returning to their own exploration. They had already run out 300 metres of line and were obviously in the main passage, which they hoped led to the Kingsdale Master Cave system, about one and a half kilometres away. They were also gaining in confidence.
‘We really became more like fish. We’d stop and rest on the bottom, sitting down on a rock, nattering to each other on our slates. We even had drinks of water because we found that after an hour of surveying and swimming you started getting a dry throat from the dryness of the air. You just took your mouthpiece out and had a drink.’
And, weekend by weekend, they pushed the route out; to 450 metres, then 600 metres, then 690. It was a slow, painstaking process. It took a week just to prepare for a dive, to check over all the equipment, clean it, grease it with a silicone spray, get all the bottles filled, and then check each valve again.
At this stage Oliver and Geoff began working from opposite ends of the system. Oliver had hurt his back, so concentrated on the Keld Head end which did not involve any caving prior to the dive, while Geoff started trying to find the way down from the Kingsdale cave back towards Keld Head. There was a low sloping passage to the first sump, and he worked on this through the summer of 1976, always on his own, relying on casual help from cavers on their way down to help carry his gear to the first sump. This was in a chamber like a gigantic shower, with the water pattering out of the dark above on to the pool into which he was going to dive. The pool led into a maze of winding, water-filled tunnels and blind alleys.
‘I got to a five-way junction. It was completely bewildering. I just belayed the line to a rock and sat down (still submerged, of course) and looked at my compass and thought, “Which one’s Keld Head?” I picked what I thought was the right way and it dropped down a shaft which led into a big river tunnel. The flow increased and the place became enormously wide, but I wasn’t quite sure where it was going. I just kept on a bearing, heading in roughly the right direction, until I ran out of line. The next trip it burst out into this incredible blackness with the floor dropping away downward and the roof shooting away up. The water was so clear I thought I might have wandered into another ox-bow but then it narrowed down so much that I would have had to take my cylinders off to squeeze through so I decided that this could not possibly be the way to Keld Head.’
He had made, altogether, six dives from the Kingsdale Master Cave but still seemed nowhere nearer finding the connection with Keld Head. It had been lonely and, at times, frightening work and on one occasion he could very easily have lost his life. He was on his way back, finning quickly through the murky waters, and had just exhaled. When he inhaled, he received a mouthful of water instead of air. He could not see what was wrong because of the murk; it all had to be done by touch, with gloved fingers. He felt his mask and found that all he was left with was the disconnected rubber mouthpiece, the other bits having dropped off. He had to find the other valve, but this also had to be done by touch. The tubes were exactly the same thickness and on his first attempt he followed the wrong tube. His lungs were now bursting – it was like trying to hold your breath for thirty seconds after completing a hundred-metre sprint. He was consciously slowing himself down, even though his body was beginning to take over in its desperate need for air, with muscular spasms in his lungs and involuntary twitching in his fingers that made it even harder to follow the tube down to the spare valve. At last he found it, brought it up to the mouthpiece, stuffed it in and pressed the button that would blow out the water flooding the system. He could breathe again. He lay on the bottom of the passage for some minutes to get his panting back under control before finning slowly back to the cave where he had started his dive. That was another lesson learnt. Never go that fast again. You’ve got to move slowly the whole time to keep your breathing rate down so that if anything does go wrong you can hold your breath for a long time.’ Because of the difficult access to the start of the dive, Geoff could only wear a wetsuit while diving from the Kingsdale Master Cave and carry a limited quantity of bottles. Eventually he felt he could go no further from that end. In February 1977 he made one more attempt from Keld Head, extending the line to 920 metres, which established yet another record for British diving and equalled the European record. They were also getting near to the link-up point from the Kingsdale Cave but, unfortunately, the limits reached by the two explorations were on different levels. The Keld Head passage seemed to be about eighteen metres below the last point that Geoff had reached from the Kingsdale end, and it could be difficult finding the connection between the two levels. In addition, they were now at the limit of the capacity of their bottles.
Meanwhile, Oliver had been writing to cave divers around the world to find out what they were doing. It was such a young activity that communication between different groups was still very poor. One of his correspondents was Jochen Hasenmayer, a very experienced German cave diver. He was intrigued by what he heard about Keld Head and offered to come over to help. Geoff was immediately impressed by Jochen, saying: ‘We found that what we thought we’d been pioneering, he’d been doing nineteen years before.’
They were now ready for the big effort to join up with the Kingsdale Master Cave system. They decided to set out at three-quarter-hour intervals with Jochen Hasenmayer, who had larger capacity cylinders, going first, followed by Oliver Statham and then Geoff Yeadon. There had been a lot of rain and, consequently, the visibility was appalling. They could see little more than an arm’s length ahead of them.
Jochen swam strongly to the end of the line and then set out, feeling his way along the bed of the cave. Geoff had gone into a cul-de-sac on his previous attempt, but Jochen sensed that there should be a route out to the left. He came upon a narrow fissure only forty-five centimetres wide. Jochen had his big cylinders mounted on his back and this made it particularly difficult and dangerous wriggling through narrow sections, since he was unable to see or even feel anything that might foul the back of the cylinders. Even so, he managed to worm his way through the gap to find that it widened out beyond, but the roof had dropped to a much lower level. He squeezed through, however, and continued running out the reel in a broader channel until it came to an end. Anchoring it in position, he started back, following the line. He had made the same mistake that Geoff Yeadon made on his first long exploratory dive in the Boreham Cave, for he had not anchored the line in places where the route went round corners. So, on his return, he found it had shifted into the side where it was much too shallow for him to squeeze through. Very quickly you lose all sense of direction. He was over 914 metres from the entrance in almost nil visibility. The more he searched and pushed and struggled, the more silt swirled up until he could barely see anything more than a few centimetres from his face.
Oliver Statham had set out three-quarters of an hour behind Jochen and followed the line to the constriction. He had one bottle mounted on his back and one on either side. This meant that his side dimensions were wider than Jochen’s, so it was even more difficult, if not impossible, for the big man to wriggle through the narrow gap. He was already very close to using up a third of his air supply and so, desperately worried, he started back down the line, to meet Geoff, who had set out another three-quarters of an hour behind Oliver.
Geoff Yeadon told me:
‘I met Bear at about 2,750 feet, coming back. I immediately felt apprehensive because, of course, it should have been Jochen who came back first, and then Bear wrote this ghastly note on my slate: “3,000, small with back and sides” – which meant the bottles mounted back and side – “No Jochen. Trouble???!!!”
‘I replied on the slate: “I will go and look and then turn back.”’
Geoff swam on along the line until he reached the constriction. Peering into the gloom he was unable to see any sign of Jochen. He had the same problem as Oliver, for he also had one back-mounted and two side-mounted bottles. He decided to wait until a third of his air had been exhausted before returning. And so he waited in the cold, cloudy water, increasingly worried because Jochen had now been in the cave for more than an hour longer than he and so, even allowing for the greater capacity of his bottles, must be nearing the end of his reserves. There was also the terrible conflict of wanting to do something to help but being helpless to do it and having to face the prospect of abandoning a diving partner to his fate. He had very nearly exhausted his ration of air, and was steeling himself to return, when he felt the rope in his hand twitch. Jochen must be somewhere near. He tugged the rope, just to show Jochen that someone was close by and then somehow wriggled and jammed himself through the narrow gap so that he could at last see the dull, suffused glow of Jochen’s head lights only one and half metres away. But between them a sandbank on the base of the passage pushed up to within a few centimetres of the roof. Jochen had not seen Geoff’s light and was trying to get through at another point. There was no communication between them. Jochen was not even able to interpret the twitches on the line which he had felt. It could easily have meant that one of the others was stuck as well. And then Jochen’s light vanished. He had obviously backed out and then pushed into another passage in his struggle to escape the trap.
There was nothing that Geoff could do, no way that he could catch Jochen’s attention. He did not dare go any further through the squeeze, since it would have been almost impossible to retreat with his back and side-mounted cylinders and the guide line now hopelessly out of position. It was hard enough wriggling backwards to get out. Each time he jammed, it could have been for good. Keep calm, slow down the breathing, edge forward a little, wriggle again, very gently, and at last he was out of the squeeze. He looked at his gauges and saw that he was well into his second third of air, but the situation was now very different. Jochen was close at hand and desperately needed his help. The line twitched again. Geoff wriggled once more part way through the squeeze, could see Jochen’s light, but Jochen was obviously not looking in his direction. Geoff retreated. His air was being consumed all too quickly, both because of the tension of the situation and because he was eighteen metres below the water surface level, which meant he was using air at three times the rate he would have consumed it just beneath the surface. And then Jochen’s light appeared once more, but this time through a hole much too small for anyone to have squeezed through. He had at last seen Geoff’s light and swum towards it until they were within touching distance. Geoff reached through and Jochen grasped his hand. Geoff told me:
‘I could feel his fingers and his whole arm trembling as he squeezed my hand. I couldn’t help wondering what the hell I’d do if he wouldn’t let go, but I just tried to keep my hand absolutely still, to show him that I was perfectly all right and in the right place. I was willing him in my mind to go back and have another go at finding the right way out, but there was no way I could communicate that. He just squeezed and squeezed and I’d give a reassuring squeeze back and then, eventually, he let go, patted me on the hand and backed away. I interpreted this either that he was being a Captain Oates, going away and telling me to get out while I could, or that he was going to have another go. I was convinced at the time I was shaking a dead man’s hand.’
Geoff was now well into the second third of his air, but he waited by the squeeze, shining his light through it, hoping desperately that Jochen would now find the right way through, and this time he managed it, skirting the sandbank and, still clinging to the line, he manoeuvred himself through the awkward dog-leg leading back to safety. As he came through, Geoff cautiously held back in the roof of the passage. There were tales of divers in both Australia and Florida who had run out of air underwater and had attacked their companions in a desperate effort to take away their air bottles in a fight for survival.
‘I didn’t know Jochen that well, so decided to keep my distance. I was holding the line so he’d be able to find me but I was in a position to see how nasty he was looking when he came out of the hole.’
In fact Jochen’s air just lasted out. One bottle was nearly empty, and there was a little more left in the second. He would not show anyone just how little there was, perhaps to avoid alarming his wife who was waiting at the entrance. Jochen did not want to talk about what had gone through his mind when he was trapped on the other side of what has become known as Dead Man’s Handshake. He could only say that it was a nightmare. The fact that he survived at all was due to an extraordinary level of control and, within hours of getting out, they were already planning their return, discussing how they could make the passage safer by anchoring out the guide line, using bigger bottles and changing the way they carried them. Geoff Yeadon set to work on his gear, making a set of harnesses that had four demand valves and four separate air supplies, all side-mounted. It was so heavy it made his back ache, even underwater. He had also evolved a new strategy to cope with the logistics of such a prolonged dive, planning to drop the two smaller bottles at 213 metres and 427 metres respectively, each of them with two-thirds of their capacity unused. This meant that he would have his reserves in place for the return and would only have to contend with the two large, side-mounted cylinders at the constriction by the Dead Man’s Handshake. He went in on 16 April 1977, dropped his bottles as planned, and reached the constriction, which he was now able to negotiate more easily. Mooring the line with lead weights ensured that it would stay in place, guiding them all through the dogleg at its widest and only feasible point. He went on to the end of Jochen’s line and reeled out another thirty metres, but he was now creeping over the third safety factor and he prudently returned. At 1,036 metres it was another European record. They were getting very close to his furthest point of exploration in the Kingsdale Master Cave, but they were still some eighteen metres below, and so the junction was as elusive as it had ever been. In addition, their cylinders were still not big enough to carry sufficient air to give them the reserves of safety they needed.
Another summer, autumn and winter went by. Geoff turned his attention once again to the Kingsdale Master Cave, doing another series of dives to try to find the vital link. On 11 June 1978, he organised himself a support team which enabled him to take in a dry suit, packed in a container, and big bottles for a long dive. This time he found the key, 732 metres into the labyrinth. He stumbled on to a passage he had not been down before and came across a hole in the floor. It was black and frightening, an abyss a long way from home.
On a practical level, a vertical shaft is potentially dangerous, for if it goes too deep and the pressures become too great, there are problems with buoyancy and the danger of getting the bends on coming back up to the surface. There is also the psychological barrier that a hole presents. It is so easy to imagine it going down forever into the depths of the earth. It’s a plunge, perhaps, into our own black sub-conscious. For Geoff, having a dry suit made all the difference, for he could regulate the pressure inside it and, through this, control his rate of descent. He sank steadily, counting off his descent with the depth gauge strapped to his wrist. It bottomed out at nearly nineteen metres. He was almost level with the Keld Head Cave. The passage swept away in the right direction, wide and inviting. He swam down it for sixty-one metres and, although he could see no sign of their exploration from the lower end, nor of the reel he had left the previous year, he sensed that he must be very nearly there. But he had now reached the vital third capacity and was forced to return.
Their effort had now reached expedition proportions in terms of commitment, time and expense. They therefore began to look for sponsorship, gaining a Royal Geographical Society grant to help buy the big-capacity bottles they so desperately needed. In July that same year, Jochen Hasenmayer came over again, bringing the bottles with him. They were ready to try once more from Keld Head on 6 July. They changed their system yet again, taking in two massive 160-cubic-foot bottles at either side and having a single ninety-cubic-foot bottle mounted on their backs in such a way that they could easily remove it. This was the one they were going to dump on the way in. They also decided to do the dives one at a time, with Oliver going in first then, after his return, Geoff, followed by Jochen.
For Oliver it was the chance to make the vital link, but he didn’t find the reel Geoff had left at his far point from the Kingsdale end. He had run out about sixty-one metres, so he should have met up with it; indeed, by their calculation, he should be well beyond it.
Puzzled, Geoff went in, following the route that had now become familiar, sliding carefully through the constriction and reaching the end of the line that Oliver had left. The moment is recorded by Geoff in Martyn Farr’s cave diving history, The Darkness Beckons:
‘Nevertheless, as I came to the end of the line and started to press on into the unknown, I became tensely alert, head jerking from side to side like a night owl. Somehow I found that environment distinctly more alien than, say, that of the Moon. The loneliness gnawed at my nerves as I strained to see the Kingsdale line which I knew must be close at hand. Suddenly an orange line came into view. At first I didn’t fully accept its existence but then I realised that I must have been swimming alongside it for some distance ... The connection had been made, yet somehow the triumph was tinged with a certain sadness that we hadn’t been able to do it together.’
Oliver Statham had been so close, for Geoff’s line from Kingsdale had been on the other side of the passage, a few feet away, obscured by the bad visibility. The joining of Kingsdale and Keld Head was, undoubtedly, the climax to an exploration into the real unknown that is no longer possible on the surface of the earth. But it wasn’t over, for a complete traverse still had to be made. Oliver Statham and Geoff Yeadon completed this on 16 January 1979. They had always worked as equals and never was this spirit more obvious than the moment when one of them had to take the lead on this record-breaking attempt. Unable to communicate, they both hung around just inside the entrance, neither wanting to go first. They made the through dive of 1,830 metres in two and a half hours and came out together. It was a world record for a continuous through trip between two caves with no available air spaces to use as staging posts. It meant total commitment. There have been longer dives since abroad, but none in anything approaching such appalling conditions of cold, poor visibility and constricted passageways.
There is also an immensely sad postscript to the end of this five-year saga of exploration, for in September 1979 Oliver Statham committed suicide. The huge stress of cave diving, the compelling need to be involved, which brought him back from his lay-off after his narrow escape in Boreham Cave, or maybe that escalator created by fame with the constantly repeated questions – ‘What are you going to do next?’ – possibly, for him, they were too much. One cannot really know. But it was the end of a remarkably complementary partnership which had been essential to solving the problems of Keld Head.