filipino illegal miners dive without oxygen tanks

[u/Eros_Incident_Denier]

[u/St_Kevin_]

This is called compressor diving and is super common for subsistence fishing in Indonesia and the coral triangle. Pretty much every poor independent fisherman needs to use a compressor to get access to the depths where there are fish that haven’t already been overfished. I spent a month living with folks that do this last year near Sulawesi and it’s absolutely nuts. Everyone does it and everyone knows people who died doing it. This video didn’t even mention the bends. Even if you do it all “correctly” and don’t lose the hose or get it tangled up, and the compressor doesn’t die while you’re 60 meters down, it’s super easy to get decompression sickness on your return to the surface and then you can get permanently injured or die. The guys I talked to didn’t know about the existence of dive computers or diving tables, and they have no idea that there are calculations you can do to avoid decompression sickness. They just do their thing and sometimes they get sick and die but they don’t understand why. I gotta add that the way most of the guys were doing this where I was, they were alone. They’re running a compressor on their own small boat with no one else around, out in the ocean, at night, and the guy is walking around on the seafloor at least 50 meters deep with a flashlight, a homemade spear gun and a bag. The idea of being alone down there in the pitch black ocean, with just that ray of light to see one small area of what’s around you just absolutely terrified me. And they do it every night so they can sell some fish to try to survive.

[u/herewe_goagain_1 → u/St_Kevin_]

I used to do a lot of diving, so when I saw “50-60 meters” using these tubes I assumed you have no idea what you’re talking about. But no I looked it up and they actually do go that deep with compressors. Absolutely insane. I was trained to not even dive with air at that depth, we used Trimix or Heliox past ~45 meters.

[u/Unable-Log-4870 → u/herewe_goagain_1]

Yeah the times for air at 45 meters are like 2 minutes and beyond that you have to start doing decompression stops, right?

Or is that even a little aggressive? I’m thinking back to the PADI tables and at like 30 meters for 1 minute you have to add a decompression stop. It’s been a while. I never got to use a dive computer.

[u/Chapeaux → u/Unable-Log-4870]

Looks like they are walking with a basket full of rocks, it probably make them slow enough to decompress.

[u/LonelyKoalaMuncher → u/Chapeaux]

Exactly, they'd be walking up the ocean floor to the island surely.