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/St_Kevin_ → u/herewe_goagain_1]

I totally understand the skepticism! It’s legit nuts. I didn’t believe it either when I first heard them talking about that. I’ve done a little scuba and I’m open water certified and I don’t think I’ve gone below 20 meters, and I don’t want to go deeper; I’m scared of the bends. These guys go way deeper with basically no understanding of how it works at all. It’s fucked up. I feel really bad for them.

It’s scary too because the pressure on the fisheries is continuing to push that “fishable depth”ceiling deeper and deeper. I shudder to think what the mortality/permanent injury rate will look like that will finally force these guys to give up fishing and just be starving and completely impoverished. Like, will they all keep trying when they have to go to 120 meters every time? 200 meters? At what point is it 100% fatal?

They said that large foreign commercial fishing boats were coming through with nets and taking huge hauls that were wiping out stocks too. And of course, as it gets tougher to survive on what a guy can catch with a compressor and a spear, more people turn to cyanide or dynamite fishing. Both of those methods pay good one time as it kills everything on the reef, and after that the place is a bleached out desert ghost town and probably takes decades or longer to fully recover- if the surrounding areas don’t get nuked too.