The author of this page is a born-again Christian first, all other things afterwards. Here is the story of his conversion.

Welcome to "solocavediver.com"

This is in fact Charles Read's scuba webpage. I appropriated the web addresses "www.solocavediver.com" and "solocavediver.com" - which are precisely equivalent - because I thought that would be cute, and because roughly half of the diving logbook entries below are about solo cavedives. I intend to add more stuff that's specific to the topic of solo cavediving. Please send comments and corrections to read@maths.leeds.ac.uk. N.B. one correction that some might like to see is if the above cavediver made less of a dangly of his primary reel. We'll work on it! Thanks to Steve Gerrard for taking the photos (see above and below!). The short index follows immediately. The fuller and more descriptive index is underneath it.

Short Index

Newest entry: my new year resolution is to put all trips (cavediving, caving, diving etc.) in one logbook this year. Here it is.
A dry caving trip to the Yorkshire Dales, and an even more recent one to the Derbyshire cave P8.
Cavediving logbooks, most recent first (that's my Florida trip at Easter 2006). Also the previous trip to Mexico includes links to my first attempts at cave photography, one of which you can see here, "A dive in Cenote Chan Hol". Photo quality not too brilliant but you are looking at a cave which only two people have ever seen in real life; in the latter part of the sequence you are looking at a passage which only I have ever seen in real life.
essay , in praise of solo cavediving.
a few annotated accident reports.
The Narked-at-50 British wreckdivers.
Saga of the Bridge II computer battery.
Re Ted Cole.
Re eurobatteries.com
Re Nitrox homebrewing.
Links etc.

Full Index.

The main contents of this webpage are my cavediving logbooks.

4 April '06

Florida trip from 24/3/06 to 8/4/06 .

Yucatan trip from 28/6/04 to 12/7/04 .

my trip to the Yucatan autumn '02,

the one at Easter '02,

the Mexico trip of autumn '01,

my general logbook for all other diving activities. (including my first ever cavedive).

What follows below consists of various other cavediving articles written by myself and others.

Added 11/2/03.

The Joys of Narked-At-50.

Narked-At-50 are a group of British "techie" wreck divers who dive just a little deeper than the average. Buddy inspiration rebreathers outnumber open-circuit rigs among their members (if my one trip's worth of experience with them is typical), and their more experienced divers are familiar with hundred meter deep dives in cool British waters and elsewhere. The 50 in the title Narked-At-50 of course refers to the metric depth of 50 meters (ca. 165 feet), at which one might reasonably expect to get a little woozy if breathing air. I did my first ever wreck dives in their company last weekend, which was really rather fun. Actually, really great fun. Click here for more details, including re my feeling that the element of risk is by no means reduced in every way if one goes wreck diving, rather than (solo) cavediving. (But if that was your first ever wreck dive why did you do it in the company of this "heavy brigade"? Well, (1) I like them and (2) I was very careful and (3) I seem to have a daredevil reputation to keep up, something which appears mysterious because as I say, in some ways wreck diving seems to me more risky than the cavedives I normally do. But then, everyone's happy in their normal environment).

Added 4/9/02.

The Saga of the Bridge II computer battery.

I had one of these go flat just before being due to go to Mexico, and far too late to send it off to Dive Rite for a replacement. See what happened next here . Note: some time after I published this, a British stockist sent me an email saying he now stocks the elusive CR3032. To check this out see Cell Pack Solutions at www.cellpacksolutions.com ; the entry for the CR3032 is at http://www.cellpacksolutions.com/Search_All.asp?searchall=cr3032 .

Added 4/9/02

High capacity NiMH D cells.

I'd like to advertise (they ain't paying me!) eurobatteries.com who as of this writing are selling 7 amp-hour 1.2 volt nickel metal hydride rechargeable D cells at Ł7.85 each, a keen price, and delivered them to my door (in the UK) in roughly 18 hours. Good job well done I say.

Added 30/8/02.

Coo! Fame!!!!

As some of you out there know, I am shortly going on another cavediving trip to Mexico - this is my summer holiday before I hit a heavy teaching load in the autumn term here in Leeds. I'm very lucky to be able to go twice in one year (last was over Easter). But Geoff, my buddy for half of the trip, reports that due to the huge fame of solocavediver.com, we are being gossipped about all over the world, with "what will they get up to" high on the agenda of lotsa dudes whose business it probably isn't. Well to all of you out there who aren't lucky enough to be actually getting wet, I make the following promise: all events will be faithfully reported here , in my usual style. Which as you know is sometimes controversial, but honest - I like to think you can really get the FEEL of a good cavedive by studying my logbooks. So to all my -hmmm- fan club out there, fear not - all will be revealed. But perhaps not instantly when I get back, as I said I'll have a fair old teaching load.

New 31/05/02. Saying something nice about "TC".

In the early part of my scuba logbook you can find some criticism of Ted Cole, the only one of my three diving instructors with whom I failed to get along. Now I naively assumed that I would keep the criticism anonymous by abbreviating his name to "TC" throughout - but there aren't that many cavediving instructors in the world, so it's pretty generally known that the comments refer to him. Since it would be implausible to pretend I didn't really mean it, I prefer to balance my comments with a short, honest article about some of his GOOD qualities - after all, we all have good and bad qualities, right? And with Ted, a certain particular good quality sticks very firmly in my mind. Click here for more details.

New! The Easter '02 Mexico Trip. Diving with Brent + Students again.

See here for the best dives of my Mexico trip of Easter '02. See here for the complete logbook for the whole trip.

"In Praise of Solo Cavediving"

A short essay on this topic will be found here Please note that though this is a statement of Yours Truly's philosophy about diving, it was rather written in haste (I received a couple of emails from DIR dudes asserting that I was nuts, and naturally wrote something with a view to winding them up further. I was Called... The Very Word of the Great Big Stalactite with the Loose Moorings came to me in a vision...) and it needs polishing. Also note that I still love diving with a buddy, though due to being busy and British I haven't managed to be in the same place at the same time as my American diving buddies for some time.

Disclaimer (Funerals Are Expensive).

One alarming suggestion I had over the emails is that someone might conceivably get the idea that reading my webpage is enough to turn them into cavedivers (solo or otherwise) too. This is not the case. If you act as if it were the case, you are likely to kill yourself. My email address is above and I'll be happy to point would be cavedivers to people who will train them. To be sure, I was not always trained up to the level of what I got up to myself; but I got SOME training, and later got the full cave certification and all that.

Diving Logbook.

Click here for my scuba diving logbook (mostly cavediving, rather more than half of which solo), up to around last March (March 2000). Click here for the Mexico trip I did just recently in August-September 2001. It contains accounts of 19 cavedives. The trip was unusual in that in fact all the dives were solo.

Nitrox Homebrewing.

Click here for mathematical info on how to homebrew Nitrox (partially fill the tank with pure O2, then top off with air).

Rebreather Project.

Click here for my d-i-y rebreather project. Some mail feedback and discussion is here. The G1 rebreather has now got about 25 dives on it.

Some links about rebreathers

You will find several photos of rebreathers at http://www.deepdiving.net/equipment.html; note how these have generally been modified in interesting ways. The whole site http://www.deepdiving.net has an attractive sense of humour which may remind you of Crestline a bit (see below).
The famous (infamous) Crestline Experimental Dive Unit (CEDU).
Steam Machines, one RB manufacturer.
Click here for an article about an experimental CO2 sensor, in PDF format.

Others:

Click here for some newsarticles I considered wiser than the average.
Click here for the British Cave Diving Group.
Click here for "diver net".
Click here for how to work out homebrew Nitrox mixes correctly.
Click here for how to correct homebrew Nitrox mixes for van der Waals effect.
Here is a paper by Erik C. Baker about calculating "no-stop" times. The originals to this and the next four papers are on http://www.gap-software.com/decotheory.html
Here is a paper by Erik C. Baker about understanding "M-values".
Here is a paper by Erik C. Baker about "deep stops".
Here is a paper by Erik C. Baker about ox-tox calculations.
Here is a general "deco tutorial" by Erik C. Baker. Quite long - but excellently written, like the rest of this sequence of papers.
Click here for a few sites I haven't dived but have had recommended.
scuba article
scuba rebreather article
dive site
phys.html Diving physiology
springs.html list of Florida springs
Click here for an article about using zinc-air cells as O2 sensors [NB this doesn't work well enough to be used underwater. I tried it!]
Click here for an interesting account of how to use bubble models for decompression strategies. The full mathematical description is in one of the references, rather poorly written though IMHO. I may write something myself at some point.
Click here for general caving information.
The UKRS web site is here.
Here are some photos...