NB The site had become unavailable and has been retrieved thanks to the Internet Archive. Some sections are currently incomplete or missing, where the files were not archived and have not yet been located. It is hoped to add these in due course.

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 cavediving is my hobby, plenty of the diving is solo, and I do not approve of the hypocrisy whereby cavedivers pretend to deprecate solo cavediving when (1) most of them do it and (2) all of their instructors do it.
Thanks to Steve Gerrard for taking the photos (see above and below!).
Index.
- Cavediving logbook: Florida trip from 24/3/06 to 8/4/06 .
- Cavediving logbook: Yucatan trip from 28/6/04 to 12/7/04 .
- Cavediving logbook: my trip to the Yucatan autumn '02,
- Cavediving logbook: the one at Easter '02,
- Cavediving logbook: the Mexico trip of autumn '01,
- Cavediving logbook: my general logbook for all other diving activities. (including my first ever cavedive).
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.
-
"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.
-
Nitrox Homebrewing.
Click here
for mathematical info on how to homebrew Nitrox (partially fill the tank
with pure O2, then top off with air).
-
-
Click here
for the British Cave Diving Group.
- Click here
for "diver net".
-
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.
See
http://wrobell.it-zone.org/decotengu/
- 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 site I haven't dived but have had recommended.
- scuba rebreather article
- dive site
- Diving physiology
- list of Florida springs
-
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.
- Here are some photos...
