GUE, DIR, George Irvine, Rob Palmer, 100m on air… wait, WHAT?

It was last nights before my first GUE course… I already finished the online theory part and was checking tabs that I’ve opened while going through the GUE history block. The one was about the founders: George Irvine and Jarrod Jablonski – cave divers of Woodville Karst Plain Project (WKPP).

So I started with a search for their names, and quickly discovered one long read Fear and Loathing on the Internet, which is an interesting post to read. While reading it I came over this sentance:

Then on May 5th, my good friend Rob Palmer was killed in an unexplained accident in the Red Sea.

And I don’t remember why, but I decided to search for that *Rob Palmer – the name I never met before – and what I’ve found blew my mind. The long read I’ve found is Get It Wrong And You’re Dead published Divernet on March 24, 1999 at 5:16 pm. That one worth reading in full! I’ll quote a joke from the kicker:

Cave divers used to tell a joke about some of their number who died and went to Heaven. St Peter met them at the Pearly Gates and asked what they wanted to find in their perfect Heaven. A wonderful cave system that no one had been in before, they replied.

Soon they were swimming through a magnificent cave. Suddenly, a diver on a big black Aqua-Zepp scooter roared up from behind them, hooked on to their line and shot off ahead into the system.

The cave divers went back to St Peter to complain that they were not the first into the cave.

“Who was that guy with the big black Aqua-Zepp?” they asked. “Was it God?” “No,” replied St Peter. “That’s Rob Palmer. He only thinks he’s God.”

The ones I was surprized (to say the least) of – I’ll quote here too, feel free to read that post yourself:

Tim and Rob each went in armed with a twinset of air and a sling-tank of nitrox 50 for decompression.

…

I took a casual look at Rob’s computer. At first I thought it read “12m”. A chill ran through me when I realised I had misread “120m”!

… dive with a PO2 of more than 2.7 bar, when he had always advocated an absolute maximum of 1.6 bar.

…

When he expressed the mind-boggling opinion that a PO2 of 3 bar was “safe”, he did so in private.

…

The scene was a typical deep-water reef in the Giftun Islands. It was Jane who, during the descent, decided to stop at 70m. Tim and Jean-Michel say they stopped at 107m, … Rob was last seen below the others, apparently waving them to continue on down.

… within days of Rob’s death, Mila went diving with me and chose to ignore our pre-dive chosen depth limit. I parted company with him at 65m and he surfaced a good time after me with 120m logged on his computer.