Records
Exley began diving in 1965 at the age of 16. That same year he entered his first cave and was hooked on cave diving for the remaining 29 years of his life. He was the first in the world to log over 1,000 cave dives (at the age of 23): in over 29 years of cave diving, he made over 4,000 dives.
Exley had an unusual resistance of nitrogen narcosis, and was one of the few divers to survive a 122 meter (400 ft) open-water dive on simple compressed air. In acting as a safety diver for two divers trying to set an air-only depth record in 1970, Exley reached (465 ft) in salt water, but could go no deeper due to narcosis and the start of blackout (the two record-depth attempting unconscious divers died just out of reach beneath him, and such air-depth records are no longer sought or recorded). During his diving career, he set numerous depth and cave penetration records.
Sheck Exley is one of only eleven people in the history of technical SCUBA diving to dive below 800 feet. His carefully planned multistage decompressions from these dives, in open water (not in a decompression tank) sometimes required times of as much as 13.5 hours. However, he never suffered a classic case of decompression sickness in his career.
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“It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a hell it is. And it’s always the war widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.”
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