Book Review -- Caverns Measureless To Man, Sheck Exley

If you've never heard of Sheck Exley, then chances are you've never spent much time in an underwater cave. Because when it came to underwater caving, Exley was, without a doubt, The Man. Even now, more than 15 years after his death, his accomplishments seem almost superhuman. And Caverns Measureless To Man is his diving autobiography (the title is taken from a line in the classic Samuel Taylor Coleridge poem Kubla Khan).

Caverns opens with Exley's introduction to Florida's underwater caves during a Boy Scout trip to Silver Springs in the late 1950s. Armed with a mask and a pair of fins, he pokes his head underwater, sees the opening to a cave, and is never quite able to pull his head back out again.

Exley went on to survive the 1960s, the early days of Florida cave diving when divers who became trapped in inside were drowning in record numbers. From there, he helped explore the Blue Holes of the Bahamas, made numerous solo dives to depths in excess of 500 feet in caves in Mexico and South Africa. Along the way, he also experimented with mixed gasses, becoming one of the pioneers of tech diving, while experiencing numerous mind-altering incidents of High Pressure Nervous Syndrome.

Obviously, Exley's final dive, on which he drowned while in Mexican ceynote while at depth in excess of 900 feet, isn't covered in Caverns. He wasn't around to write about it. But he wrote just about everything else, though. Never have I read a more dive-intensive book than this. If it doesn't pertain to diving, he didn't put it in. So much so that, after a while, it actually gets a bit repetitious -- one mind-blowing dive after another. But that's no reason to not read Caverns. Exley was an incredible guy and it's staggering to read the things he did.

For a shorter account of his exploits and of the birth of tech diving that I wrote for Wired Magazine a few years back, click here.

Caverns Measureless to Man was published in 1994 by Cave Books.