Nuno Gomes is a
scuba diver who lives in
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the most densely populated major city in the Un ...
. Born in
Lisbon, his family relocated to
Pretoria
Pretoria () is South Africa's administrative capital, serving as the seat of the executive branch of government, and as the host to all foreign embassies to South Africa.
Pretoria straddles the Apies River and extends eastward into the foot ...
when he was 14 years old.
He is the holder of two world records in deep diving (independently verified and approved by
Guinness World Records
''Guinness World Records'', known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as ''The Guinness Book of Records'' and in previous United States editions as ''The Guinness Book of World Records'', is a reference book published annually, listing world ...
), the cave diving record from 1996 to the present and the sea water record from 2005 to 2014.
Records
Gomes used self-contained underwater breathing apparatus to dive to a depth of in the sea.
The dive was done in the
Red Sea
The Red Sea ( ar, البحر الأحمر - بحر القلزم, translit=Modern: al-Baḥr al-ʾAḥmar, Medieval: Baḥr al-Qulzum; or ; Coptic: ⲫⲓⲟⲙ ⲛ̀ϩⲁϩ ''Phiom Enhah'' or ⲫⲓⲟⲙ ⲛ̀ϣⲁⲣⲓ ''Phiom ǹšari''; ...
off the coast of Egypt near
Dahab
Dahab ( arz, دهب, , "gold") is a small Egyptian town on the southeast coast of the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt, approximately northeast of Sharm el-Sheikh. Formerly a Bedouin fishing village, Dahab is now considered to be one of Egypt's most tre ...
in June 2005. Gomes' total dive time was 12 hours and 20 minutes; the descent took 14 minutes.
He is one of three men verified by Guinness World Records to have dived with scuba equipment (using
trimix) below ; the other two divers are the late
John Bennett and Ahmed Gabr.
Gomes is also a renowned
cave diver
Cave-diving is underwater diving in water-filled caves. It may be done as an extreme sport, a way of exploring flooded caves for scientific investigation, or for the search for and recovery of divers or, as in the 2018 Thai cave rescue, other ...
and held the World Record for the deepest cave dive, done in
Boesmansgat
Boesmansgat, also known in English as "Bushman's Hole", is a deep submerged freshwater cave (or sinkhole) in the Northern Cape province of South Africa, which has been dived to a depth of .
Boesmansgat was believed to have first been explored by ...
cave (South Africa), to a depth of , in 1996.
The cave is located at an altitude of more than above sea level, which resulted in Nuno having to follow a decompression schedule for an equivalent sea level dive depth of to prevent
decompression sickness
Decompression sickness (abbreviated DCS; also called divers' disease, the bends, aerobullosis, and caisson disease) is a medical condition caused by dissolved gases emerging from solution as bubbles inside the body tissues during decompressio ...
("the bends"). The total dive time was 12 hours and 15 minutes; the descent took 14 minutes with 4 minutes spent at the bottom.
See also
*
World's deepest scuba dives
References
External links
* - official site
Living people
South African people of Portuguese descent
South African underwater divers
Year of birth missing (living people)
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