BOOK REVIEW
THE MANY ASPECTS OF THE BENDS
Between the Devil and the Deep:
One Man's Battle to Beat the Bends by Mark Cowan & Martin Robson
IN 2012, technical diver Martin Robson went diving in a Russian mountain lake. It didn’t go well.
The wintertime expedition was an attempt to locate a longrumoured but never seen cave system thought to feed the very deep Blue Lake in southern Russia.
It was the sort of noble diving endeavour that was bound to attract considerable attention among the country’s fervent technical-diving community.
Nothing much was happening on the cave-location front but then things went tragically awry when one of the Russian support-divers died.
A pall descended over the team and then, for reasons not made entirely clear in the book, Robson decided that the best thing he could do would be to try to reach the bottom of the lake, wherever that was.
A fully supported 200m-plus dive ensued, but on the way back up and not too far from the surface he was well and truly ambushed by the “devil”, aka decompression illness.