The League of Extraordinary Divers Podcast

Phil Short, Legendary Cave and Technical Diver

Phil has been diving professionally and exploring for over 26 years and has logged over 7000 dives in caves and open water using both open and closed circuit equipment, with over 3000 hours on Rebreather equipment. He started dry caving at the age of 14 and got into it, rappelling, remote medicine – but in dry caving the cave often comes to a point where its flooded, and unless you cave dive, you’re not going any further. So, Phil took an open water diver course then dozens more courses just to further his cave penetration pursuits.

Phil became a scuba instructor, continued cave diving and began developing his Technical Diving skills through. In 1993 he was involved in forming one of the first Trimix wreck diving teams in the UK.

Phil is now one of the UK’s foremost IANTD Instructor Trainer Trainers and the Training director of IANTD UK in addition to being a member of the IANTD HQ Board of Advisors. Having devoted all his free time to developing his Technical skills, Phil began to use them for cave diving, his true passion, on expeditions to Mallorca, France, Spain, Canada, Russia, Greece and Mexico. At the same time, he began teaching first open, then closed circuit, technical and cave diving full time.

Phil has been involved in film projects for the BBC, Discovery and others.
As an educator Phil has trained divers from groups such as the HSE, the BBC, the Police, NOAA, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), the Archaeological department of the National Museum of China and the US National Parks Service. For the last five years Phil has been a team diver and Dive Safety Officer for a combined WHOI and Greek Ephorate of Antiquities project to rediscover, survey and excavate the Antikythera Mechanism wreck in Greece. Phil has also been involved in the continuing excavation of Lord Elgin’s Mentor wreck. In 2017 he helped excavate the Tulsamerican B-24 bomber off the island of Vis in Croatia for a joint DPAA/Lund University and USA NPS project.

Linked to this move into commercial support for the scientific diving community Phil completed HSE SCUBA training in 2016 along with HSE First Aid at Work and became co director of Dark Water Exploration Ltd. After completion of a 3 month cave exploration project with Bill Stone, where 45 days were spent underground, in 2015 Phil became a member of the Explorers Club and in 2017 was upgraded to a Fellow. In 2016 Phil was awarded ‘Diver of the Conference’ at the TekDive USA conference in Miami Florida. Phil became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS) in 2018.

Items In This Podcast

• Caving at age 14
• The Darkness Beckons Martyn Farr
• British Cave Diving Group
• Finding new caves
• Exploration defined
• Bacteria in breath can change pristine caves ecosystem
• Early Nitrox misinformation and fake news
• South Mexico’s J2 exploration – 45 days underground
• Risks of a cave diver vs. recreational diver
• Cookie monster in a cave
• Antikythera mechanism wreck in Greece
• Griffin Hound Wreck in Baltic Sea
• Phil Short Technical Facebook
• Dark Water Exploration

Sponsor

Special thanks to our episode sponsor Aggressor Adventures

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