British scuba diver sets new world record with depth of 313 metres
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Your support makes all the difference.A British diving instructor has plunged to a depth of 313 metres off the coast of Thailand, setting a new world scuba diving record.
Mark Ellyatt took just 12 minutes to make his descent off the resort island of Phuket in southern Thailand on Thursday, beating the previous record by five metres. He spent 60 seconds at that depth, collecting a marker to prove his record-breaking feat pending independent verification.
Mr Ellyatt, a technical instructor at a Phuket dive company, returned to the surface in six hours and 40 minutes, a slow ascent designed to avoid decompression which can result in sickness or death.
He took six breathing tanks on the dive and had another 24 delivered to him by support divers who met him at various stages during his way up to the surface.
The previous world record of 308 metres was set in November 2001 by another British diver, John Bennett, off the island of Mindoro in the Philippines, according to Guinness World Records. The depth of 305 metres (1,000ft) had long been regarded as a major barrier.
"It's a lonely trip, like a trip to the moon," Mr Ellyatt, one of the world's most prolific divers and instructors, told the Phuket Gazette newspaper. "Other dives like this that have been attempted ended with massive injuries to the diver".
Mr Ellyatt, a former car salesman from London, attributed his feat to 10 years' training, a "high panic threshold" and a "body which doesn't seem to mind too much".
In February, he needed emergency decompression treatment and three months' convalescence after a deep-sea dive went wrong.
Unhappy with current computer forecasts for the effects of decompression, he made his own calculations for the record-breaking dive.
"I wanted to find a method for safely ascending because there didn't seem to be one," he said.
"Lots of companies sell computer software that plots a solution for returning to the surface but none of them seems to work."
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