South African Cave Diver Karen van den Oever Sets New Women’s Deep Cave Diving Record

Text by Nuno Gomes. Header image: Karen van den Oever with Theo van Eeden, who acted as a witness for Guinness World Records (GWR). Photos courtesy of Karen van den Oever.

Karen van den Oever is a science graduate from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa, where she resides. She is a CMAS diving instructor, a former member of the Wits University Underwater Club, and was one of Nuno Gomes’ students. Van den Oever previously dived to 201 m/660 ft in the Bushmansgat sinkhole in South Africa’s Northern Cape province on February 27, 2020. The dive lasted 441 mins, of which only 11 minutes were spent descending. 

On March 26, 2021, Van den Oever dived to 236.04 m/770 ft at Bushmansgat with a bottom gas of trimix 6/85, exceeding the previous woman’s deep cave diving record of 221 m/721 ft set by Verna van Schaik in 2004. The dive lasted seven hours and 18 minutes.

Adjusting for Bushmansgat’s altitude of 1550 meters/5085 ft, her dive was equivalent to a sea level dive to 283 m/928 ft. “This was a dive that I have been working towards for a long time. It was a challenging dive. You train not for the dives that go well but for when things don’t go well. I decided to turn at 236 m/774 ft, as my intuition told me that this was where I needed to stop,” she explained. You can find her on Facebook at Somewhere Out There Diving.

See: Diving Beyond 250 Meters: The Deepest cave Dives Today Compared to the 1990s.