Taravana at the Tuamotu archipelago

by Rik Rösken

A different evolution of breath-hold diving in comparison with Asia, existed at the the Tuamotu Archipelago, belonging to French Polynesia. At these islands in the pacific, a i ndependent group of pearl divers arose with their own technique.

On these islands, the harvest area's where deeper in Japan. Dives exceeded 30 meters, and beyond 50 meters was no exception. The dives took about 2 minutes and the time between each dive was 3 to 4 minutes and sometimes longer to ten. At these pace, 40 to 60 dives where made each day. On an average, diving was done for 4 to 6 hours.

The divers suffered sometimes from a strange phenomenon. About ten to thirty percent suffered after diving from "Taravana", translated as "fall crazily". Mild symptoms could exist of dizziness and eye sight problems. Worse cases existed of the loss of consciousness at ascent, paralyzing of arms or legs and once a while a diver died.

Suggested in 1965 was that this could have been caused by decompression sickness, or "the bends". DCS or "the bends" is a group of symptoms that can arise with divers on pressured gas and workers under high pressure after a prolonged exposure in a high pressured environment and a too fast decompression.

In the 1960's, it wasn't completely understood how this could happen with breath-hold divers, since they didn't breath air on depth, what probably contributed to the illness in divers on pressured air and tunnel workers. Although these was a quite interesting phenomenon, especially with the current interest in decompression sickness in the breath-hold diving community, there never have been an thorough research to the dive profiles and their effects on the symptoms. Since now scuba is also used on these islands, it is not possible anymore to research this phenomenon as it was possible in the 1960's.

Bron:

G. Ferretti, Mario Costa, Diversity in and adaptation to breath-hold diving in humans, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology Part A 136 (2003) 205-213

J.H. Corriol, La plongée en apnée, physiologie et médecine, Masson, 2002

Read also:

History
Summary
The Hae-Nyo of Korea and the Ama of Japan
1913: Giorgos Haggi Statti, The first deep breath-hold diver
1944: Shallow Water Black Out

Diving Medicine
Decompression Sickness and Breath-hold diving: Is it an issue?