Journey into Adaptive Scuba Diving; Full Interview w⁄ Dan Metcalfe - 3x Guinness World Record Holder

All right, good morning, Benjamin Hadfield. Teach me to dive. I'm a technical dive instructor here in Idaho and Florida, and we've got the real honor. You guys know I'm really big into my world records, and we've had some really amazing ones here. We've had the deepest woman in the world. That's Karen Banda-Uwer. She did 900 feet of cave in Boesman's Ghat in South Africa. We had Gomez. He was the deepest command for the wild, and lost that record, got it back, then lost it again as well. One of the four men over 1,000 feet. We now have Dan Metcalf. Dan has three world records. I wrote them down just to make sure. He is the fastest underwater swim, fastest underwater scuba, and fastest one-mile diver. Bam. Dan, thanks for coming on. You are a stud. Thank you very much for having me. Congratulations on your achievements. I see recently Guinness has verified those. That must feel amazing. The three world records on the wall look pretty good. We're not going to finish there. We want to go further. We want to get more world records than that. There's no finishing. There's no stopping. That is awesome. Let's talk about these three world records. How did you prepare to break these world records, because they're pretty big? It's a usual thing in here, the crazy mind that I have. We train a lot, a little quarry called Stoney Cove in the UK. It's our training site that we do most of our training at. Very good for deep water. We're all training really within BSAC, which is what I train under, and SSI. We were there, and somebody made a comment once of, have you swam all the way around? Have you dived all the way around the lake? I'm like, no, you can't do that. I want to get around on one cylinder of gas or even my side mount. They said, no, you do it between six and eight meters. You'll get around easily. No problem. It went into my head that, okay, well, let's make it a real challenge, and let's see how many times I can do it. We started plotting. We started planning a year of training, swimming in the pool with a snorkel, just swimming as fast as I can do, breaststroke swimming, because I'm paralyzed from T8. Just above my belly button down, I've got no core movement, no abs, no hip flexors, legs, anything working. They're all there. They just don't work. They just drag behind me. A year's worth of training in the pool, a year's worth of deciding and training on how we're going to actually do this at Stoney. How's it going to work? We worked out how many cylinders I'm going to be on there, so 20 cylinders I changed underwater. How do you do that underwater? How do you drink? How do you eat underwater? I've got to do all that, and then work out how my safety divers are then going to do the same, because over here in the UK, we're not allowed to just go do that on your own. You've got to have a safety diver, and then you've got to have an overwatch diver. For the world record, the whole thing's got to be filmed. I've got to have another person behind me filming the entire event. How do we get cameras? How do we do all that? Is there a rig that will go underwater for five and a half hours? No, there isn't a rig that exists at the moment, not that I can afford anyway. I made one. I made a rig. It was brilliant. It was tested. It was working, and on the day, it failed in less than a meter of water. That wasn't very good. A bit gutting, but yes, it was a monumental challenge, and it was really, really good to do, especially to get all the diving agencies involved. On the actual day of the event, we had everybody from TDI, RAID, SSI, BSAC, PADI, everybody was there, all individual people all joining together to do one big event. Of course, we did it for charity as well. It all raised money to help charities, help disabled divers, help the air ambulance. They're the guys that scraped it off the floor back in 2014 when I had my original crash. Yes, it's helped the place that we did it at themselves, Stoney Cove. We wanted to increase the disabled facilities there at Stoney Cove because there isn't a lot in the dive world, as you probably know. Disabled facilities for divers just don't really exist at the moment. We're getting there. We'll get better, and the more knowledge and the more this goes out there, the better we will be. That's amazing. Not only did you set some world records, and you beat me the punch on sharing the amazing ... I mean, it's amazing to set a world record, but not only did that, but with a T, what'd you say, T8 injury. That is unbelievable. Not only did you set some records, but you went on, you became an open water instructor as well. What inspired you to become an open water diving instructor? Yes. Through the journey of being a diver, doing what I do, diving had a big change in my life for me. I had my first crash, 2014, which was a motorbike crash which paralyzed me from T8 down. I went into hand cycling, racing, came pretty good at that. I got fifth in the UK, so British Cycling was looking at taking me to the Olympics in Rio if training went well and everything. There was another group of five of us being tested at the same time. Unfortunately, on a 600-mile challenge, charity bike ride, I was hit by a car. That ended all of that. I've got an injury at C4 in my neck, which knocked out half of my left shoulder as well, which is why I'm just having an operation on it. That led to big problems with PTSD. Both crashes were the same sort of noise, same bang, same impacts, not sleeping at night, all this sort of stuff. I got made quite a big concussion from it. I just turned into a horrible person. I luckily had a couple of my friends say to me, you need to go diving. I've just started diving, so it was quite a new thing to me, but they're just like, we know the benefits of water therapy and getting in the water and diving. They took me diving, and it did. It really relaxed the brain, took away what I call the noise of life. It just takes you back to basics. You have to control just you and you alone. When you dive, buddy, there's nothing else to focus on apart from breathing, buoyancy, your buddy, and what you're focused to do. That is it. There's not all this everything else going on. Fantastic for me. Every time I went back in, it just made me feel even better. I knew I needed to carry on that journey. That's where everything else came from, really. I take everything to the max that I can do. Then the natural progression was to get into diving with disability, obviously, as I am TA paralyzed. It throws so many spanners in the works, so many things that people are like, oh, no, no, you've got to do it like this. That doesn't work. It's just get rid of that. That doesn't work. We found new ways and our own ways of doing things. It was really interesting. I looked at the program, the disability program and other organizations. We're just not doing enough. It's got to be better. It's got to be bigger. My plan is to get to an instructor trainer at the disabled. For us, it's DFA, so Diving For All. I want to get to instructor trainer at that level so that I can teach the instructors how to deal with disabled students and how to dive with disabled divers. We're not all the same. We're all massively different. That was where my journey needs to go. I've got a long journey ahead of me to get there, but that's where my plan is to get there and to be ideally one of the top people in the country, hopefully the world, where I'm pushing disability diving to the new level where we should be, where people should be fully accepted. It shouldn't be, oh, I don't want to go diving with her or him because they've got one leg or they've got one arm or they're paralyzed like I am. It shouldn't be an issue at all. Quite the opposite to be fair. Absolutely. That's a great goal to get to. Instructor trainer is definitely a fantastic goal and a desire to get there. Count us in for helping you with whatever you need with that as well. I am an instructor trainer and happy to help as well. One of the things you talked about, every diver is different when it comes to adaptive and we talk about that, but one of the key things that we kind of want to back up just a little bit is there's also different levels of PTSD that are involved with that. Tell me how the diving has affected you and helped you with your PTSD to move on to these amazing world records and become an instructor and everything else. The biggest thing for me with the PTSD was going diving gave me a purpose to be here still. I got to that point where I didn't have a purpose anymore. I have got a daughter. I didn't have a partner at the moment. I now have a wife. But thanks to diving, it calmed the PTSD down. It relaxes me when I go diving. I chill out a lot more. Like I say, it takes the noise of life away. It puts you in a whole world of, a lot of people call it meditation. I don't think I'm meditating down there. I'm not sat with a hat on. But I do come out and I'm a lot calmer than I was. I'm not all het up. I'm not, everything's stressing me out. It's not like that. The diving and just everything, breathe and let everything out. And it's much calmer when I come back out. And thanks to that, I ended up with my partner and a wife. So that was fantastic. But yeah, it does. I know there is significantly higher levels of PTSD than what I dealt with, soldiers and that kind of thing. But PTSD is relevant. It's all relevant to the person. You don't have to have got blown up in Afghanistan or somewhere like that to have that severe PTSD. You can just have several accidents that just link together to be just as severe to that person. It doesn't happen to be a military situation. But yeah, for me, yeah. Diving, can't say it fixed PTSD. It's never fixed. It's always something is always there for the rest of your life. There is always triggers. There's always something there, but it really, really helped me. And I've seen loads of other people, anxiety massively helps with anxiety. I've seen many other cognitive disabilities that diving really, really helps. Autistic really helps with that. So the therapy of being underwater is just fantastic. And it's freedom as well. I mean, a lot of people say to me, freedom of the disability, but for me, actually, it's freedom to make me equal to everybody else. And in some cases, now I'm an instructor, it makes me higher than the people that I'm diving with. So when we're on land, they can get around everywhere. They can do whatever they want. They can do however, when we get in the water, they're up and down like a yo-yo and I'm just sat next to them. What are you doing? It's brilliant. So to teach people to do it as well, it's that nice feeling that you can give back and you can do something that everybody else can do that some people can't do, but you can teach them to do what you do. And then they come up to your level and it's just like, oh yeah, it's great. People get out of the water from diving with me as a disabled diver, obviously, I wear my webs and I've got world records to say how fast they are. They all come out and go, oh my God, you're so fast. And I go, well, not, but yeah, but they do come out and they're so excited because they've been diving with a disabled diver and they go, I struggle so much to do that underwater and you don't struggle at all. I go, well, I did, but I don't struggle so much now. And I said to them, you know, we both got struggles. I struggle on land, you struggle in the water. So it's fair and equal, isn't it? That's interesting. So adaptive diving, classified diving, as they call it at SSI, presents some really unique challenges, but it also creates some interesting opportunity. What are some of the challenges and opportunities you've seen within the adaptive diving? Wow. Loads. The different abilities is crazy. So no one disabled person is the same. I'm paralysed at T8. I've also got another friend who's also paralysed at T8, but because I'm complete and he's incomplete, we are miles apart from what we can do. He can stand, he can weight bear, but he can't kick his legs. I can't do any of it. He gets lots of nerve pain down his legs. If you touch his legs, touch his feet, it'll spasm and it'll get nerve pain and that's crippling for it. However, for me, I don't get any of that. So just the same, exactly the same injury level does not mean the same thing. The biggest thing I could teach anybody is that no disability is the same. Everybody is individual, just like you're individual to your next door neighbour. We're all individual to each other. We all have individual pains and triggers and abilities to do what we do. We just have to ask, find out how you do what you need to do. The best way of doing that is talking. Exactly what we're doing now. Absolutely. Shed some light on it. Absolutely. So you've taken the opportunities and the adaptions to a whole new level. I mean, you're in sidemount, for example. Why did you decide to go to sidemount versus backmount? So sidemount was quite a quick change for me, to be honest. I started off obviously off life as a diver, as everybody does with a single BCD, single cylinder on the back. I was diving with a 10 litre cylinder on the back, relatively good. I was extremely fit then because I was cycling like crazy. So I was extremely fit. So my RMV rate was very, very low and that was good for a 10 litre cylinder. But then you realise you want to do an hour dive. You want to be longer underwater. So, okay, you need to chuck a 12 litre cylinder on your back. I can't have a standard 12 litre cylinder because I get ready, kitted up, sat down on the quayside or on the back of the boat. I get kitted up, sat on the floor. Well, how do you roll in? How do you do anything? Because a 12 litre cylinder is like this over the top of your head. You can't do it. So we learnt I need to use a 12 litre dumpy, which I don't even think you'll have over in the US, to be honest, because you use alleys most of the time. But it's a steel cylinder that's very short, like a 10 litre cylinder, or like, I don't know, for you guys, alley 50, something that sort of 55, something that sort of height. But it's massively round. It's quite a big cylinder. So that rolled me like a turtle in the water. I had loads of weight on top of my back. So it was rolling me about. So we very, very quickly knew I needed to go twin set. So I changed to seven litre cylinders, which is equivalent to, I think, maybe an alley 40, alley 50 to you guys. So I have twins, two of those, independent, so I can shut each one off, do whatever I need to do. And then whilst training for the world record, they were like, Dan, you are dragging so much water displacement above your head that you're like a double-decker bus. Take those cylinders and tuck them in underneath your armpits on your side. You've broke the water with your shoulders. So why don't we put them at the side of you? Oh, that was a very early one. So that was the very first day of trying side mount. We didn't end up with that wing, unfortunately. It just did not work for me. And then we ended up moving the position as well. So we brought the position backwards and up so that they ended up a little bit higher, but further back. The normal side mount divers, they haven't really tied up into their armpits because when you're sat in this position, nice and level, they're right there just to turn off. But for somebody that swims with their arms, you can't do this motion and back down again when there's a cylinder right underneath your armpit. It doesn't work. So a lot of side mount divers look at how my side mounts are fitted up and go, why has he got them hanging like that? They're a little bit low. They're a little bit too far back. That's what works for me. That keeps me balanced. So one, it puts the weight out for the sides. So it balances you stabilization wise. You're not getting any rolling so much. I do have to do 50 bar at a time each cylinder because just 50 bar of gas can start tipping me. So very, very minimum amount of breath rate that will start tipping me. I can put half a K on one side and I'll just sit flat and I'll start tipping to one side. But yeah, you guys cheat with your fins. You sit on a safety stop and you don't know you're doing it, but you're just very slightly wiggling your fins just balancing that tip tip side to side. But take fins off and try and do it. That's fantastic. You just start just tipping and rolling. But yeah, we found out that stabilization, brilliant. It's really good for that. And then we also found that obviously I've broke the water with my shoulders and with my arms going. So I've already moved that water past the cylinders. So then I'm not dragging water. So it makes me a lot quicker as well. And not to mention the fact that then you can put QDs, so quick disconnects in between. What I had coming off my regulators. So I had only swivels. So my regulators went down. So they come down my chest and then they have a QD that I can clip off and clip on. But then we can clip the QD, pop that cylinder off, give that cylinder away to the safety diver whilst I change over to the other reg. He can then put the new cylinder in, change it over. I then change regs and the other side gets done. So what we did was we basically pit like Formula One pit stop. And I came in, I stopped at the bottom of the ladders and they very, very quickly, I mean, when we were training in the pool, we got this down as fast as just under two minutes. So we would pull in, I would lift one arm up and they would disconnect all that side, cylinder off, cylinder back on. And then I'd change regs and then they'd do exactly the same this side. So they're back off, back on, and then that's it. I swam off again. I think, yeah, it worked. It clearly worked because we got them. But as well as that, I had to tow an SMB behind me because I had to be seen from the surface at all times. And I also had to have a GPS marker on me the whole time. And so we did all this training with no surface marker boy dragging behind me or anything dragging. And then right at the very end, they said, no, no, no, you need to be GPS. We need to see where you've been. And you also need to be visual from the surface. And I'm thinking, I'm paralyzed. I swam with my webs. And now you want me to tow an SMB behind me as well. So yeah, good luck to whoever wants to try and beat that one. It's not fun. That's amazing. So some other adaptations that I noticed you did, you are in a dry suit. And that's not something that's really within the standards when you start talking to, well, Diveheart, HSA or SSI, NAUI or SDI. So talk to me about the benefits of you being in a dry suit. I'm British. Fair enough. But it's definitely something we don't see in the standards. So what are some of the benefits to you specifically? I mean, there's guys in Britain that dive a semi-dryer or a seven mil wetsuit as dumb as that is. There's those guys that do it, but there's special considerations when it comes to somebody that has a T8 or is a paraplegic or even into the Ls that is a paraplegic or quadriplegic. What are some of the benefits to you that dry suit adds to that? The biggest thing for a dry suit with myself or anybody that's paralyzed or anybody that can't temperature regulate or has lower blood flow rate. So I can get blood pooling in different areas as well. And what we need to worry about or worry about or we need to make sure we cover is getting cold where you can't feel. So someone like myself who's complete injury, I can't feel whether my legs are getting cold, wet, damaged or anything. So obviously for the damage, a wetsuit would be great. You can just bump off stuff, the wetsuit will get snagged, doesn't really matter. You can fix it or get a new one. But for temperature over here in the UK, my first sea dive was in Scapa flood top of Scotland in Auckland. It was my first ever swim dive. So it's cold up there. You're lucky if you've got nine degrees up there. So it's cold. But the main problem is getting cold. So with a dry suit, you can thermally insulate inside. We put the air inside so we can create that barrier of the freezing cold water from the outside to the core body temperature that we need to keep warm. The bad thing is for me, even for me, when I'm diving in my dry suit in the winter months, January, February is the worst over here. I mean, it can be minus six air temperature and we can be diving in two degrees of water. That's centigrade, not Fahrenheit. So it's pretty cold. I have seen ice on the surface when we've gone diving. And when I come back out, it takes six hours for my legs to warm up. That sort of is really dangerous to be looking at because we all know cold, soft tissues get DCI quicker. So we get cold in the water, we're much more at risk of DCI. So what we're trying to do is make sure we stay warm. So put a dry suit on. That then creates a world of problems. We put a dry suit on, telescopic dry suit that I could just get for cheap. We learned very, very quickly, I can't do an inversion roll. I cannot do one. So what will happen is you fill your feet up. I try and do an inversion roll and my knees just smack me straight in the face. And I was like, well, what do I do here? So my feet are here above my face and I'm just going towards the surface. And it's like, great, well, this isn't going to work then, is it? So we decided to put cuff dumps on the ankles. We put these cuff dumps on so that if I did go inverted, they'd let the air out and I'd come back down again. We tested them, brilliant, they were a treat. But then we found my air usage or my gas usage in the cylinder was just ridiculous because every time my feet went up, I'd let the air out. So if my legs had come back down again, I'd need to put more gas in because I started sinking in the water. And it was just gas in, gas out all the time, which was, again, an absolute nightmare. And I met with another friend who's a paralyzed diver, Tom, and he said, why don't you wrap your carts, put gator skins on, get rid of the cuff dumps, wrap your carts so that the migration can't get there. I was like, that's a good idea, let's try that then. So we had a load of gator skins, we wrapped them up. We first tried it with duct tape, which is not a good idea, don't do that, it's a bad idea. You end up with some really weird marks on your legs, don't do that. So we put gator skins on, which are neoprene wraps that zip up. And those neoprene wraps, they can stretch in size. So if you do over inflate, they can stretch. They'll also stretch enough to let blood flow through, but they won't let much air go through. And they were a treat, absolutely perfect. And then luckily, when I got on to doing the world records Northern Diver, they supported me with a full dry suit. They were fantastic. They've given me probably two to a half thousand pounds worth of suit. So it's a lot of money, a lot of time, it's very specialist because I bum shuffle across the ground before jumping in. I can bang my knees or legs on stuff and not know I've done it. Going through a wreck, I'm very good at looking what my legs are doing because I don't want to bang the wreck or I don't want to do anything dodgy, but I can just catch something. And I have a tri-laminate suit, not a neoprene suit. So I can layer up underneath if I need to, just to keep that core warm. And so they made a military bottom box from the waist down, it's military. It's all Kevlar line, it's all Kevlar suits and extra thick padding on the knees, extra thick padding on the butt. So a massive, great, big padded area for my backside and then Kevlar cupboards so that I can bum shuffle wherever I like. But then from the waist up, I need the most amount of movement I can physically have because I swim up here and straight back down again. So it's a big pull. Not many dry suits will allow you to go up there and then pull straight back down again with both arms very, very quickly. So they had to make the upper half of the suit out of the rescue divers dry suit material. So it's a very, very thin tri-laminate material that is very susceptible to getting damaged, however, is super flexible. So yeah, they did a fantastic job for me. And thanks to them massively for the world record that we've managed to achieve. That's amazing. So what other modifications have you had to make to your equipment specifically to be able to accommodate this type of diving? Yeah. As I said, like with dry suit, obviously thinner legs because we don't want like an able person whose legs are massive compared to mine. They've got a lot of muscle wastage. So we have to have thinner legs on there. I have a P-pipe. You guys, the gentlemen of the diving, they have P-valve. So that's a urinary valve that you connect the condom to, pipe to, and you can pee to the outside world. But I can't create pressure to that valve. So what I have to have is a pipe that goes straight out to the outside world. And if you don't connect it on the inside, the outside world comes in, which we have learned several times in me going, oh, why is my chest cold? Oh, my whole suit's full of water. That's why. Yeah. I don't feel it till it gets all the way up here. But yeah, they're learning and I got an award for doing that at the club as well. So yeah, I won't go into that. But yeah, so the P-pipe is just to convene, again, to a pipe to the outside world. So we're all covered that way. And then other than that, it's padded backside, sort of thing like that. Well, the main adaptions really, suit-wise, is the hardest part. It's always going to be. So my wetsuit, when I dive abroad, I had to get a longer zip put in so it goes all the way to the bottom of the crotch so that I can bunch up with the back of the boat and go for a wee off the back of the boat. Yeah, it's not great. There's other people on the boat. Oh, well, we'll have to deal with it. But the worst thing for a disabled person in my situation is I can't get in any toilets on a boat. No boats at all have I ever been able to get in a toilet because you either got to go down the front, so you've got to go downstairs to go to the toilet, or on a big liveaboard, normally they're down another flight of stairs. And I just haven't been on a boat that is fit for disabled divers. Even the big boats over here, that they go out on day boats like up in Scapa Flow, they're big trawler boats, massive, great big things. The head to get through is too narrow for a wheelchair because it's got a locked door on there to stop the sea from getting in. So you just, you can't get in. Even the wider ones, the bigger, newer ones, slightly wider, they have a great big massive lift where everyone's going to lift you over that. But you still, when you get to the toilet, it's got a really, really narrow entrance to the toilet. I can't use it. So yeah, we have to work out ways of dealing with that. That is probably the biggest obstacle for a disabled. My situation, for a paralyzed diver, it's probably the biggest obstacle, unless you have stoma bags and things like that. But that causes a whole other world of problems as well. Another thing that I adapted massively, I don't know whether I can grab them actually. I probably, have we got a second? Absolutely. Yeah, I'll grab them then. If I don't run anything over. As he says, as he knocks them over. Ah, they're not here. So I was going to show you the webbed gloves that I dive with. I'm sure you'd probably be able to find them on my YouTube channel, Facebook or anything like that. They're definitely on my Instagram, I think. But they're webbed gloves. Obviously I swim with these. You know, I've got relatively decent sized hands, but that does not cause a great amount of water resistance. So I dive with a set of gloves that are neoprene, five mil thick webs, five mil thick neoprene gloves. And then in between every single finger is sewn a web between every single one. The good news is, we'll get that link and I'm going to put that in the comments below, so we can make sure that anybody that would like a pair of those can get a pair of those. I looked online, found some different types of actually made for open water swimming. There's a lot of them out there, say a lot of them, there's a few of them out there that say they're for diving. They're not. They're a different type of neoprene for diving. It's not crushed enough. So when you take them to 20 meters, they end up coming back up and they're not elasticity anymore. They just fall off your hand. Plus you wreck them in two dives. I've done it loads of times. So I made my own set. I designed them. Eve, my wife, sewed them for five hours, sewing them together to make them work. And then after using those for several months and going, these are brilliant. I took them to Northern Divers with me and they said, if we can get a demand for them, we will commercially make these. But what we will do is make you a set for the world record. So they made two sets for me for the world record, which I absolutely beasted for a year of training and the world record and another year after that. So they lasted two years, a year each, each set doing in the region of, I don't know, the dive training for that year was probably in the region of about 20 hours worth of training just at Stoney Cove to do the world record going around in circles, not to mention all the pool use as well. So there was a lot of work doing three and a half hour dives time in Stoney, just swimming, swimming, swimming. And these things have stood up to the test. So yes, they are going to commercially make them. They have got an order in. So I'm hoping to be going live with that fairly soon. But I know they are definitely going to be sold and you can get hold of maybe two pairs, three pairs left at Northern Divers at the moment. But I will be getting full shipment of them to them, not to me. But it has got my three stars on there for the three Guinness world records and my logo. They're very nicely done that. So yeah, it's just not to me that we call them. I was going to show you a pair, but unfortunately they're in the dive kit in the, in the garage. And I thought my wife would be able to grab them, but she's on a call. We'll get some pictures of them and we'll put them on as part of the comments as well. So you kind of moving on. So as someone with an extensive amount of experience in adaptive diving, what advice would you give other divers who may be considering taking up the sport and considering and worried about the physical limitations? So for me, the biggest thing is why not? The biggest thing is what's, what's going to go wrong? Why not? Can you swim? If you can swim, you should be able to dive. The, the, the biggest limiting factor that you will have is your medical. That is the biggest thing. What tablets do you take? What, you know, what medication does what to you? And how does your body react in certain ways? And what are you limited to do? You know, you, I know, um, quadriplegic people that die, um, I know tetraplegics, I know limbless, um, I know, um, and loads and loads of different disabilities that can very easily die. Not just physical disabilities, mental disabilities. Um, there was one, uh, Jimmy that I know he's very, very good cerebral palsy. Um, he actually doesn't tick any boxes for a medical, which is crazy. He, all of his, he goes for a medical for us in the UK and he doesn't need to tick a box. So he technically just self-certifies as a normal able-bodied diver, but he knows he's not. Um, so he's a cerebral palsy. He can't keep a regulator in his mouth. So he knows that he will have a spasm and his regulator will just drop out. And then you are, he can't do a recovery because his arms are clawed. So he can't do a recovery for that. So full face mask, very simple. As long as you can recover from a full face mask to a regulator again with his body, that's safe to do. Um, so yeah, there is so many different limitations and so many things, but what you need to think as a new diver is, can I dive? Do I want to dive? And do I want to see a world that is so unbelievable and will blow your mind every time you get to do it? Yeah. Why not? You know, if you can, you should. In my opinion, um, I believe that everybody should have the right to dive and should have the ability to dive if they want to. Um, it's just the biggest thing we find, unfortunately, is the medical, medical factor. If the, you know, it's a bit more strict over here than it is over in the States and the rest of the world, to be honest. Um, but it is that, you know, you, you have to, you have to be careful with the medical side of stuff. There is certain limitations. There is certain things that will stop you from diving or might just make it. You can only go 12 meters, might make it, you can only go 10 meters, but you know, that's a, that is what it is. If you can still dive, you can still see a whole lot of stuff at 12 meters down. Um, you don't need to be able to go super deep. Absolutely. So training adaptive divers requires a special approach. What are some of the secrets that you've used and created over the time to really help those divers along? Um, right. So biggest one for me, there's no secret. It's just talk. So ask somebody, how do you want to do this? Or do you think you can do this? If they say, I really don't know what I'm going to do. Cause obviously if they've never put scuba unit on before, scuba kit on before, they're not going to know how to fit or they're not going to know how to breathe for a regular. Well, those sorts of things we can teach them. That's not a problem. It's more the fact of, before you get in the water, it's the problems with disability isn't once you're in the water, the problems with disability is before you get in the water. So it's getting to the venue. It's, is there a bathroom you can use? Is there somewhere you can get changed properly without having 10 people walking around you? For me, I've got to get fully naked to get in my suit. You don't want to be doing that on the poolside when there's 15 people walking around you. You know, it happens, but you don't want it. So it's more asking, how are you going to transfer from your wheelchair if you're in one to the floor? Do you want to be lifted? Is it okay for us to touch you? Is it okay for us to pick you up here, here and here? Or do you need to use a chair, a lift chair? We've got a pool hoist where we are. For me personally, I've done a hell of a lot of stuff in my time and I'm, I'm, I'm pretty strong. If somebody told me, do you want to use the hoist? I'll put them in the hoist myself and then I'll put them in the pool with the hoist. No, I don't want a hoist. No. So for me, I think I can throw myself on the floor and then I can use a wall and transfer myself back up into my wheelchair again, but it ain't great. And that's what's knackered my shoulder, doing those sorts of things. So sometimes you've got to swallow your pride a little bit. There has to be a give and take on both sides. You've got to be in a disabled, as a disabled diver, you've got to be in the knowledge that it's not going to be perfect. It's just not. You're going into a world that isn't designed for you. And just everyday life isn't designed for you. But disabled people, we know this and we get used to this on a daily basis. It doesn't change when you go into doing an extreme sport or when you go into diving or anything like that. Just be aware there has to be a bit of give on your side, as much as the instructor's side. And for the instructor on the other side of it is, you need to give a lot too. And it needs to be a, oh, okay. I've dealt with a paralyzed diver before. I know how a paralyzed diver needs to operate. You need to get on the floor like this. You need to let me do that. Ask the person how they want to get on the floor, how they want to transfer, or can you even do that? They might not be strong enough to lift themselves out of a chair themselves. You might have watched me do it one day, throwing myself on the floor, but another friend of mine, who's the same level, can't do it. He can't transfer because his legs, they spasm too much, won't let him do it. Or some very similar things with cognitive disabilities. That's a whole other level. Every single person on the part of the spectrum in cognitive disability, they're millions of miles apart from each other. You have to treat every single person as an individual and as a new case, as an individual case. I do like how dive parts have the scoring system. I do like that. And I think that is fantastic. That just helps an instructor out to know what they're coming to see or what student is coming to them before they get there. And I do really think, something that I personally do, if there's any divers that come to us as disabled divers or even new divers, full stop, we always, always talk to them before they get to the pool, before they even have their first session. We talk to them, okay, what are your preconceptions about diving? What are your ideas about diving? This is what we plan to do with you. Is that okay? Are you going to be all right with that? If you build a basis before you even get there, especially with disability, then you've got to trust already before you even started. You've got an understanding of one another, of what level that person is at, of whether that person is maybe, whether they're even there ready in the headspace to be going diving. Because sometimes they just get there, oh my God, this is way more than I thought it was going to be. There's 20 divers in the pool. I can't deal with that. Okay. So let's not bring you on a day where we've got 20 divers in the pool. Let's just calm it down. Let's bring you when we've got five divers in and make it simple for you. It's things like that. You've got to be individual and bespoke to every single dive. Awesome. That is a fantastic advice. Dan, what's next? What's the next goal? I've got the three Guinness World Records that we already know about. Longest distance, I've got that in fresh open water. All my records are in fresh open water, so they're not sea-going records. Obviously, the fastest mile scuba dive as paralyzed and as able-bodied. All you've got to do is put webs on your hands and tie your legs together, see if you can beat me. The next one is, well, next two now. One of them is going to take some time. Obviously, all of it now has been jumped at least a year further away from me because of shoulder reconstruction done because of doing all these crazy things, but that's fine. We'll just deal with that. What the next thing is really is the, I'm going to pull it out there because it already exists. It's on Guinness World Records. It's the fastest 10K. That's the one I'm hunting for that because it's in the sea and it can be done in any body of water in the sea. It's pretty much whatever depth you want to do it at, but obviously, for 10K, you don't want to be deep. We want to be no deeper than eight meters. I'm aiming for five hours, which the 10 kilometers, I did, if you think about it, I did five kilometers, 5.2 kilometers in open water with no currents, no tides, no nothing. I did that in five and a half hours. Now, we're looking at doing 10K in the sea in five hours. We're moving. We're looking for a body of water that is moving as well as me moving, swimming hard fast. That was the next one. It was supposed to be this year towards the end of summer this year. Obviously, that's got knocked on my head because I can't even lift my arm above my head at the moment properly. That can't happen, but that will be there, I think, either next year, maybe the year after, but probably next year now. Then the other one, the other one's a big one, it's deep. I am going to be, not I'm going to aim to be, I'm going to be the deepest paralyzed diver. I already know where I wanted to set my record. You can get qualified within BISAC and within TDI to go to 100 meters. What's the point in just going to 100 meters? That's a qualification that anybody can get. I want to make sure I'm going deeper than 100 meters. They've got to come for the title if they want to beat me. As a paralyzed diver, I want to go to 120 meters. Then talking to a few of the greats in diving, I was with Rick Stanton quite a few times. He taught me sidemount as well as Michael Thomas and Robert Thomas. They're all cave divers, so they're all the big names. I was talking with them and they got me talking with some others from Santee Diving and some of the other divers, as well as Sally Cartwright and that lot. Talking to all of them, they're like, if you're going to 120, really, it's not that much different to go to 150. It's only when you go past 150 that it becomes really dodgy. I'm like, really? If you go into 120, it's not that much more. It's a lot more planning, but it's not that much more. We're only going for a bounce dive, so we're going in as fast as we're allowed to descend as fast as I can take descending. Then we're eating. We're picking a book up, a bit like a free dive. We'll be picking a book up, taking a photo, and then we're off. We're not spending hardly any time on the bottom at all. It will be straight back up again. The biggest catch with this is, probably the second biggest catch. The biggest catch is my wife. The second biggest catch with this is it has to be on open circuit. I wanted to do it on a rebreather because I know for a fact if I had twin sidewinders on my side instead of side mount, I'm on the way. I've got one side mount, one rebreather for bailout, one rebreather for doing the dive. I know I'm happy, but no, we can't do that. Guinness Book of Records states it has to be open circuit. We've got to do it on open circuit, which means trimix, which means they're expensive. We are looking at options for funding. We need to find a couple of millionaires that are happy to sponsor it. That would be fantastic. Other than that, we're going to look at companies sponsoring BOC for gas and stuff like that. We're going to have a look at places to see who can sponsor me. I've already got the dry suit to do it, which is fantastic. We're going to have a look at sponsorship-wise because that would be a phenomenal dive. It would be absolutely amazing to hold that title of the deepest paralyzed diver because nobody has taken the title yet. It would be a new world record, just like the three that I've just done. The 10K is trying to take on a world record that already exists, that's already out there, and there's a video on him doing it. That one's great, but I want to take that. I want to win that and bring that back to the UK. Then I want to take on the deepest paralyzed diver. That would be amazing. Shortly after this interview, you're going to get an email from me that's got Nuno Gomez and Karen Van de Oer on it as well. I'd be happy to make that introduction as well. Maybe we can sneak in one of the wet mules as well. Get you a few in there. Not a problem at all. Dan, you're amazing. I appreciate you greatly. Anything else you want to share? A little bit. Respect each other. Respect the environment you're in. Go dive in and look after one another. That's the biggest thing. Be safe, look after everybody, and enjoy diving. Don't grab everything and pick it up and want to play with it. Just sit next to it, watch it in your own environment, and take a photo of it. Great. Absolutely. Dan, thank you so much. Again, Benjamin Hadfield, teach me to dive. I'm a technical dive instructor, instructor trainer, as you found out. I don't talk about that one a lot, but I'm also an adaptive instructor as well. I'm nowhere near the adaptive instructor as Dan is. Dan makes me feel lazy, to be honest. He's out there setting world records, and I'm running a podcast. I feel a little overwhelmed. He's just a bit amazing. I appreciate that. Again, take the time. Subscribe to our channel if you love this kind of stuff. Check the links below if you're interested in getting some gloves and sponsoring Dan. He's looking for sponsors for his 150-meter open circuit world record dive. Be a part of that, and we'll make sure we get a GoFundMe, some links in the comments as well. Again, thank you very much. Benjamin Hadfield, teach me to dive. Make sure to tune in. Thank you very much. See you later.