Rebreathe Deep the Gathering Doom

The plan that day was to dive to as much as 200 feet deep — not an outing for beginners. But Jones and the six other dive instructors with him who worked for Pro Dive International, owners of the Pro Diver II, were no rookies. Capt. Stuart Dye steered the vessel over the eastern part of the site, where the deepest diving is done. Jones and the other instructors wriggled into wet suits, checked their gear, and, one by one, plunged into the lapping sea. With the grace that comes with years of diving, they slowly descended toward the man-made reef.

Seven minutes later, Jones and his designated dive buddy, Richard Hartley, were down 194 feet. They exchanged "OK" hand signals and separated to explore. Some time later, another diver, Catherine Baldwin, saw that Jones had speared what looked like a 50-pound grouper. Removing the fish from the shaft of his spear gun, Jones looked satisfied with his catch.

But a few minutes later, something was wrong. Hartley spotted Jones hovering at about 160 feet, the fish gone, and Jones looked listless, like he was staring at the coral. Hartley banged his knife against his tank, trying to get Jones' attention, but there was no response. Then Jones began to sink.

Hartley swam down to him and reached for Jones' buoyancy compensator, an inflatable vest that helps a diver control his depth. Hartley inflated it, and Jones began to rise. When Jones hit the surface, Bradley Cunningham, a diver who had already returned to the boat, jumped into the water and began giving Jones CPR. After Jones was pulled onboard, he was given CPR for another ten to 15 minutes. But Jones was gone.

He was just 30 years old.

In the year since, the death of Zak Jones has been particularly troubling for the nation's dive community. The popular, good-looking, young dive instructor had made hundreds of dives that were at least as difficult and many that were much more treacherous. Conditions that day were good. Jones held more than 25 certifications and was diving with experienced, responsible instructors.

In March of 2006, however, Miami-Dade's deputy chief medical examiner, Emma Lew, found that Jones had died of "human error."

That finding shocked the people who knew Jones. Divers refused to believe it. Writing on Internet forums, diving experts from around the globe expressed skepticism. There had to be more to it. Jones was just too competent to get himself killed. Walt Amidon, a Seattle man who was Jones' first diving instructor, says he can't believe that assessment. "When they say personal error, that's not Zak," Amidon says. "He didn't make a mistake."

After reviewing official reports of the incident and interviewing experts familiar with the gear Jones was using, however, it becomes clear that Jones, the careful, charismatic professional, was indeed taking chances that day, including violating the law. But his death is troubling not only for the risks Jones took. His affinity for a newer kind of equipment, growing in popularity with the most experienced divers, has an entire industry nervous about the scrutiny his death may bring.

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It's not at all surprising that Jones was out diving on a holiday. It was his livelihood, but it was also his obsession.

As a child, Jones was fascinated with the idea of breathing underwater. When Zak was 5, his father, David Jones, found him at the bottom of the family pool in Scottsdale, Arizona, with a hose in his mouth and a bucket on his head. When Zak came to the surface, he said, "Dad, do you know how hard it is to suck through a garden hose?"

A few years later, Zak would spend hours in Seattle dive shops, browsing gadgets. At 14, he gave up his catcher's mitt against the wishes of his father and spent his life savings — $100 — on his diver's certification. He flipped pizzas at Papa John's and spent the earnings on dive gear — but only the best. The latest technology and the highest-quality equipment were essential to Zak, and it didn't hurt if it all matched.

"Everything was black: black mask, black fins. He looked like Darth Vader," David Jones says.

Amidon, owner of A&E Aquatics Dive Center and, later, Underwater Sports, hired Zak as a salesman, taught him to dive, and eventually made him an instructor.

"He showed such a grasp for the sport," Amidon says. "He was very capable, and he learned enough to be a very, very effective instructor. Whatever Zak did, he never did it halfway. He perfected whatever he did, to the point where he became an expert."

Not everything about his young life was ideal, however. During his senior year in high school, Zak's mother succumbed after fighting cancer for more than a year. His 14-year-old sister ran away from home soon after. If it tore him apart, Jones didn't let on. He advised his father to buy a boat and sail the world.

After high school, he attended some community college classes but never graduated. School wasn't his thing. In the dive shop — that's where he excelled.

At 18, he became one of the youngest dive instructors in the State of Washington, and that was about the time his father also got certified to dive.

"It was either that or I wouldn't see him," he says. And his son was the kind of guy everybody wanted to see.

Jones had the answer to every question and was willing to spend hours with dive shop customers. But he also earned the nickname "Sea Biscuit," because he was always raring to go.

Diving with Jones was fun, but it was also safe. Divers who knew Jones insist he was meticulous. He had trained other instructors. He certainly knew the dangers.

But he was also a risk taker. Jones had dived subterranean caves, deep wrecks, and other challenging sites all over the world — the South Pacific, the Yucatan Peninsula, Alaska's Kodiak Island, the Mediterranean Sea, Belize, the Sea of Cortez, and more. He was part of a dive team that recovered a Boeing B-17 in Labrador, Canada, and had been on 500-foot dives — far more challenging than Tenneco Towers.

And like other hardcore types, he was particularly fond of a piece of equipment that allows divers to stay down longer and makes the bubbling undersea adventures of traditional scuba divers like Jacques Cousteau look like swimming in the kiddie pool.

Zak Jones, in other words, was a rebreather man.

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There are claims that the rebreather was invented earlier, but the first person who clearly understood what he was doing — breathing and rebreathing the same air underwater — died after using his device for only 20 minutes.

The year before, in 1771, a British man named John Smeaton had attached an air pump to a diving bell for the first time. But in France, inventor Sieur Freminet took a different approach: Rather than simply expel the air that he would be breathing, he rigged his equipment so that what he exhaled came back into his apparatus.

What Freminet apparently didn't understand, however, is that the air we breathe out and the air we take in have different compositions. Within just a few minutes underwater, Freminet was poisoning himself with his own exhalations. The culprit: carbon dioxide.

On land, the carbon dioxide we exhale is harmless; it dissipates into the air around us and is absorbed by plant life. But in a confined space, without proper ventilation, the carbon dioxide we produce can quickly build up and become toxic.

For Cousteau and his partner Emile Gagnan developing the Aqua-Lung during World War II, there was an easy solution to this problem: Don't rebreathe. Earlier inventors had designed self-contained diving units, and others had developed the crucial on-demand regulator that allowed air to be taken from tanks only when a diver needed it. But Cousteau and Gagnan were the first to combine all the best features in an apparatus that allowed for the kind of unfettered underwater exploration that became associated with the Cousteau name.

To this day, the most popular way of exploring the sea is still based on Cousteau's model: compressed air in tanks worn on the back of the diver, delivered with the use of a regulator that expels exhalations in a cloud of bubbles. How long a diver stays down depends upon how long the supply of air lasts.

Careful dives, however, require slow transitions to deeper water and slow ascents. That time eats into the supply of air. And the bubbles that divers exhale, while useful for expelling carbon dioxide and other unwelcome gases, can scare away undersea life.

Not to mention the precious oxygen those bubbles waste. Although oxygen makes up about 21 percent of air, human lungs make very inefficient use of it. Not only do we exhale carbon dioxide but nearly all of the oxygen we breathe in goes right back out again. And for divers, that means that most of the oxygen they need underwater gets wasted in the bubbles they send to the surface.