Polish Diver Sets World Record With 338-Meter Cave Dive

A Polish cave diver plunged 338 meters into the flooded Matka Vrelo cave in North Macedonia, making it the deepest underwater cave ever explored by a human diver.

Bartłomiej Pitala began the record dive shortly after 10 a.m. on October 16, filming his descent with a camera behind his underwater scooter. The footage shows the scooter’s lights sweeping across pale limestone walls and vast blue chambers as he drops through newly discovered passages, while the depth reading in front of him climbs from about 290 meters to more than 335 meters. Expedition film by Andrea Mescalchin shows the wider team at work in the cave and on Matka Lake.

Pitala went on alone beyond the end of the guideline his team left at 287 meters last year, passing 300 meters and then 315 meters as the shaft kept dropping. “At minus 338 meters, I decided not to push the limits of the equipment any further. The passage was still going down steeply,” he wrote. “I was the deepest man on Earth.”

He spent about a minute and a half below 300 meters, but his ascent, including more than eight hours of decompression, took almost nine hours. Seven support divers took part, and the Polish, Macedonian and Italian team from the BAD Exploration Team and Dive Club Vrelo staged more than 25 safety cylinders in the cave, with a helicopter and a hyperbaric chamber on standby in Skopje.

The expedition, which ran from October 10 to 17, was held under the patronage of North Macedonia’s President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova.