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Northern Norway. February.

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Three hundred and sixty-seven feet down, in a flooded cave inside a mountain, in the narrowest part of the passage, two divers are face to face.

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They are about a foot apart. They are looking into each other's eyes.

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One of them is caught in the guide line, the thin line that is supposed to show them the way out.

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For ten minutes, the other has been trying to free him.

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He cannot.

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This is Caving Stories: Cave Diving. True stories from flooded caves, told from the record.

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Today, the Plura cave in Norway, a dive that went wrong, and the friends who went back.

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Two divers died in this cave.

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In the county of Nordland, in northern Norway, the mountains are full of limestone, and the limestone is full of caves. Some are dry. Some are full of water.

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In a valley called Plurdalen, a river runs for more than two miles hidden inside the mountain. Only about half of it has been explored.

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Where the river comes out into daylight, below a farm, there is a deep pool.

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Cave divers come from all over Europe to start their dives there.

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From the pool, the flooded cave runs into the mountain and down, to its lowest point, about four hundred and thirty feet below the surface.

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Then it climbs again.

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Along the way there is a long chamber full of air, almost eight hundred feet long, where a diver can swim and wade above the water.

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And on the far side, deep inside the mountain, the flooded cave comes up into a dry cave called Steinugleflåget.

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That dry cave can also be reached from the surface, by climbing down a narrow and dangerous passage.

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In the autumn of twenty thirteen, divers found a way through the maze from one to the other for the first time.

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The two who found it were Patrik Grönqvist and Kai Känkänen.

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On Thursday, the sixth of February, twenty fourteen, five Finnish friends were ready for a long weekend of diving in Plura.

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Patrik Grönqvist. Jari Huotarinen. Kai Känkänen. Jari Uusimäki. Vesa Rantanen.

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The plan was a traverse: to start from the pool, swim up the river system through the mountain, and come up in the dry cave at Steinugleflåget.

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They would go in two teams.

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First, Patrik and Jari Huotarinen.

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Two hours later, the other three, on the same path.

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It was winter. The ice on the pool was almost a foot and a half thick. They cut a hole in it with a chainsaw.

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Each diver's equipment weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds above water.

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They were diving on closed-circuit rebreathers, carried on their backs, with ordinary scuba cylinders as spares.

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The water was barely above freezing.

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There would be no light in the cave but their own.

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And from those depths, the way back up takes hours of decompression, stopping at set depths on the way. Otherwise, decompression sickness, which can be fatal.

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The first team went down under the ice.

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They followed the guide line through the maze, and passed the deepest point of the cave, about four hundred and thirty feet down.

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So far, about an hour had gone by. Everything was going to plan.

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Then the passage began to climb toward the dry cave.

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It climbs through the narrowest part of the whole route.

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At about three hundred and sixty-seven feet, Patrik noticed that Jari was no longer behind him.

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He turned and swam back.

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Jari was stuck, in the narrow passage, tangled in the guide line.

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Patrik tried to free him.

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It went on for ten minutes. At the end of it, the two men were about a foot apart, looking into each other's eyes.

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Jari Huotarinen could not get loose.

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He died there.

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Now Patrik was in danger himself.

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The last time he had looked at his dive computer, it had told him he would need about a hundred and twenty minutes of decompression on the way up.

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Now it said four hundred.

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As the numbers climbed, he became more and more afraid, and his breathing became faster.

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Under stress, a diver makes more carbon dioxide. At depth, carbon dioxide is one of the most dangerous things there is.

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Patrik got his breathing back under control, and started the long climb, stop by stop.

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And on the way up he thought about the second team, two hours behind him.

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They would swim straight onto their dead friend, in the narrow passage, with no warning.

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He had no way to tell them.

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He decided that when he reached twenty feet, he would go up, whatever the computer said.

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He had been underwater for seven hours.

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At twenty feet, Patrik saw something below him, and swam down to it.

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It was Vesa, the first of the second team.

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Vesa had squeezed past his dead friend in the passage. To do it, he had taken off the equipment on his back and pushed it through ahead of him.

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The two of them came up much faster than they should have.

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Vesa began to show signs of decompression sickness: a pressure in his joints, his elbows, his knees.

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They waited an hour in the dry cave. Then they had to climb out, up the narrow passage to the surface, and walk down through the snow of the valley, to the farm by the pool.

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The whole way, they hoped to see the last two divers. No one came.

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At the farm, they were given food and dry clothes.

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Then, down at the pool, they saw a dim light in the dark water. Everyone ran outside.

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It was Kai.

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Kai told them what had happened behind them.

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Jari Uusimäki, the other Jari, had come to the narrow passage, and found his friend dead in it.

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Something happened then. VG's account says that perhaps he was stressed, or panicked, at the sight. Nobody can know.

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Kai saw Jari Uusimäki drown. He tried to help him, and could not.

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He saw Vesa get through the passage.

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And he turned back, the way they had come, through the deepest part of the cave, before he could start his own climb.

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The whole time, he thought he was the only one of the five left alive.

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His underwater scooter broke down, and he had to swim the rest of the way out.

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When Kai surfaced in the pool, he had been underwater for eleven hours.

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The three survivors were taken to hospital.

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The two Jaris stayed in the mountain.

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At the end of February, the Norwegian authorities decided against a recovery.

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It was too dangerous for the people who would have to do it.

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The police had already called off their own operation. And the cave was closed: no one was to go in.

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The survivors and their friends did not accept that.

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They had prepared for this situation.

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And in secret, they planned an operation of their own.

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Their federation later wrote down why.

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To recover the remains of two divers. To help the families get their loved ones back. And, as a favour to the cave diving community, to help keep the cave open.

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In the words of VG's account, the divers thought it was easier to be forgiven than permitted.

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The recovery ran from the twenty-second to the twenty-sixth of March, twenty fourteen.

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The Finnish federation's report counts seventeen people, divers and surface crew, ten of them diving on rebreathers.

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VG's account says seventeen Finns and ten Norwegians.

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They would work from both ends of the cave: from the pool, and from the dry cave on the other side.

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They carried about two thousand four hundred pounds of equipment into the mountain.

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Spare cylinders, scooters, rebreathers, lights, dry suits, first aid.

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Down through the dry cave, which is prone to rockfall.

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They placed spare gas along the route, at depths from twenty feet down to three hundred and twenty-eight.

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They left spare rebreathers at both ends, with a separate team of safety divers ready to bring them down.

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And at twenty feet they anchored a habitat to the cave wall: a chamber full of air, under the water, where a diver could sit dry through the last of his decompression.

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The deep dive went to Patrik Grönqvist, and to Sami Paakkarinen.

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On Monday the twenty-fourth, they went in from the pool.

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It took about fifty minutes on their scooters to reach the narrow passage.

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The first one they came to was Jari Uusimäki, in the same place he had died, forty-six days before.

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About sixty-six feet beyond him was Jari Huotarinen.

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Because he had been caught facing the way they were now coming from, they pulled him out by his feet.

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They brought him through the passage without trouble.

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Then Patrik and Sami had five hours of decompression in front of them. The last two and a half hours of it were at twenty feet.

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On Tuesday, three divers went in from the other side, from the dry cave.

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The third, Jani Santala, waited at three hundred and twenty-eight feet, while the other two went the last sixty-six feet down to the passage.

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This time it was harder. They had to cut Jari Uusimäki's equipment loose before they could bring him through.

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But they did.

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On Wednesday they cleared the cave of their equipment. The two men they had come for were brought up into the dry cave.

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Everyone climbed down into the dry cave one last time.

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There was a moment of silence.

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Then the Norwegian police were told, and took over.

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Every dive had been filmed on helmet cameras, and the film and the equipment they recovered were handed to the police for their investigation.

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The report counts a hundred and one hours of diving in five days.

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The record is clear about what happened in the narrow passage, and it is clear about what it does not know.

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Jari Huotarinen was caught in the guide line, at the tightest point of the route.

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At those depths, as VG's account puts it, it is easy to lose consciousness and die.

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What happened to Jari Uusimäki after he found him, no one can say.

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Three men came out. Patrik had been in the water for seven hours. Kai, for eleven.

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And six weeks later, the people who knew that cave best went back into it, against the authorities' decision, and brought their friends home.

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The sources for every fact in this episode are in the show notes.

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This has been Caving Stories: Cave Diving.

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Thank you for listening.