Donald Cerrone Almost Died Cave-Diving - Joe Rogan Experience

the ultimate fighter. Correct. He really couldn't train properly with it. Yeah, that's going to be a different animal in the future when people aren't worried as much about permanent damage. Right. I hope I need it because I do a lot of permanent damage. Yeah, the most damage today is permanent damage. All these wild excursions I go on. Yeah, tell me about the cave dive. So you want to learn about cave diving? Okay. So first of all, cave wants to take you. She takes you. So you learn about all these different rules of the water and of the nitrogen levels that you're taking to your body. Anyway, cave diving is about five years. And I got my certification in high school. And I am a super cave diver, man. I love it. I love it. I love I love diving. I love everything about diving. I love ship diving. So no days, caves, you name it. I love it. So we were in Cozumel a couple weeks ago. And one of my old, you could almost call him instructor, he's taught me a lot of what I know about diving today. We dove three or four days with some buddies of mine that were down in Cozumel. Just went through some ships, went through some cave, like the coral reef, just playing around, dying with them. And then we go and do a serious dive. Always he's getting a little bit older. His mind is still very, very, very sharp. But his motor skills don't keep up with him much anymore. And in cave diving, it's very necessity that you need. So we jump in this cave. It's rewind 20 minutes. I just kissed my girl and my new baby. And she's like, I don't really want you to go. Like, right? I don't. I don't want to say his name, but the guy you're going with, I'm worried. I said, what are you worried about? I said, I'm coming home. This is what I come home every time. I'm coming home. Fuck, I don't know. So I pick up another. I order another cylinder of air just for X-ray. I have two originally I'm going with. I order another cylinder of air just a total just for just just to fucking have it. No one's ever died because they have too much air. In cave diving, you dive in third. So if we have 300 PSI, we'll do 1,000 PSI in. We'll do 1,000 PSI out. And we have 1,000 PSI in case something fucking happens. Also in cave diving, they have lines. You run these in a cave. They'll already have a line run. A bunch of guys like me tech divers have gone into caves. They discovered them. They mapped them. They named them. And they put lines so you can follow them in case something happens. Get in and get out. Lines and lines. And none of the lines really connect except for the main lines. They'll have three or four main lines down big channels of the cave because caves are huge. From an entrance to the main line, usually no one has a cave. You have to make what's called a jump. You have to make your own line because they just don't want someone listening on here today to go find a cave, jump in, swim down, and be able to get in and out and get lost in there. And also, we have a Thailand incident. We're fucking wanting to save people. So we make a jump, tie off. You put these direction arrows down. They're called cookies, pointing out towards the direction out of the cave. So that way, if something happens, you come out. When you make a jump, you take your light. You wrap it around your neck. And then you have two hands that work on the line. The guy I was with didn't follow some of our rules. And in cave diving, it's kind of an unwritten fact that you only worry about you. I'm coming home, right? I'm fucking staying alive. So Joe, you mean I were cave diving with something where it happened? I'm not going in there to get you. No reason for two of us to die when only ones in there can die. So he tries to tie off. He's buoyancy fucking hits the roof of the cave, kicks his feet, spins. And now all of a sudden, this line that's supposed to be tied off, which is our fucking lifeline, is now wrapped around him. So I swim over to him and I try to help him unhook this line. And he goes into panic. And panic kills everybody involved. Everybody involved dies with panic. And that's something that I can't express enough. So he starts fucking with me. And I'm like, oh, I'm going to die. So he starts freaking out, hitting the roof, spinning, silt fucking everywhere. And I just back out. Take about four or five big, strong steps back. And I grab a hold of the main line. Now it's silting out. Now when I see something silting out, there's all this sediment that ends on the bottom of these caves. And you're in a little tiny room. So if you kick your fin hard, it kicks up dark dust, mud, sediment, silt. You can't fucking see anything. Blacks it out. So I back out of the silt. I grabbed the line. And I see him in there freaking and panicking, spinning and rolling around and getting all caught up in this line. And I'm like, fuck. Well, just stay calm. This was the exit. I know where it is. Cause I know where I am. There's the exit. He was making a jump to go down another tunnel. There he is. Now, what I just tell you about the rule that someone comes home, right? I broke the rule and I went in to get him. I said, fucking God damn. So I let go of the line. And I go in to get him because his light fucking is off now. And I'm thinking, God damn, he's spun up in this line. His lights off. Did he drop his regulator? Is he have air? Is he okay? Soon as I go into the silt, fucking lose everything, man. I lose my way, where I am, my up, my down. I don't know where I am. I'm fucking panicking now. I'm panicking, freaking out more than any I've ever, breathing hard, bang, hit my head on the fucking ceiling. And I just close my eyes. I'm like, God damn it, cowboy, calm the fuck down. Calm the fuck down. Calm the fuck down. Breathe. Can't even see my hands in front of me. I have two watches on. They're glowing, right? Those are my, let me know my depth, my time, everything, where I have two dive computers. I check them, I look, I calm, I check my light. I got to turn my light and burn my, our pressure gauges. They're glowing the dark, right? So I charge it with my light and I look at, okay, air. Check my second one. Okay, air. I know my third one's good because I haven't even opened it yet, that's just in case. I breathe down, I fucking think, and I can't even see my hands in front of me. And to this day I close my eyes and it gives me nightmares, right now, just thinking about it. Cloudy, dark, can't see anything. All I can see is the hum of my light. So I turn my light off. I'm not trying to think like, all right, just calm yourself, figure this out. Where's our partner? I start feeling around and he's nowhere to be found, right? Nowhere to be found. So I've now calmed myself a little bit and I start feeling the walls and I start moving around. I'm trying to think, where am I? But I don't know because we haven't been down to this channel yet, so I don't visually haven't made an imprint of, oh, there's that, there's this, right? Kind of like a mental imprint in my mind because that's what we're doing as we're coming in, landmarks, right? I don't have any of those. I don't have any feel. I don't have any touch. And I'm moving around, moving around. I took a compass reading of the direction of the front when we tied off at the first jump, right? So I know 126 degrees is the way out. But in a cave, they twist and they move and they're up and they're big and they're deep and they're low, right? There's no rhyme or reason how the water made the cave. So it's kind of a direction I can think of. The first thing that comes to my mind, and I start swimming that way, now I hit a wall, boom. And I go down, I hit a wall and I'm fucking in panic mode again, I fucking swim. Now I just start swimming and kicking and fucking going crazy. I make my way out of the silt and I fucking turn around on back on the main line, right? I find the main line to the cave again, which is 800 yards to the front, to the door. I grab ahold of the main line, I fucking reel it in again. Okay. Now the entire behind me, deeper into the cave is free. It's no problem, silt free. I can see everything's good. Where I need to go is fucking silted out and blown gone. I completely fucking wash it. I couldn't see you sitting there, but I can see everything behind us. Can't see you. I have the main line, but I don't have the jump line to get the fuck out. So I started thinking I was looking at the cave maps, trying like before we went, just try to get a visualize of the direction. I'm trying to remember landmarks, but I can't see anything and I can't feel them. I'm like, fuck, there was a split up here. So I start, I go back into the silt again. And I start feeling around and I'm feeling and I find a hole and I'm like, is that the right way? Is that the one I want to go down? Where does that want to go? Okay. Maybe remind, remember, remember, remember. That's that's not okay. Let's go to this next one. I go into the next one. And now this is, this is where it's got to be. I'm going, but all of a sudden I'm swimming against the current. And I remember when I came into this cave, there was this very slow current, which is why the entire cave is now washed out from that point on, right? The current is taken out. So I'm like, fuck, you're swimming against the current. So you're going the wrong way. I somehow work that into my fucking panic mind. We're swimming into the car. We're swimming in the car. We're going the wrong way. So I fucking turn, swim back. I'm back on the fucking main line again, right? I find the main lines, clear out into the clear main line. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I start like hyperventing and panicking. And I'm thinking, man, are you fucking you piece of shit? This is how people die. What the fuck are you? Right? And I'm keep her mind, kissing my wife and keep my kids saying, I'm coming home today. I'm coming home. I'm coming home. So I do it again. I fucking venture into the fucking great unknown, fucking abyss total blackout. Another panic, another panic, fucking freak out. Can't find my way, hitting my head, kicking, losing air by the fucking second, bro. Cause now I'm breathing hard. I'm breathing fucking irrational. And I'm sucking my tanks dry, right? Mind you, I'm on air so I don't have, there's no answer to this after I breathe my last breath. Keep checking my thing, keep keeping my time, looking in direction, time, time, air, time, fuck, slow down, slow down, slow down. Now I'm in pitch fucking black. Can't see anything, trying to figure out where I'm at, what I'm thinking, what am I doing? Okay, we're running out of air. How much time do we have? Calvary, we're at 28 feet. I know we're at 28 feet. I could probably breathe on this for about another hour on this tank, another hour. So we've got another hour, okay. We've been in here fucking 38 minutes already. How, what are we gonna do? Start trying to find my way out. I can't, trying to find my way out, I can't. Now I start thinking, what am I gonna do? I'm not gonna drown, Joe. Drowning's like my biggest fear of my life. So everything that's called a BC, we carry it on our back, it's a Buoyancy Control Device. That's how you control your buoyancy when you're scuba diving, right? It probably holds 20 big, huge, strong breaths. So I fill that motherfucker up. This is my plan. I'm gonna fill my BC up, which throws me to the top of the cave. Bonk, right? Now I'm only, now I gotta flip upside down. I'm gonna have to like crawl on the ceiling trying to figure out where the fuck I am. How am I, now I gotta get out of a cave upside down. And I'm thinking, all right, we've switched to our last bit of air. How are we gonna do this, Cal? What are we gonna do? Fill our BC up. When I run out of air, I'm now thinking in my mind, how am I gonna die, Joe, right? Tell my wife, tell my kid, I'm not fucking, I'm coming home. Now I gotta fucking realize how am I gonna die? I have a notepad that you carry in your pocket to draw on, write on. I'm thinking, what are you gonna say? What's your letter gonna be? You're writing a fucking death letter, you're awake. You're a fighter, we figure this out. You don't fucking find a way to quit, you fucking bitch. This is a conversation I'm having with myself. While I'm in fucking complete panic mode and complete darkness, thinking that there's no, this is how people die. What the fuck are you doing? You're gonna write a letter to your fucking kid and tell her how you fucked up. I'm sorry, daddy's not coming home. So I'm fucking thinking, I'm not gonna drown. I'm not gonna breathe my last breath. So I'm gonna breathe this BC that I just filled up with air and I'm gonna fucking breathe it until the oxygen level no longer happens and I just pass out. That's what I've come to realize how I'm gonna die. I'm gonna fucking just slip away and pass out, keep breathing the same air until I go away. And I start thinking, you fucking piece of shit. You're giving up, you're having like legitimate conversations with myself while fucking in complete panic. Like you're gonna quit, you're writing a letter and you're gonna fucking breathe your last air until you pass out, you fucking pussy. You're a fighter, figure the fuck out. So I'm upside down. I'm crawling on the ceiling. I remember when I came in, we came in the big cave and there's like a huge fucking crack that runs along the top. Turn both my watches off now at this point because they're giving off light and I kill my light. I said, that crack's gonna fucking lead to the surface. That crack's gonna fucking give us something. So I just call, start panicking me, panicking again because I'm panicking. I don't know what to do. I'm sucking air and I'm fucking breathing hard and I'm hyperventilating. I'm crawling on the ceiling, crawling on the ceiling, looking for this fucking crack and goddamn it, I found it. I found the crack and I followed the crack and the crack got bigger. And all of a sudden I see fucking glow like green glow. Crawling, crawling, crawling, find it, try to get up. My tanks are too big. I can't fucking get out of the little hole. Can't get out of the hole. Beak, beak, beak, beak, beak, beak, fucking kidding, screaming, freaking out. Calm down, cowboy, calm down, cowboy. This is the way, calm the fuck down. Reel it in, reel it in. We're here, we made it. Grab control. Follow the crack some more, opens up, out, boom. There's the cave, fucking I'm out. Made it. You're coming home. You aren't talking about, whoa, motherfucking whoa! Right? That was the feeling. Meanwhile, my guys out there, I can't even be mad at him because he panicked, he grabbed the line, he fucking ran out the hole. He looks at me and he says, so we're not diving together ever again, are we? I said no, that was it. That was it. And I text my girl, I love you baby. And today was a fucking scary moment. But daddy's coming home. And it was fucking so crazy because that was, I mean, I've almost died numerous times, but almost dying slowly, which puts it in perspective to me like these guys on death row, I always thought like, yeah, fucking kill a murderer, man. That's, fuck them. Dude, knowing the time and how much time you have left, that's some scary shit, Joe. Knowing that you have two hours left, how much energy I've left at the end, maybe another hour probably, hour and some change. But could you imagine, I had to talk to myself how I was gonna die. Like to me, that fucked me up. That fucked me up really bad. Like I probably had to go do some mushrooms and ask myself some questions now because that fucked me up bad, but the inner me, the fighter, the you who do new fear at the fuck out. But was I gonna write a letter? I was fucking damn close to writing a letter. It was crazy, man, it was wild. Damn. Hopefully I explained that good for everybody. You explained it like a motherfucker. Yeah, I'm nervous, I felt like I was there. Fuck, dude. That is crazy. Yeah. Man. And I'm gonna do it again. I'm not scared of it. Like that just needs to be done better. I'll run my own motherfucking line. Well it also shows you how important it is, like what your wife was saying. You can't, she knew something, she had a sense. When people fuck up a lot or when they're just that person that just can't keep it together, you gotta be real careful around those people. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking crazy shit, man. I mean that's why people kill those people in war. Yeah. You know, they're just like, look, we can't do this. Yeah, we can't. Even everybody killed. Yeah, your panic is, sorry. Yeah. Yeah, you're not hanging in there. You've become a detriment. Fuck, dude, that is one of the craziest stories I've ever heard of my life. I'm glad I got to share it with you. Fucking impressive.