Claim Yourself - Claim Your Life with te-a

Fatally Flawed is an inside look into the world of deep diving and the people who populate it. This is the story of how Verna van Schaik found a way to become the deepest woman in one of the most extreme sports in the world. There are no books to teach you how to dive deeper than anyone else – you either find someone who has been there to teach you (an impossible task) or you teach yourself. The price if you get it wrong is your life.

Verna van Schaik never started out wanting to be the deepest woman in the world, that was an ambition that evolved as a support diver on Nuno Gomes’s quest to be the deepest (Nuno Gomes is the deepest man in the world). As a member of his support team she was perfectly positioned to become a world record holder, instead her ambition got her thrown off the team. If she wanted to be the deepest, she would have to do it on her own and doing it on her own was a prospect that petrified her. If she really wanted this, she would have to learn how not to be her. She would have to learn how to be a woman in a man’s world.

Verna's dives gave her a record. They gave her a new understanding of who she was and who she could become. They also got her onto the dive that would forever change the way she sees the men who dare to dive deep – Dave Shaw’s ill-fated body recover at 272-meters. It was this dive that allowed Verna to finally see past the carefully edited illusion that is ‘being the deepest’. Suddenly her experience with the top divers in South Africa ( if not the world) gave her a unique opportunity to question who deep divers really are. What drives a person to place their life on the line ? Why do they want so desperately to be the deepest ? Are they fatally flawed ?

Fatally flawed is a penetrating look in the world of deep diving, following Verna's beginning in 1989 when technical diving was in its infancy and culminating with her experiences on Dave Shaw's dive.