"If something goes wrong, leave me down there. I want my final resting place to be in Boesmansgat."
The meaning of world-record diver Dave Shaw's instructions to his team on Friday night was clear.
He knew there was a real chance he would not survive his attempt to recover the remains of another diver from the 271m-deep Boesmansgat cave - the third-deepest freshwater cave in the world - near Danielskuil in Northern Cape.
Shaw also was adamant that no divers should follow his example and risk their lives in trying to recover his body.
Tragically, Saturday's meticulously planned dive did go horribly wrong.
Shaw failed to return from the bed of the cave.
Australian-born Shaw, 50, a Hong Kong-based airline pilot, had found Deon Dreyer's body on October 28 when he clinched the record for the deepest cave dive using special rebreathing equipment.
He promised Theo and Marie Dreyer he would fetch the remains of their son, who died in the cave on December 17 1994.
Before the dive began early on Saturday, Shaw pulled aside technical diver Derek Hughes, a member of the recovery team, and gave him the number of a friend overseas.
"He told me that if anything went wrong, I should phone this person who would then break the bad news to Dave's wife in Hong Kong," said Hughes.
At about 10am, three hours after Shaw went into the water, Hughes made the call.
The team's plan was for Shaw to dive to the bottom of the cave, place Dreyer's legs in a bodybag, then cut him free of his equipment and place the rest of the body in the bag.
At the 220m level his number two man, Don Shirley, would have taken the body to a third diver at 150m.
As each man began his decompression, the body would have been passed to the surface by another in the chain.
On Friday, at a dive briefing, Shirley remarked that he was "Robin to Dave's Batman".
"I'll be watching my watch closely, and if I don't see him coming towards me after six minutes then we abort the plan to fetch Deon. Dave becomes the priority. I will go after him."
As it turned out, that is exactly what happened - and Shirley nearly lost his life in the process. Diving down to look for his friend, the water pressure at 250m crushed critical components of his equipment and he was forced to turn back.
Police diver Inspector Theo van Eeden was supposed to have surfaced with Deon Dreyer's body and hand it to the Dreyers who had come from Vereeniging with their minister.
They were meant to have a quiet moment with their son.
Van Eeden said: "Marie was tense. She was looking at me in this determined way when I surfaced. I looked at her and I just shook my head."
"They didn't know at that time that something had gone horribly wrong."
The father and mother had travelled to Boesmansgat to find closure - instead, the person who went to fetch their son's corpse didn't come back.
A family friend said the Dreyers were devastated. Shaw had become a friend - and they were wracked with guilt.
But Hughes said Shaw, who had been an explorer who pushed the boundaries, had known all about the risks involved.
"A few minutes after he surfaced on October 28, when he found Deon's body, he told me that he wanted to go down and fetch it."
"He hadn't ever met the parents. They didn't ask him to do it; he offered. Now victim and recoverer are lying side by side."
"This expedition was more than retrieving a body. Sure, it was part of it, but he came here because it was another cave adventure.
"He was passionate about diving," said Hughes.
Another of the divers, Peter Herbst, agreed that Shaw had been fully aware of the dangers. "As long as there are deep holes, there will be people like us who will want to explore them."
"There's a little boy in all of us and Dave was drawn to the adventure aspect of diving."
"Like the other crazy people who dive, Dave wanted to go where other people haven't been before."
"Dave died with his boots on," said Herbst. "Exploring caves was Dave's life."
It was also his death.