| Name | Age | Sex | Injuries | Injured areas |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vazquez Cabrera, Gilberto | 25 | Not recorded | Not recorded | Not recorded |
On Saturday morning, July 23, 1983 a group of eight divers began operations at La Cueva Manantial del las Aguas Frias, near the Manati River in Puerto Rico. The cave is a resurgence with an entrance 40 feet high by 30 feet wide with the ceiling coming right down into the pool of water at the back, some five or six feet deep. In the side of this pool is a hole, some two feet high and three to four feet wide leading to a "tunnel-like conduit angling downward for some 700 feet at a 15 degree angle, then upward another 1240 feet into the shaft of a vertical cave on the other side of the mountain. Each diver had a single tank with 20 minutes air supply. Diving was in progress when surface members became concerned that Gilberto Vazquez Cabrera (25) had not appeared after his 20 minute period. On the way back from his exploration he experienced problems with his air, became separated from his partner and was not seen again. His companion searched as long as he dared, then surfaced. Other team members dove in and searched but Cabrera could not be found. The NSS was called and this produced two Florida cave diving experts, Henry Nicholson and Wes Skiles, via Air Force transport. Subsequent searches produced traces of the missing diver but no body. At 130 feet from the entrance a knife, a piece of lanyard, and a tether hook attached to a shorn piece of lifeline were found.
According to Skiles the basic mistake was the failure to save two-thirds of a tank for the return trip and failure to stay out of deep, silty places such as this. Skiles theorizes that the victim "may have been pushed upward into a ceiling crack, of which there are many, by a loss of buoyancy control. The less water you have above you the more the pressure decreases and once wedged up against a crack in the ceiling the decreased pressure forces you upward into the crack which may be full of all kinds of debris-if that happens you are in serious trouble."
Diver Gilberto Vazquez Cabrera died after running out of air and becoming separated from his partner in a silted area of the cave during a cave diving operation.