Tucked away in the emerald-green mountains of northern Thailand is a majestic labyrinth called the The Sleeping Lady. It is gorgeous, ancient, and deeply sacred in local folklore. But during the monsoon season, this place doesn’t just get wet. It swallows rain in sheets, turning miles of jagged, subterranean tunnels into a roaring, high-pressure washing machine with zero visibility and a maze of tunnels leading to a tiny beach with mile high limestone steps.

It was June 23, 2018. Twelve boys from the Wild Boars youth soccer team and their coach hopped on their bicycles after a game to do what locals had done for generations: duck inside the mouth of the cave for a quick, innocent exploration. Except, the monsoon season didn't wait for their calendar. Flash floods slammed into the mountainside, pouring millions of gallons of muddy water straight into the cave system and trapping the boys two and a half miles underground on a muddy sliver of rock.

What followed was a seventeen-day stretch of total, suffocating silence in the dark, a rescue math problem that looked like pure suicide, and a high-stakes, ketamine-laced medical gamble that required diplomatic immunity. Join host Vada Greer for The Sinking Ship as we trace the miraculous underwater extraction of the Wild Boars, the titanium-nerved British divers who found them, and the ultimate price exacted by the mountain.

Keywords:
Tham Luang cave rescue, Wild Boars soccer team, Chiang Rai cave flood, John Volanthen, Rick Stanton, Richard Harry Harris cave diver, Saman Kunan, Ekkaphon Chanthawong, cave diving survival stories, Vada Greer Sinking Ship, monsoon cave trapped, true survival podcasts, ketamine cave rescue sedation