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After being banned by the Editor from operating the highly successful Beach-comber Dating Agency, Beachcomber was doubtful in any case whether such a thing could survive these high-speed days.
How wrong he was. Following his toe-dipping last month in the personal-column style of dating by reprinting the call from an "ex-professional deep sea diver" for a "stunning younger girl for frisky fun times", Beachcomber was amazed at the huge response from frisky young and not-so-young diving ladies.
This response was by no means tempered by my revelation that the deep-sea diver putting out the mating call was not, as he stated, 39, but knocking on 60, and was obese to say the least.
Among the responses was one that suggests there is no limit in the minds of today's "frisky young girls" to the desirability of divers . Beachcomber refers to two upper-class young ladies training to be Army officers at Sandhurst.
Their photograph shows them in scoop-necked party dresses and sporting SA-80 rifles. Their message is simple: "Hi, we're at Sandhurst at the moment, training to be Army officers. We enjoy most sports - diving, skiing, hockey and squash. If you're an active sort of guy, then give us a call!"
Can anyone doubt that diving tops the list of the greatest sports of the world... and that Beachcomber helps keep it there?
Will divers soon lose interest in those wonderful TV wildlife programmes featuring underwater scenes? Beachcomber's interest took a hard knock recently during an apparently serious programme about seals.
TV directors should pay more attention to the editing of such shows. One incautious swing of a camera revealed that the seal shots were coming from a boat named Spearfish.
My Leaks are herewith put on TV watch to make sure that any similar bloops are drawn to my attention for passing on to you.
Just as there are knots for divers, there are also knots that divers find very difficult.
There are divers Beachcomber confesses he would never trust within feet of a rope. There are divers who, if left to moor a boat, you know will ensure that it would have to be recovered drifting miles out to sea.
The standard explanation? Someone must have untied it/ cut it free/ the rope must have snapped.
You would never think, to hear such conversations, that divers have all passed their boat-handling courses without a hitch holding them up for a second.
Divers are incredibly bad at knots, and dive instructors are the worst of all. Which is why Beachcomber draws your attention to a report from one of the best Leaks in the Canary Islands.
The setting is a PADI Instructor Development Course on Lanzarote, on which not all the candidates are happy with the results.
One unhappy soul describes himself as "totally disillusioned" and, what's more, "confused" about whether he now wants to be an instructor at all.
The cause of his fury is that he apparently passed all his IE exams with high marks, but was failed because he was unable to tie a sheet bend, which, as every diver knows, is the one for joining together two lines of not very different diameter.
Beachcomber is not an ace at tying such bends, but he looked it up in a book and found that you start by taking something called a bight in the larger of the two lines, then pass the thinner end through the loop from the underside, around the back and across the front of the loop under its own standing part... Isn't that simple? Surely every diver knows that?
Apparently our failed candidate didn't, but didn't think he should have been failed, as he had never been taught knots on any PADI course. When he complained, he said he was threatened with having to take his Open Water again as well.
Any other divers who have their knots in a twist need not panic. Apparently this knotty problem will never happen again, as things in Lanzarote have been changed.
But Beachcomber is not sure it can end happily just like that.
So will the examiner who failed our sheet-bender send me five crisp cracklies for the diverLifeboat Fund to remind him on every IE exam he takes that bends are not compulsory.
To me as fast as you can say get knotted - or I shall have to bend my tongue around naming names in this sad affair.
Some nervous divers have sent me e-mails querying today's tendency to make heroes out of villains. We're not talking politics here, but
a different kind of shark, the diver- and surfer-eating kind.
Surely, say my e-mail correspondents, we have taken the protection of some kinds of wildlife much too far. Most of them quote the great white as the prime example, and some go so far as to say that any great white in an area of an attack on a human swimmer should be ruthlessly hunted down and killed. A tooth for a tooth, indeed.
Beachcomber knows that a number of great white lovers, some of whom organise cage-dives for tourist divers who want to be able to show office colleagues their photographs, will object strongly to this attitude. But some of the anti-shark divers may have a point in saying that things can be taken too far.
One e-mail, for example, draws my attention to a retired British diver who is busy defending the giant Nile crocodiles, the ones that tend to snap their jaws shut on anyone who goes too close to the river bank.
He wants even these "man-eaters" to be protected from the natural anger of the locals after some hideous killing. He is not having much success yet with his campaign to protect the great browns, but he will.
Just think how quickly things have changed on the shark front. A few years ago, no one would have thought of protecting sharks, and especially not great whites.
Soon we will be shedding tears for the crocodiles, which are reputed to weep as they devour human victims. Just wait and see.
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