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As I promised, I have delivered some crisp crunchies of my very own to the Diver Lifeboat Fund as a result of my name-the-diveboat competition, and those banknotes are now safely in the hands of the RNLI. Parting with my own money, has of course, driven me into a furious round-up of all those others in debt to the Fund.
Only a very few of these transgressors against Beachcomber's Law refuse to cough up. But I would not like those who did hand over cracklies and crunchies to think the non-payers had escaped without punishment, and that all the debtors have to do is to keep their heads down and all will be forgiven and forgotten.
Beachcomber never forgets; some say he never forgives.
So today the list of non-payers has not only remained remarkably short, but is installed in more than one computer, all of which give out an noisy alert to a debtor who has not paid up on the anniversary of his, or her, crime.
One thing, however, which did surprise me is that some of those who paid up were unsure of the difference between a crisp crackly and a crisp crunchie. One example is "Annie". I fined her a crisp crunchie in May, even though she shopped herself to me after talking to those dreadful journos, who of course misquoted her.
She sent a note with her cheque asking how much a crisp crunchie was. How could she not know after all these years of the Law According to Beachcomber? She overpaid as a result - there are no refunds - so I will say it for the Diver Lifeboat Fund just one more time - a crackly is a fiver, a crunchie will cost you £10.
You will have to excuse me if I leave it there - my Debtor Alarms are just going off...
Writing about the Diver Lifeboat Fund brings me to a likely money-raising tale from one of my Leaks in the Robin Hood countryside. This Leak was, he tells me, one of a group at Scapa Flow when they were joined on their dive-boat by "not the diver from Hell, but from just down the road from there".
The diver from near Hell would have two minutes longer on a dive so that he could have 30 minutes' longer decompression time than anyone else in the group, but would point out every day that his gear was bigger and better than theirs, so he didn't have any problems.
The near-Hell diver was not, says my Leak, very popular and made himself even less so by dishing out facts about each wreck they dived which, on every occasion, turned out to be completely wrong.
The other divers put up with all this until the middle of the week, when they were chatting about the day's diving.
A girl diver asked: "Did you see all that coal lying on the seabed? It just looked like the coalman had been there yesterday?"
At which the near-Hell Diver pushed his way into the middle of the group, and announced: "That wreck was scuttled in 1919, which makes that coal nearly 100 years old!".
My Leak tells me that no one in the group told him why a stunned silence followed his dating of the coal, particularly as he had always made so much of his membership of the Nautical Archaeology Society.
However, I am not so hesitant. His wild underestimation will cost him two crisp cracklies for the Diver Lifeboat Fund. To me swiftly, before I have to blow on the coals and up the fine.
Dive-boats all over the world have reported buoyancy problems and some skippers have put this down to the weight of divers' new gear bags.
Beachcomber has now become involved. He has been asked to carry out an independent survey using a sample of divers and their gear bags, both here in serious diving country and also in warmwater playgrounds.
It was not long before Beachcomber was able to come up with a likely reason for the vast increase in gearbag weight over the past two weeks. He discovered that divers' tastes in holiday reading have changed.
The steamy adventure paperback has been replaced by a much larger volume. Harry Potter is now required aprés-dive reading.
The Beachcomber survey revealed that the weighty new Harry Potter tome does not show up in gear bags until the divers go aboard their dive boat.
On the aircraft to warmer climes it is carried in cabin baggage and not stowed in holds. Dive boats are expected soon to insist that Potter is not brought aboard as part of a dive group's luggage, and that a weight limit on gear bags be strictly enforced.
With Pottermania now a part of 2003 diving, there is an opening for diving writers.
They should create a series of diving books about Harry Potter, taking him from novice diver (when he is old enough) to Harry Potter, Wizard Diver of the World. Octopush will replace Quidditch, of course.
But what would the new series be called? What title should replace "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" or "Chamber of Secrets"? I'll print the best you send me.
My best Scapa Flow Leak tells me a strange tale that I can hardly believe to be true. He says that the skipper of a visiting dive boat, not a regular in Scapa waters, fell overboard while docking one week and the very next week ran his boat aground and was stuck until the next high tide.
Can this really be so? My Scapa Leak swears that it is and, what's more, shows me video proof of it.
The skipper concerned, he adds, has not been seen in the Flow for many a tide.
Despite the video, which I found slightly blurry around the facial features of this luckless captain, I feel I need more witnesses.
Were you there when this happened? Better still, were you aboard the dive-boat in question at the time? Your depositions to me as soon as possible, please...
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