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Despite the desperate and increasingly strange efforts by Government and police authorities to find solutions to binge-drinking, such as introducing 24-hour alcohol licences, it has been left to Beachcomber's Top 10 Leaks to find the true answer to the menace of youthful boozing in pubs and drinking clubs.
My elite Leaks tell me that there are plans for a chain of drug- and alcohol-free clubs, the first of which is due to open in 18 months' time in some old bank premises in middle England.
Basis for this new form of clubbing is not alcohol, but natural intoxication, known to divers as nitrogen narcosis, or "the narcs".
Other superclubs, trading under the name of Club Nark will be opened in other disused banks as funds become available.
The first club will have cost £5 million by the time it is in full operation and is open to revellers to be put under pressure, get narked and have a good time, then go home without worrying about violence, drink-driving, pickling their livers or hangovers.
All the clubs are planned to be located in old banks because the vaults make good pressure chambers. The strong-room area is also important for safe installation of air-compressor equipment, not only to create the correct pressurised atmosphere, but also to supply the clubbers with compressed air during their period of mild drunkenness.
Main question from the local authority was: "Is it safe?" To which the organisers were able to reply in a press release: "Perfectly. The effect creates no lasting damage, and the narcs are only considered unsafe under water because of a diver's possible actions while intoxicated.
"The Narked members will find it difficult to injure themselves in the clubs because of the extremely thick padding on the inside of the bank vault. Safety tests have been carried out on mice, dogs and divers, and a baby, without any problems."
Be warned, all those who are already getting excited at the prospect and can't wait to get into their special Narked "three minute safety stop at 5m" T-shirts - getting into Narked will not be cheap. I'll believe all this when I get my invitation to the riotous opening.
The Strange Case of the Frayed Rope makes Beachcomber's memory twitch.
To know why, you must be one of those veteran divers who, years ago, at Easter, bank holidays or a full fortnight in the summer holidays, hitched the branch boat onto the towbar of the best car in the club and set off for the Branch Diving Holiday.
Each branch had its favourite little port, camping site, caravan park or B&B, mostly in the South-west of England. And the divers would usually behave themselves.
Which was more than could be said for some of the fishermen of one particular cove, who hated divers with a passion, born of the belief that they were all pot-robbers.
You might think divers would have stayed away from these hotspots, but they didn't. They often even helped local families recover lost pots or snagged gear, despite believing deep-down that at least one family included the fishermen who cut their mooring ropes or, in extreme cases, slashed the tyres of their trailers or took a razor to the sides of their inflatables.
Boats would be cut loose to drift miles offshore during the night. The local fishermen who recovered them were inclined to demand salvage fees, saying that the boat had obviously been moored carelessly with a "frayed rope".
The bad blood seemed to have died out by the end of the '80s; so it was a shock to receive a new report from one of my best Leaks of the South-west. I learned that when a group of divers holidaying in the cove recently asked about their RIB, missing from a mooring allocated by the cove's harbourmaster, the locals all said it must have been moored with a "frayed rope".
The divers knew this wasn't true, for the mooring rope was new. In belt-and-braces fashion, they had also used a second line with karabiners attached to a buoy.
The RIB was found much later high and dry on rocks, with no sign of any ropes at all. Then a small diving inflatable was untied, and this time a local man was seen to do it. Since these incidents this autumn, many of Beachcomber's Leaks have heard talk among divers that "the men of the cove are up to their old tricks".
Note that Beachcomber has not named the cove. I hope there will be no need to do so. The harbour authorities and locals who read this should remember that the cove now relies for its livelihood on tourists, including divers, not professional fishing.
It would be a pity if boat-owners and other holidaymakers decided not to come to the cove, or spend their money there.
After the infamous case of Maeve earlier this year, I had expected good shotline etiquette to reign supreme, at least for a goodly while.
So I was upset by a recent report from my best Manchester Leak. A group of divers were carrying out a safety stop on the buoyline attached to the Hispania, the steel Swedish steamer wreck in the Sound of Mull, following an enjoyable dive.
"Suddenly another group of divers went through us like cascara through a short grandmother, pulling, poking and kicking us out of their way," my Leak told me.
That was not all. When the safety-stop divers surfaced, they were dismayed to see the RIB that had presumably delivered the offending divers on top of them, casting off from the buoy, putting outboards in gear and motoring away instead of first drifting a safe distance away from the divers down below.
The miscreants, says my Leak, were in three RIBs, all orange Humbers with black and yellow stripes on the aft half of the pods. One was the same RIB the props of which were turning just over the heads of the divers on the buoyline, and used twin 75s. They seemed in a rush, having arrived too late from Tobermory over the wreck to go down the line at slack.
The cox'n of the offending RIB will now collect a crisp crunchie from each of the divers he dropped so carelessly, and add another two of his own. This he will send swiftly to Beachcomber for the Lifeboat Fund. Or I shall have to name lots of names.
Bad behaviour on buoylines and shotlines seems to be the most infectious diving disease this year. Let's stop it all right now.
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