 |
A pathetic plea for help from the Training Officer of a well-known Middle East of England Branch has caused Beachcomber to put his network of Leaks on full alert.
The request concerned the TO's loss of four sets of full equipment and the subsequent rejection of his branch's claim under its insurance policy. Why, he asked Beachcomber, should the insurance company refuse to pay on this occasion, when the branch had always paid its premiums on time, and often even before the due date?
I consulted my top insurance Leak. He said that the company concerned was one of the best in the insurance world, and that it must have had a good reason for the refusal. What exactly happened for four sets of diving equipment to go missing?
It was at this point that Beachcomber sounded the full Leak Alert and set it to finding out the facts. The TO had merely said that the equipment had gone missing as he was launching the branch boat for a novice training dive.
What a weird tale of modern life Beach-comber's Leaks uncovered! The TO had not been completely frank.
It seems that when his town's refuse collection was switched from dustbins to wheelie-bins, he had quickly realised that bins on wheels would be ideal for transporting diving gear from store to car and from car to boat. So he had "borrowed" one from a nearby refuse collection point.
All went extremely well - until the Wednesday in question. With the branch boat on tow and the wheelie-bin laden with the novices' equipment in the back of his white van, the TO drove to the launching point.
He took the bin out of the van and put it carefully out of the way on the pavement. Then, with the help of the trainees, the boat was launched. Back went the TO to collect the wheelie-bin. But, shock, horror, although the wheelie-bin was still there, it was empty.
It seems that Wednesday was collection day for green wheelie-bins in that area, and, yes, the TO's bin was green.
Despite frantic calls to the refuse-collection HQ and the local refuse dump and the crew of the van who would have collected the bins in that street, no sign of the missing equipment has been found.
And when my Leaks reported back, it seems hardly surprising that the insurance company refused to pay.
So let that be a lesson to all divers who have eyed those refuse wheelie-bins and considered what ideal gear transport they would make.
I did think of imposing a fine on the TO for the DIVER Lifeboat Fund, but he will be having other money problems over the missing gear - and Christmas is coming, is it not?
The Scylla is already being described as the most popular artificial reef dive in the world. If that is so, the wreck must have snatched the title from the Spiegel Grove, the US Navy landing ship dock that was sunk for divers in the Florida Keys in 2002. Since then, 75,000 divers are recorded as having visited the wreck.
Can the Scylla really have exceeded this number? If it has, it means that every full member of the BSAC, together with at least two non-member friends, will have dived it before this year is out. I hope the captains of all those Plymouth dive boats shuttling back and forth to Scylla are keeping count.
The massive yearly Scylla Dive-in on the anniversary of the record being broken will be quite the largest event in the world diving calendar, even if it is open only to those who can prove by their logbooks that they contributed to the record break.
Admission by ticket only?
What a bashing poor old Beachcomber has taken over his casual question about why divers should not push their face masks up onto their foreheads.
Outrage poured in from members of the "never take your face mask off until you are at least two miles inland" school. Because it's the sign of a novice, distressed, panicking diver, squealed others, referring to page 156 of some PADI manual.
Because divers do it to look hard and tough, claimed more mails.
Beachcomber needs to take a refresher course, suggested one brave soul. This frightened Beachcomber so much that he decided at once to ban any more comment on mask up-pushing. Well, for this year, at least.
Beachcomber is hereby passing on a story from the early days of British diving, a story that should set all real divers arguing over the pudding and the port that, by tradition, is always taken in a communal hot bath after the Christmas Day dives.
Roy Davis, the first real underwater archaeologist of British waters, was lecturing at a Fort Bovisand meeting of archaeologists and divers interested in shipwrecks.
The title of his talk was "All Archaeologists are Treasure Hunters". He was telling a spellbound audience of his latest discovery, a wreck that, it seems, was full of gold coins.
To hold his audience's attention even more closely, he gave them a brief glimpse of some 20 gold coins that he carried in a small pouch.
As Davis left the room at the end of his lecture, he apparently accidentally dropped the pouch out of the folder containing his notes. He seemed not to notice.
By the end of the weekend meeting, only one coin had been handed in! This indeed proved, said Roy at the closing session, that all archaeologists are treasure-hunters.
Those who had kept the coins would gain nothing from their treasure hunting - the coins were all fakes that he had had made to test out the title of his talk.
So the question for the Christmas tub this year is exactly that. Are all archaeologists, as most divers think, really treasure-hunters under another name?
The start of this year's most impertinent e-mail: "Dear Beachie (If I may make so familiar)..."
This year's shortest reply: No, you may not.
|
