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The liveliest letters from the DIVER mailbag...
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I spent the morning reading and digesting your April issue, and what a very stimulating and thought-provoking experience it was.
I live on the edge of Telford Town Park, 40-plus acres of managed natural beauty and nature reserve interlaced with footpaths, lakes and woodland. It never ceases to amaze me how people can want to be there enjoying the surroundings and at the same time ruin the experience for themselves and others, by discarding so much rubbish!
I read with special interest the letter from Yusuf Musa (Another Maldives Perspective), as I've just returned from my second liveaboard trip to the Maldives. The diving was stunning and the mv Sea Queen and crew excellent.
During every dive briefing we were reminded about our responsibilities to the environment we were about to enjoy. One morning, as we approached Boduhithi, to visit the manta rays, we could see a boat there already picking up divers, so we hung off to let them clear.
Imagine our astonishment and anger when, on picking up the last diver, the captain gunned the engine and steered straight over a group of rays! Presumably taking divers for these special experiences is how the boat earns a living, so how idiotic to run the risk of ruining it for future trips!
In the same vein, I've been to the Red Sea and seen swimmers dropped off dayboats onto coral heads to use them as diving platforms, oblivious to the megaphone shouts from other, more conscientious, boats. See the connection with my park experience?
On a global basis we see the same sort of behaviour. The USA can't see past its desire for oil-guzzling; Europe can't or won't control indiscriminate overfishing; Japan doesn't see that slaughtering sharks and whales to satisfy a peculiar lust is unacceptable.
Whether you're discarding a sweet wrapper, prising a piece of brassware from a wreck, treating wildlife with disdain or polluting the oceans, the result is the same. The beauty, health, longevity and therefore the amenity-value of everything on our planet is under threat, whether it's the next day, the next visit or the next decade.
Allan Reeling, Telford, Shropshire
I read with some annoyance the letter from John "Jack" Dabill concerning baggage allowances on flights, and about BA in particular on his flight to Malta (Time For Action, April).
We should all realise that airlines are in business. They state their terms of carriage and there is no obligation for them to give better terms to any group of passengers unless they are prepared to pay more for it.
Does the gentleman go into his supermarket and expect to have, say, two more tomatoes for his money, or would he expect a builder to put up a 30ft wall after having quoted for only 20ft?
I also note that he had email correspondence with BA, which is probably as impersonal as could be. I suggest that if he writes a nice, polite letter and also make a nice, personal phone call, the results may possibly be a little better.
I also object to his attack on BA. I would suspect that he is making his first booking with it but I always try to travel with this airline, as I find its service excellent. This year, for a non-diving holiday, I asked for BA even though this increased my costs by £20 per head.
I enrolled into its executive club (free of charge), so it can see I use its services regularly. I have flown with it to Cyprus for diving, have phoned before flying, and each time been told that BA reserves the right to charge me extra for the dive kit - but this has never been applied.
I recommend that all divers use BA, and perhaps it might reciprocate. But I agree that it would be nice if all airlines gave a fixed cost for sporting equipment to avoid confusion in future.
Neil Thorneywork, Evesham, Worcs
Back in the 1960s and '70s, I was involved in a number of open-water studies of diver performance and the effects of nitrogen narcosis, cold and anxiety.
This was firstly under Prof. Alan Baddeley with the Cambridge University Underwater Exploration Group (CUUEG), and later with the United London Hospitals Diving Group (both BSAC special branches), as project leader.
That and a lot of deep air diving in those years gave me a pretty good insight into the diverse range of feelings and symptoms divers might experience at depth. These are well described by divers in your article about nitrogen narcosis experiences (Mind Games, April), and Sam Harding is doing some interesting work - well done to her for the Duke of Edinburgh Award. You may be interested to know that a CUUEG dive team (Malta, 1965) won the first ever Duke of Edinburgh Award.
More than 20 years ago, following a manslaughter trial concerning the death of a teenager who was given in error a nitrous oxide/carbon dioxide anaesthetic mixture (that's right, no oxygen!), I carried out a series of lab experiments on volunteers, looking at the breath-by-breath gas changes within the anaesthetic circuit while we simulated this incident. We did not believe the expert physiological evidence at the trial.
We discovered that we could simulate the sensations of deep air diving with heavy physical work load magnificently at ambient pressure with this mixture.
As the thrumming of the computer cooler motor became louder and louder, the tunnel vision set in and that warm, fuzzy glow slip-sliding into semi-coma developed!
Oh yes, and the "experts" at the trial got it wrong, but that was a matter of physiology, not of culpability.
Mike Davis, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Auckland, New Zealand
After reading the article Mind Games about nitrogen narcosis, I went diving at Stoney Cove. at around 20m.
I had the funny feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder. My dive buddy Andrew Seals was taking photos with his new digital camera and captured this amazing face - no, not mine, the one in the head-mounted torch.
It has a striking resemblance to the man on the Pringle crisps box.
Paul Henson, Nottingham
I was interested to read the account of nitrogen narcosis by Brendan O'Brien and am surprised that, after all this time, the condition is "inadequately understood". I am also surprised that there are still a few quite senior divers who believe that it does not exist.
I did a certain amount of deep (below 70m) dives on air in the Mediterranean in the 1960s. On my first dives to that depth, I happily recorded "No Narcosis", but later, especially when working to recover bodies from 73m, both my co-diver and I suffered considerably.
On one occasion, I found a diver walking along the bottom at 70m. I brought him up and he had no memory of having done any such thing.
We found that (as with alcohol), we built up a resistance to nitrogen narcosis by progressively diving deeper. When recovering fishing nets, I discovered that if you went down fast enough, you could arrive at the bottom completely clear-headed, and then had a minute or so before it seemed to hit you all at once.
We also had the impression that having a good breakfast before diving seemed to help in combating the effects.
Thanks for an excellent April issue. Please advise Mike Clark (Scotland's Top 10 Wall Dives) to try the Butt of Lewis, and Beach-comber to leave our happy memories of using goggles and flippers alone!
Reg Vallintine, London
In April, Beachcomber raised the question of whether or not masks should be raised onto a diver's forehead. One very good reason other than the one given on the Open Water course (it signals a diver in distress) is the importance of retaining all your, or the dive centre's, equipment.
While diving in Tenerife in November, I shared the RIB with a novice completing his Open Water dives prior to certification. He had been told several times not to slide his mask up on top of his forehead, as we all have done at times.
Unfortunately, having forgotten where he had "stowed" his mask, he then proceeded to take his hood off while sitting on the edge of the RIB.
There was a ping, then a plop, then a large splash as one of the instructors dived into the sea after the rapidly sinking piece of equipment, but the mask and snorkel were never seen again!
In the same issue there was a letter expressing concerns about dive centres in some parts of Tenerife being more concerned with the girls in bikinis than dive safety. I would thoroughly recommend the centre on the marina in Costa Adeqe, just outside Los Americas.
Bill Tate, Peterborough
I read your online news story The Deep Goes Deeper, about the Deep Aquarium in Hull opening a new exhibition showing marine life that normally lives at depths from 200-1000m, called the Twilight Zone.
I dive in Puget Sound in Washington State. Last weekend we had an Open Water class, and saw two giant Pacific octopuses (one about 3m across), a pair of wolf-eels (male and female), spot prawns and comb jellyfish - all in a maximum depth for the four dives of 16m.
Just because water is twilit (the sun really doesn't penetrate deeply into the emerald seas) doesn't mean that the species are not at our diveable depths.
Richard Carmody, Yakima, USA
After completing my Advanced Open Water Course abroad, I decided to take the plunge and do some diving in the UK. I went to a local dive centre to book a drysuit speciality course, and the pool sessions went fine.
When it came to the open water part in a quarry, I was quite excited. I set up the equipmentI had hired from the centre, but found that the regulator felt difficult to breathe through. I alerted the instructor to the problem. He tried it and said it was "OK and working fine".
We entered the water and descended to 10m to do some skills, which took about 10 minutes. The instructor then signalled that we would do a short tour around the dive site before ascending.
Off we went, and descended to about 15m. All of a sudden my regulator decided that it wasn't going to give me any more air.
I signalled to the instructor that there was a problem with my reg, and he signalled for me to use my alternative air source.
Blowing bubbles as I switched regs, I was telling myself: "Don't worry, I'm OK." But my AAS was also dead. I was starting to panic now, because my lungs were burning and I desperately wanted to bolt to the surface. I think the sheer panic in my eyes told my instructor that I needed his AAS, and he held it out to me.
I rammed it in my mouth, pressed the purge and took a deep breath. After ascending and leaving the water, the instructor didn't seemed that concerned, and acted as if this was a common occurrence.
On the second dive of the day I was given another set of regs, and the ones with a problem were thrown back in a box with all the others. I was in two minds whether to continue after what had happened on the first dive. Later,I found out that my instructor was also the dive centre's regulator servicing engineer.
Was my instructor incompetent in his actions, and do dive centres have to keep records of when the equipment they hire out has been serviced last? (name and address withheld)
Mike Harwood of the Health & Safety Executive comments: The events stated in this letter appear to be outside the requirements of the Diving at Work Regulations 1997, in particular the duty on the diving contractor to "ensure that the plant (in this case the breathing apparatus) made available is maintained in a safe working order". The failure of the breathing apparatus is also reportable to HSE by the diving contractor under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations 1995 (RIDDOR). Such events should be reported to the local HSE office or directly to HSE's Diving Group (www.hse.gov.uk/diving/contacts.htm). The writer of the letter may wish to contact HSE, which will investigate the complaint.
I have just read Steve Weinman's editorial about drysuit incidents and BSAC Incident Reports (Don't Get Too 'At Home' In The Water, May). My view is that people are put into open water in drysuits too soon. Trainees are taught buoyancy control, in a pool, using a BC, but are then often taken out into open water with a drysuit having had little or no specific training with it.
The poor trainee is then told to use the drysuit for buoyancy control when he/she has not acquired the skill, hence the rapid descents and out-of-control ascents.
I am unable to dive now, owing to a medical problem, but when I did, and as an Open Water Instructor, I made sure that my trainees had the full benefit of pool training before they were taken into open water.
Even then, on their first few open-water dives I insisted that only the BC was used until the trainees were comfortable with all their kit, and had overcome any fears about the new environment (ie, cold water).
Once they were happy in the water, I would allow the drysuit to be used for buoyancy control and keeping ballast to a minimum.
When I started diving, these buoyancy problems didn't exist. Drysuits came in two pieces with a cummerbund to seal the two halves, no air inflation and no dumps.
The only way up was to swim, and if that didn't work, dumping the weight belt helped.
Philip Laughton, Doncaster 75 BSAC
Many thanks for yet another great edition of DIVER and in John Liddiard's article on Bonaire My Mate Lenny (January), your usual high level of journalistic content and ability always to find another angle is appreciated.
However, the first paragraph refers to storm waves leaving resorts without dive piers, and I would like to point out to your readers that Hurricane Lenny took place in November 1999, and every single resort is functioning 100%, with all Bonaire's buildings and piers fully intact since around June 2000.
Thanks again for providing your readers with information about Bonaire.
Ronella Croes, General Manager, Tourism Corporation Bonaire
As you can see, reading the latest DIVER made my 10-month-old golden retriever Silver tired. However, it must have inspired him, as shortly afterwards, on our Easter trip with Baltimore Diving in Co Cork, Ireland, Silver took to the water for the first time.
I was unable to dive over the weekend thanks to a sudden head cold, so Silver and I watched my husband Brian and his friends enjoy a couple of dives. Silver couldn't understand where they had disappeared to. This is what diving is all about, good fun with friends and DIVER magazine.
Elaine Skehan, Balbriggan, Co Dublin
When I was 10 I would go swimming with my mum and watch others learning to scuba dive. I was fascinated and asked my mum if I could join the scuba team, but unfortunately she said no, so I had to forget it for the time being.
I was still interested, however, and would later pop into shops to enquire about how to get started, but then I moved away to work as a builder all over England, which took up all my time.
I had to stop working in 1993 because of an accident at work, which resulted in me losing my right leg below the knee. But I battled on, thinking that I didn't want to waste my life in a wheelchair, but to get involved in all sorts of activities.
I noticed at our local swimming baths that the diving team was still there, so I asked my wife if she'd mind if I went. "If it's something you've always wanted to do, go for it!" she said.
So I spoke to Mick and Paul and they said it would be a big advantage on both sides, as they didn't have any disabled divers in the team, and were not sure what I would be like in the pool.
I went to the to start my diving course with mixed feelings of excitement and nerves. But now I'm into it, diving in places such as Sheffield and Leicester and it's not bad - it's great! I've taken my written tests and, even though I'm dyslexic I've managed to pass. Thank you to Divemaster Scuba.
Kevin Priestley, Chesterfield
Having just returned from a holiday with my Army unit in Sharm el Sheikh, I feel that the Red Sea rules are not being adhered to. I noticed several divers - always photographers - destroying the coral with their fins as they tried to get that perfect shot.
Whether this was accidental or not, are all photographers visiting the Red Sea this bad, or is it just a few who have blemished my view of them all? I urge all photographers to please watch where they put their fins, and preserve this remarkable coral for future generations.
I am 19, and I would like to go back time and time again to see the coral as I first saw it.
Piers Boileau Goad, London
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