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SICK PUPPY
THE UNDERWATER WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE, but beauty and suffering go hand in hand. Anyone who has had her bikini line waxed will know what I mean.
I watched a blue-lipped girl in a rented semi-drysuit fill her booties with hot water in the toilets at Stoney Cove, trying to prepare herself for a second, icy dive. This is the kind of needless cruelty that would warrant her instructor being targeted for a battering by angry protestors - if she was a puppy or a rabbit. This is England, after all. But if you're a human being, your suffering is very much your own business.
Which is probably why poor John is curled like a foetus in the bow of the RIB. Seasickness is miserable at the best of times, but when you're stuck on a crowded inflatable boat, it's hard to be stiff-upper-lipped and politely conceal your suffering.
Nobody in that branch had told John about the "bodybag" technique traditionally adopted by those sick with a hangover. Club-members still too addled by the previous night's drinking to make the rational decision to stay on land would wrap themselves in a waterproof mac and collapse semi-conscious across the tubes. Private, and any onlookers would assume that the divers aboard had recovered a corpse. and steer clear.
Secretly, I'm not too displeased when someone starts throwing up. Mr Vomit is usually doing more than enough suffering to allow the rest of us to get off for free. Though I do wonder whether the seasick-prone aren't ignoring Nature's way of telling them to take up golf.
It's amazing what some people will put themselves through for a dive. I have to take my hat off to those who get sick on boats. Just not too near to them. From past experience, any receptacle will do.
When someone on a dive-boat asks me to pass the bucket, I assume that they want to rinse their mask rather than empty out their stomach. No such luck on this occasion! Watching - or rather smelling - someone retching up half-digested scrambled eggs beside you is not pleasant.
Please don't share that experience with me. Or with my SMB reel and left fin, thanks all the same. Why does this always happen when all parties are pinned down by large amounts of equipment?
At least an immobilised sickie is preferable to one who totters about the deck, threatening to projectile-vomit in a random direction. In such circumstances, I've heard it's best not to turn your back - and to keep your drysuit fully zipped.
But while I'm concentrating on avoiding what comes out of people's mouths, other divers are more concerned about what's going in.
My latest issue of the Divers Alert Network newsletter - a cheerful missive, full of warnings about sunstroke, stinging corals and poisonous sea snakes - contains a piece about how the bacteria living on your regulator mouthpiece can do you harm.
Prejudice makes me expect that nutty health scares emanate from the USA, but the original article in this case was German, titled Krankmacher, and written by Dr Holger Goebl.
You couldn't make this stuff up.
Perhaps divers from other countries have a more delicate disposition, but British divers will laugh their Xerotherm socks off at the very thought of anyone worrying that a regulator mouthpiece will mach them krank.
What exactly is the point of disinfecting your regulator mouthpiece, when the entire boat is awash with spit, snot and vomit? Not to mention the blow-back from dive blokes who insist on taking a wee upwind.
Sorry, but UK diving really is not a sport for the squeamish. And I'm sure any seasoned diver will agree that if you're going down, you can't afford to be too fussed about what ends up in your mouth.
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