I’ve obviously messed up somewhere along the line.  I have realised over the past few months that an inherent property of my desk is to act as a dumping ground for paperwork, much of it in archaeological layers.  Time Team’s finest would have no problem interpreting activity on this site using the stratified stacks of paper.  I can usually find anything I need by reference to when I last saw it, and taking a guess at how far down the stack it might be…..the only skill required is remembering which is the right stack to start searching through… 

And it’s not just on my desk that this layering applies.  I have two kit boxes in the store room, and a kit bag that heads out to dives with me.  It is possible to retrospectively write up my dives by looking in my kit boxes at the layers.  My kit bag accumulates diving bits until it is full, and then I have a back to basics approach of emptying it all into a kit box, selecting the bits I know I need and heading off.  It is almost a certainty that when I get to the dive I need a spare compass for a trainee, a spare dSMB, a spare [insert name here of kit recently emptied out of bag into storage box].  Thus I would have been well equipped and prepared if I hadn’t been so tidy.

But I am not alone in this phenomenon.  Visiting divers to our dive centre will do just the same.  Their initial thoughts of “I’m going on a trip so I’ll clear out all the unnecessary rubbish that has accumulated in my dive bag” can be roughly translated by day 2 of their week- long trip into “I wonder if you would have a cable tie, lanyard, spanner, spare gloves, replacement hose, spare [insert name here of kit recently emptied out of bag into storage box]” when they realise that clearing out their dive bag before their trip was a mistake. 

 A dig down through my kit boxes is starting to feel a bit like one of those memory jogging exercises for people suffering from dementia.  A Morning Fresh washing up liquid bottle attached to a lanyard evokes strong memories of a Razor clam survey project.  An ice cream tub with the lid cable tied to one corner is from collecting marine critters for the Manx Wildlife Trust marine touch tanks exhibit.  A lift bag with some suspicious stains (even after soaking in disinfectant) recalls the horror of an anchor recovery from near a sewage outfall.  Perhaps that’s why my enthusiasm for clearing out my kit boxes is so low, this isn’t just dive kit, these are my diving memories in a plastic tub.

Some divers will never experience this sensation of looking back and remembering, because they are still using the same kit they have had for 20 years.  There is nothing extra in their kit bag apart from a spare tube of glue and some pieces of bicycle inner tube that will be used later in the trip for repairing yet another leak on their drysuit.  All the kit that they possess enters the water with them and will duly return with them at the end of the dive.  No spares, nothing used for strange marine surveys, wreck identification or search and recovery projects, no bits of something slowly rusting in the bottom of the bag.  I both admire and pity them in equal measure.  At the end of their diving season their kit bag will be just as tidy as ever, bereft of the memory-jogging accumulation of dive related things.

Of course there are some ‘things’ in my kit box that I could have done without.  It took me three days to trace the dead and decaying snakelocks anemone that got left in one of my sample bags.  The smell was horrendous and had permeated through the rest of my kit.  But tucked away in the corner it was no wonder that the deck crew emptying the bag had missed it, and no wonder it took me so long to locate the remaining mush.  But still, faintly smelling, that goody bag forms part of the layers in my kit box now too.
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A good friend of mine writes the most evocative and hilarious log book entries.  I confess to log book entries that record the bare minimum of detail about my diving.  Perhaps that explains my reluctance to clear up my kit.  In my kit boxes lie tales of diving adventures, moments of teaching break-throughs and innovations in marine surveys that still bring a smile to my face.  As for my desk?  It’s a heap of paperwork and I hate paperwork!

​The internet has changed many aspects of diving, some for the worse and some for the better. It has never been so easy to find out about different dive sites or to hook up with like minded divers. Dive forums allow the novice divers to connect directly to ‘experts’ just waiting to answer their apologetically-asked questions. In fact most forums rate the users by the number of posts as if to provide some sort of credential for the usually anonymous forum member. In dive forums as elsewhere on the internet there is a need for caveat emptor.

I run a dive centre and probably do more than the average number of dives in any given week, though sadly if I lived somewhere warmer and calmer I know I would do a lot more. I struggle to keep up with daily emails, text messages to and from divers, calls to suppliers and that’s without the customers coming into the dive centre as well. As a consequence I rarely dip into the forums and only usually for topic specific threads. When I do read through forum threads I resist commenting unless I have direct knowledge of the matter. I wish that others would exercise the same restraint.

For the average club diver simple economics dictates that they must be in some sort of paid employment to finance the diving activity. I’m lucky in that I can play with my kit as part of my current job, but I think that would have been frowned upon when I was involved in scientific research in a hospital, and I guess not many employers are much more understanding either. So a paid job and the travel to get there and back must take up a fair chunk of the 168 hours available in a week.  A 9 to 5 job plus a bit of commuting accounts for around 47 hours a week.

For all of us there are the basic human needs for food (including shopping and cooking time), sleep, travel, family commitments and at least a little social life that doesn’t revolve around diving. Where on earth does anyone find time to make 50 posts on a dive forum a day and still find time for doing enough diving to become an expert on all matters? I am working on a mathematical description of this phenomenon. It is obvious to me that N [number of posts] must be inversely proportional to L [number of logged dives] but I think I may need to include extra terms to account for A [number of different diving agency qualifications held], C [number of years on Branch Committee], F [number of years as member of forum] and I [number of years as an instructor]. I will be collecting data to further develop my theorem over the coming months.

If we assume that my basic concept is correct then we must be cautious of high frequency posts from forum members. The time spent making those hundreds of posts is time that isn’t actually spent diving. Internet ‘experts’ are probably as reliable as those offers of millions of dollars from a Nigerian government official who died in mysterious circumstances. Have you ever wondered just how the experts know so much about so many aspects of diving? I know I do but then I have the experience to sieve through the information that appears on the forums. Do new divers possess the same scepticism or will they make important, life-critical decisions based on what they read on the internet?

​A few days ago a young lad came into see me. He had bought a cheap drysuit from a store that was closing down. His plan was simple. He had trained as a scuba diver on holiday last summer and was also friends with lots of the fishing boat crews. So armed with his entry level qualification he was going to help out his mates, changing anodes, untangling propellers etc. He’d been on a forum and worked out that he needed 8kg of lead for his 4mm neoprene drysuit. He had not ever been trained in how to use a drysuit and declined my offer of a course because he’d read the notes for a drysuit course and read lots of forum posts about whether to put air in the suit or his BCD. His drysuit came with neoprene socks, so he wanted wetsuit boots to go over the top of the socks so that he could walk down the harbour steps. He read that on the internet and he declined a pair of rock boots. A few days later his father rang to say that all the seals on the suit required replacing and his son had read on the internet that silicon seals were the best thing and ask if we could fit ring systems etc. It’s all just wrong on so many levels…but can we offer him any advice? There’s no need as he’s got it all off the internet!

I’ve never owned a 35mm film camera with an underwater housing. Given that I have to concentrate on dry land to make sure I don’t chop peoples’ heads off in the photo, taking a camera underwater was going to be a pointless exercise for me.  Never mind the expense, preparation time, weight and hassle, I was only ever going to end up with partial, nearly shots of my intended subject.  Not for me the Nik V and the like or counting the precious shots on the film.  I have a set of childhood photos which are peppered with shots of the clothes I was wearing and miss my posed, smiling face. My dad set the family standard for photography! I have recognised my limitations and therefore I do not possess a matching underwater portfolio of partial shots with seals, nudibranchs or urchins, or in the worst case yet another bit of seaweed or rockface.

The rise of digital cameras has been a bonus for me both above and below the water.  As a parent I’m fine with letting my kids off to play with a camera, knowing that I won’t be paying Boots a small fortune to develop two photos of the wedding reception and 22 out of focus photos of the tablecloths, carpet and the back of my son’s eye (well it can be hard to get the camera the right way round!).  Digital cameras have solved this….take as many photos as you like and then use the handy delete button. I don’t miss the sympathetic and slightly patronising look from the man behind the counter as he hands over a packet of 6x4 prints where 75% of them are stickered to advise me to focus carefully, avoid putting fingers over the flash etc. Digital cameras; remove memory card, review shots, delete rubbish, save to file with a vaguely memorable name. Job done!

So now I do have an underwater camera…. I do concentrate, I do try and line everything up, but if I fail then I don’t need to pay the photo developers for the privilege of finding out. To be honest, I know I will never publish a book of my underwater photos and I am in awe of those who manage to get some amazing shots. I lack time, patience and skill. My father taught me all he knows!

My latest toy is an HD video camera in a housing. The little LCD screen on the back helps me aim it in generally the right direction and so far things are looking promising. I’ve had some great recreational dives with year with the camera, carried out some marine surveys and been documenting wreck sites. I have hit a slight snag as now I need to learn to edit my video.  I see this as similar to deleting the frames where I let go of the camera to check my handset and gauges, but forgot to turn the camera off, or even where I just let go of the camera and it floated up on its lanyard for a bit.

Purists will tell me to weight the housing, but my policy of letting my camera float saved everything earlier this year.  A nice spell of calm weather meant we dived all four wrecks on Abu Nahas in the Red Sea. On dive 2 my camera wasn’t there when I reached for it, and I assumed I’d left it in the RIB, but when I got back to the surface there was no camera waiting.  The crew were great, we searched for 20 minutes over the site.  Other divers started to surface and we abandoned my camera to pick them up.  A few minutes more searching and we started back to the boat, with me lamenting that I hadn’t downloaded the photos from my sister’s hen party from the card. Nearly a half a mile from the wreck we found my floaty housing bobbing along.  It had been lost for nearly 2 hours! So in my book, floaty is good.
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That’s not always the case though. I guided a party of visiting divers on the wreck of the SS Liverpool this summer. I dropped down the shot marvelling at the 20+ metres of vis and turned to find a totally panicked wide-eyed diver behind me. His floating handle on his little video camera had pulled the lanyard off his wrist on his journey down the shot. He caught it before it floated away, but the lanyard became knotted around his regulator hose.  On a 40m wreck dive, with a hint of narcosis this wasn’t looking like a great situation. In his case, a floaty housing was definitely bad! I stopped filming and disentangled him, put his camera back on his wrist and the rest of the dive continued without incident. I hope he’s put weights on his housing now!
 

​One of the joys of running a BSAC training centre is that I get to teach diving all year round rather than the usual branch approach of teaching across winter.  Many branches are lucky enough to have a good core of instructors and if you are asked to teach one of the theory lessons for the Ocean Divers that might be your entire theory allocation until next year.  By contrast I find myself able to deliver the Ocean Diver and Sports Diver lessons without reference to the visual aids.  I have to keep checking that I have actually said the crucial piece of information during this lesson rather than the one I delivered a few days ago. 

With practical skills, I find it much easier to ensure that I’m not suffering from déjà vu.  Individual divers are so variable and the practical skills are so obviously progressively taught that every lesson takes on a unique character.  PADI instructor exams include an element of fault correction during the teaching section as fellow candidates are briefed by the examiner to do daft things like trying to put on a mask upside down.  BSAC instructor exams don’t need this element as any instructor regularly helping out with training will experience a wider range of trainee diver ‘cock ups’ than any examiner could conceive of!  And it is those trainee mistakes, variations in technique, different attitudes and different characters that really make every practical session a different beast.

Rescue skills are a particular bug bear of mine.  My initial training included some really poor technique that meant any rescue I attempted was likely to be at best ineffective and at worst dangerous.  My potential for drowning an already unconscious casualty was never going to improve a bad situation. Luckily at some point a National Instructor was invited into our branch and we tested his diplomacy skills to the maximum as he patiently corrected the endemic poor technique.  I learnt a particularly good technique and I hope that by now I have done it enough to overcome the possibility of returning to my original training under stress. 

Even though I hope none of my students ever need Rescue skills, it is an aspect that I particularly focus on.  I’m sure everyone knows that skills go out of practise and it’s a brilliant idea to see clubs having an early season refresher that everyone joins in.  I have a theory that being rescued by an active instructor who has demonstrated and practised the drill several times in a year would be the ideal situation….unfortunately for me I am often diving with those who I have taught recently!  So ensuring they get the skill right is important for me as their buddy, as much as it is for me as an instructor.

But who checks my skills?  Do I claim to be the best instructor ever?  Certainly not!  But I do claim to be a reflective instructor.  I continually appraise how my lessons went, whether we achieved the learning objectives and, if not, why not.  And I talk to the rest of the instructor team about all of the lessons we teach.  We are all open to new ideas, we are all open to appraising each other’s lessons and to learning new ways of teaching the sport we love.  This isn’t a concept that is unique to diving, it’s a basic premise for achieving quality teaching.  Schools do it, universities do it and we do too.

Reflective practise doesn’t come easily to some.  It requires an open minded attitude and the humility to admit that you can make mistakes and, importantly, that you can learn from those mistakes and not keep repeating them.  BSAC’s incident report is a brilliant source of information to help you avoid some common mistakes.  Although some of the detail is limited in the published reports, it’s often easy to see where the ‘incident pit’ started and where you could hope to have intervened if you were in that unfortunate situation.  From my perspective, the earliest intervention possible is to ensure that really good skills are taught from the very first lesson.  I probably won’t be there when any of my students experience an incident in future, but the skills that I have taught them will be there with them.  I hope I’ve done a good enough job that everything turns out well.  I owe it to myself, my students and their future buddies to be the best instructor I can, and if anyone else wants to improve my techniques then I’m happy to learn.
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Just for the record, when my ‘student’ in my PADI instructor exam tried to put his mask on upside down, I had turned it over in his hand before he had even got it near his face.  The examiner told me off as I didn’t let the student make the mistake he had briefed for.  In my ethos, preventing the mistake was entirely the point.  I don’t want a student to panic trying to fit a mask upside down.  I want a confident and happy student who checks the orientation of the mask before trying to refit it.  My job done.

Divers love seeing the big stuff; from dolphins to turtles to sharks, we adore the big charismatic wild animals that we have a chance of encountering.  For some divers, the pursuit of 'big things' resembles the ghosts of the I-Spy guides from years ago. Tick each one off, add a date and a location, and then move on to try and fill the rest of the book.  I'm not sure that the Chief I-Spy still exists to countersign your completed book, but maybe the National Diving Officer would step in?
 
Of course there are significant challenges to be overcome in order to tackle a safari trip for some of the big stuff.  Planning a trip to coincide with the seasonal arrival of whale sharks off Christmas Island presents considerable logistical hurdles, but at least their arrival is linked to the predictable phases of the moon which triggers the crab spawning and the release of the whale sharks favourite high protein snack.  Other animals can be much harder to predict. 
 
Basking sharks arrive around the Isle of Man in around April/May each year, and the data suggest they are here for around 4 to 5 months.  Our old crusty divers, who have been observing these patterns for years, will repeat the mantra that the sea temperature needed to reach 11.5 degrees before the sharks appeared.  The precision of this prediction has always bemused me. Not 11 degrees but 11.5, the sharks obviously need the extra half a degree. Of course, the factors relating to basking shark sightings are more complex than that.  There is reasonable evidence to suggest that basking sharks come to Manx waters to give birth to their young and to mate.  Similar to some other sharks, basking shark young are born live, having been carried in the mother being fed on eggs that she releases while they grow to around 1.5m.  We regularly see very small basking sharks round these waters.
 
The arrival of the basking sharks each year is timed with the spring explosion of plankton, but that isn't purely driven by water temperature.  Hours of sunshine plays a huge role in the plankton bloom, driving a rapid explosion.  So an overcast spring can delay the sharks by a few days or even weeks.  This year's extensive snow fall took weeks to defrost, and the cold melt water helped to hold temperatures down.  All of which makes predicting the basking sharks' return even more difficult.  
 
One of the other aspects we need to consider is that there just simply isn’t enough information about these creatures.  A huge volunteer effort which encourages the public to report basking shark sightings reveals some interesting data, but using that information to find sharks can lead you on a wild goose chase.  Let me explain.  80% of reported sightings are in the SW of the Isle of Man, so you might think there is something special about these waters.  Yes, there is some deep upwelling of water carrying nutrients that feed the plankton, but we know that high tidal flows mix the water around anyway, so this isn’t the full picture.  The high level of sightings is directly correlated to the height of the cliffs and proximity of the coastal path.  Get up high and look down on to the sea and you have a good chance of spotting sharks.  Lower cliff heights and remote areas are less likely to have shark sightings reported nearby.

Then there’s the matter of timing.  Sightings start in April and end around September…or do they?  We have met sharks under water in October and early November.  We couldn’t see the dorsal fins on the surface, but they were still here, lurking.  You need calm surface conditions to spot shark fins, and traditionally the winds increase in September so calm days are hard to find.  The weather deteriorates so that less people are out looking anyway…leading to a statistic that indicates the sharks have left.  Experience tells us this is wrong.

So for some animals it’s not enough just to know the phases of the moon to be able to tick them off your wish list.  You’re going to need a whole lot of information and a bit of fuzzy logic to interpret it all.  Humans are generally good at fuzzy logic, although many of us would recognise it more as an ‘instinctive feeling’ which we can’t fully justify. And so we come to the last crucial factor in spotting the big stuff, a large helping of luck.  Hope you've been lucky this summer! 

The world is littered with abbreviations, mnemonics and acronyms.  We use them to save time and energy repeating ourselves, shorten text messages for our lazy thumbs, remember key points and to establish a clear barrier between those ‘in the know’ and the rest of the world.  All this talk of what the DO said to the TO about the skills in SO1, and whether the CBL RBs and subsequent CCs were at the correct rate can leave a new member in the branch feeling like they have landed on another planet.  I once joined my very first team meeting in a college where I was doing some teaching that consisted of impenetrable discussions following these lines.  After 3 minutes I was bewildered and after 20 minutes I was starting to giggle and play abbreviation bingo in my planner.  But in reality such an experience can be off-putting at best and downright discouraging at worst.

So here’s a challenge: Have a look at your club notice board, website or newsletter.  Is it littered with acronyms that us British Sub Aqua Club members, the cognoscenti use with impunity?  Put yourself in the eyes of a new prospective member.  Would they be able to comprehend 75%, 80%, 95% of the information that you are presenting if they didn’t know what special code words you were using?  Some websites and newsletters avoid this pitfall, but others, put together by well-meaning and time-poor volunteers fall headlong into creating a barrier to others, right at the point where we should be welcoming and helping them into our world.

Sadly this problem is not limited to written materials.  Listen to an OWI or AI (or maybe still a CI) running a OW session and there will be a litany of BCDs, SEEDS, REAPs and ASs perhaps with some ppO2 and an MOD thrown in for good measure.  And as if this wasn’t enough to send you into a tailspin the instructors themselves will get hung up on memories of times past and terminologies encountered, so that terms such as DV, reg and 2nd Stage are bandied around interchangeably.  And confess now, who still refers to AAS in the occasional lapse?  And CPR instead of BLS?  We’ve all done it, haven’t we?

Of course, I am not arguing that we should abandon all abbreviations.  Anyone who has tried to draw up a dive planning sheet on the computer will be aware that there’s only so much space on an A4 page and you can only make the font so small or no one else will be able to read it.  The actual size of the font will of course need increasing as the age of the divers in your branch increases.  This usually corresponds the apparent shortening of one’s arms so that your dive computer display can’t quite be forced into focus, and leads shortly thereafter to the purchase of a dive computer with a larger screen or colour LED higher contrast screen.  This strategy is of course just buying time and bifocal lenses are looming on the horizon.  So in order to stave off the hideous reality, we can happily abbreviate to fit the information into the print out so that our dive plan doesn’t cover an intimidating number of printed pages.

In some cases though abbreviations can be an even bigger lifesaver.  Take the role of DM.  We all know it stands for Dive Marshall or is it Dive Manager?  Nevermind, I can safely hide behing the DM term without struggling to remember.  The Diving Officer’s Conference abbreviated to DOC saved us from misplaced apostrophes, and two years ago we changed the name to the Dive Conference.  But without fail the feedback every year includes reference to the DOC.  You can take an instructor to the bar but you can’t make him drink….oh well obviously you can’t stop some of them..but you know what I mean!

So  I’m setting a challenge to my own teaching and my instructor team to avoid the over excessive use of acronyms, especially with prospective new members and new trainees.  Perhaps I will introduce a glossary of terms list on the classroom wall?  Maybe I will award a wooden spoon style prize for the biggest transgressor?  Maybe I’ll start a diving abbreviations lookup website, like the ones that I use to help me decipher text messages occasionally?  As I was discussing the other day with the NDO and several NIs from the DTG and ITG at the NDC meeting at BSAC HQ, the first step to solving the problem is to recognise it exists…

Divers are a privileged section of society.  We have been places and seen things that even the most avid watcher of TV nature documentaries will not have noticed.  I’m guessing that not many film crews have hung out in Wraysbury trying to film pike, but anyone who has dived there has usually spotted at least one, especially if you go for the ‘circumnavigation around the lake’ dive.  The cost of underwater filming and the limited number of minutes or seconds of screen time mean that what the non-diving public see of diving is massively limited. In some respects it’s the equivalent of trying to infer the whole picture in a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle by looking at just one piece of it.  Try watching the documentaries made about the filming of wildlife programmes and you’ll end up feeling massively sympathetic to the cameraman who spent 3 months sat up a tree to get 30 seconds of edited footage. 

A few years ago we worked with the Fish Fight team led by TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall.  Hugh has been incredibly successful in campaigning against discards, the massively wasteful practice of throwing back the fish that are over quota as, even though the fish are dead, they can’t be legally landed.  This campaign has been fought at EU level where the fisheries policies are set.  I suspect a large number of people were surprised to find out that this even happens, as like most fishing practices it is ‘out of sight’ and therefore ‘out of mind’ too.  That series of Fish Fight programmes moved the argument on a little and looks at sustainable fisheries management, which was why the team headed for the Isle of Man, although we are a small island in the middle of the Irish Sea, we punch above our weight when it comes to looking after our marine resources.

To understand how this situation has developed you will need a little oceanography, a little history and a little politics.  The Isle of Man is a Crown Dependency (a bit like the Falklands but without the threat of invasion) and we have our own laws and govern ourselves.  For political reasons we are not directly part of the EU, but are represented at that level by Westminster.  So within the EU rules we can do what we like with our territory which for the most part is 12 miles offshore.  Over a hundred years ago Liverpool University set up a field station in Port Erin to study all things marine.  The site was carefully chosen as the confluence of warm southern waters and cold northern waters means that the Isle of Man is probably one of the most biodiverse sections of the British Isles.  Port Erin Marine Lab operated until 2006 when research was relocated to Liverpool to save money. However, many of the scientists remained on the Island and took up government funded roles, set up consultancies or became involved in charities with a marine focus. The legacy of the Marine Lab continues in our fisheries management.

The closed area outside Port Erin Bay was the first area in which scallop dredging and trawling was banned and within 4-5 years it was already possible to show that catches outside the area were on the increase. Nearly 30 years of closure means that the seabed looks as it should look, three dimensional, with tall seaweeds, seafans and hydroids galore.  The data from Port Erin is cited all around the world and has been globally used in the arguments for closing sea areas to damaging activities.  But that’s not all, we have restricted fishing seasons, restricted engine sizes, minimum landing sizes based on the reproductive ages of the scallops, a further four closed areas and active fisheries protection officers.  Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall wanted to see all of this in action and ask why a small island of 80,000 people could still have a sustainable scallop industry when areas in England and Scotland had been fished to extinction. 
 

Most divers aim to be self sufficient, carrying spares, able to effect running repairs and with a wide skill set that covers boat handling, dive planning and responses to emergencies.  But sometimes there are situations in which outside help is required and we look to organisations such as the coastguard or the RNLI to assist. A quick peruse through the latest BSAC Incident Report reveals how often we rely on these services, and yet in our normal diving activities we probably don’t even consider them beyond noting the phone numbers on the dive management plan.

I’ve recently spent a thoroughly entertaining and informative evening with one of our local lifeboat stations. Following an incident last year, it had become obvious to both myself and the Lifeboat Operations Manager that there were some developing gaps in the understanding of their crew regarding dive kit and dive practises. So we set out to remedy that and the first step was to take some kit in for a bit of a theory session. Some of the older crew members had dived in the past, but many of the newer crew hadn’t. Presumably these were the guys we’d overheard saying “There’s no way you’d get me diving, it kills people.” It wasn’t hard to spot the need for some reciprocal training!

Accompanied by one of my assistant instructors, we lugged scuba kit and a rebreather up the staircase into the Lifeboat Station training room. Next time I will definitely remember to take my trim weights out of my Evolution! First things first though; a cup of tea and a chance to say hello. I haven’t met a lifeboat crew yet who didn’t revolve around tea. Once we got started, we talked through the kit, focusing on how understanding removing the equipment safely would aid the recovery of a casualty onto their Atlantic 85 RIB. Even the crew who had already had some diving experience got stuck into trying the different clips and releases. The big learning curve came when we looked at the rebreather. The growing number of rebreather divers throughout the UK means rescue services are now much more likely to encounter a rebreather unit on a casualty. We had a great discussion on some of the different risks that rebreathers can expose divers to, not just the 3Hs (hyperoxia, hypoxia and hypercapnia ) but also non freezing cold injuries from extended dive times. There were some lively discussions and great questions.

But our visit wasn’t just about the kit, we also took copies of the Incident report, and we talked about the numbers of incidents a year, and even read through some of the reports.  We took the British Diving Safety Group Accident flowchart with us and explained what actions divers would be trained to take. The big surprise came when I challenged their perception about diving as a dangerous sport, showing how few fatal incidents actually occur each year. I’ve given them the link to the BSAC website to access the other Incident reports too, and I know that as I left they were already searching the website.

There is more to come of course. The Operations Manager and I have set up a couple of joint training sessions to give the crew some practical experience. All my Dive Leader trainees are going to take part, and I’ll go through the Practical Rescue Management theory with them in advance. We are planning to set various scenarios that allow both groups to develop their skills and understanding. What a superb learning opportunity and a great way to build a relationship with the crew that we hope we will never actually need to call out.  In fact, I’d love to be in the position of only calling them so see if they want a pint after we’ve finished (although I guarantee they will be trying to make more tea!).
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During the winter months when the weather is reducing the number of dive opportunities, this seems like a good way to arrange some training, with both our instructors and Dive Leader trainees benefitting. Maybe DOs and TOs should be actively seeking to partner an RNLI station and foster just this sort of relationship? I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest ‘twinning’ as I suspect that any dive club advertising that it is ‘twinned’ with a lifeboat station would suffer a drop in recruitment! But I am convinced that a closer relationship between divers and the rescue service personnel can only be a good thing. I know these links exist at higher levels, isn’t it time the ground level guys were involved too? Dive safe!

We've all experienced ear worms at some point in our lives. You know, the annoying little tunes that get into your head. Maybe you heard a snippet on the radio, maybe a song popped into your head or maybe you've been deliberately sabotaged by the boat crew in some cruel collaboration between the skipper and the deck hand? The source of that annoying little ditty is important.  Chance tunes played on the radio as you are listening out for the inshore forecast on the way to a dive are just unfortunate. But the songs picked by the boat crew are a deliberate attempt to get inside your mind!
 
During a series of marine survey dives on one boat we found out that the skipper's taste in music affected our surface time between surveys by up to 30 minutes.  As the strains of the "Irish Rover" blared out across the deck, we speedily changed to fresh cylinders, repacked our survey kit, drank, snacked and watched our computers to count down our nitrogen levels. Once those dive plan numbers had hit the magic 45 minutes we needed for the next survey, we were in the water to escape the music. Only we couldn't. I spent 45 minutes humming the 'Irish Rover' round and round in a loop in my head! It was a dire situation, made worse by not really remembering the words, as it’s a song I usually only join in with after a few drinks. So the tune rattled round in my head as I struggled to focus on the job in hand.  We got back onto the lift, handing across samples, quadrats and tapes to a grinning deck hand.  Once on deck we promptly questioned the parentage of the skipper, and from the grin on his face he knew exactly what he'd done. 45 minutes of my lyric poor version of The Dubliners hit was the cruelest joke.
 
Just before the next dive ELO's Mr Blue Sky wormed its way into my head.  If you listen carefully to the video recording of the sea bed you can hear me humming along. Hey there Mr Blue! Somehow that was less irritating, maybe because I knew more of the song and didn't get stuck in the same musical phrase for the entire dive.  But I've realised I'm very susceptible to ear worms and now like to avoid anything too memorable before I go for a dive.  I don’t play the radio on the way to the boat just to make sure.
 
A number of years ago a candidate on an Advanced Instructor exam pointed out that, as water enters your mask when you smile underwater, this facial; expression could be used as a way of clearing water too.  "All you have to do is smile" he said "And breathe out at the same time." Marvellous! Great logic. The trick is to stop smiling before you've fully exhaled, but that's just technique.  It was the ear worm that came with the suggestion that I have struggled with ever since.  I alternate between Lily Allen's Smile and Charlie Chaplin's Smile like some Glee club mashup.  I have been haunted by the advice to this day.
 
If the boat crew don't blast something at you, and your fellow divers don't offer advice that plants some repeating tunes, then watch out for any non-divers.  On a liveaboard trip where a few of us sat out the night dive, the strains of the Little Mermaid theme tune were swiftly called up from an iPod, just to ensure that everyone was humming "Under The Sea" before they stepped off. Those of us on the sun deck, beer in hand, waiting for the divers to hurry up so we could have dinner felt it was fully deserved.  The divers returned from their dive in record time. Job done!
 
In this era of easily downloadable music and quick to construct play lists, I have considered that I could do a selection of the worst songs to play on a dive boat.  The theme tune from Jaws would have to be on it, not because there is the slightest chance of seeing a Great White Shark with a grudge around the Isle of Man, but anyone meeting a basking shark underwater would discover that part of their brain which screams ‘Shark!’ and would hear the Da Dum playing in the background.  Now that’s an ear worm worth planting.
 

​It’s human nature to be hoarders. Thousands of years of human evolution has taken place without a row of shops in the high street or an out of town retail park to cater to our every need at most hours of the day. So humans have developed into hoarders, even if our modern day caves are overflowing with stuff. Witness the growth in ‘Self Storage’ facilities, a service that I am certain didn’t exist twenty years ago. How much ‘stuff’ do people have, that their homes are no longer enough and they need a portakabin sized extension, with lift access and on site security to keep their belongings? And for every organised, sensible person that realises that ‘extra storage space’ would come in handy, are there another dozen whose garage and sheds are rammed to the gunwales? Er…wait…yep that’d be me!
Across the winter months is a fine time for dive kit fettling. Just because the weather is less amenable to actual diving, doesn’t mean you have to spend your weekends doing something more useful. Non-diving partners will fail to see the logic in this argument. From their perspective you aren’t actually driving 2 hours to the dive boat to spend the day diving, therefore you must have time for a variety of other tasks, DIY, family visits, cinema trips, more DIY etc. The list of aspirations held by non-diving partners for days when you aren’t actually diving can be a long one. The length of their list is directly proportional to their lack of understanding about your love of all things scuba. The longer the list, the less they ‘get it’. Having established your weekly dive routine of disappearing from the household radar first thing on a Sunday morning and returning 12 hours later with an offering of fresh lobster, you must be very careful not to relinquish this time during the winter months.
So, what’s a diver to do when the weather is roaring in and the dive’s been blown out? It must be time to sort the dive kit. And this is a task that will take several blown out weekends. The longer you have been diving for, the more equipment you will have hoarded. If you are lucky enough to be the Equipment Officer in your branch then congratulations! You have an almost endless to-do list on behalf of your club. The act of ‘kit fettling’ on such a huge scale will ensure that your ‘dive time’ is protected as you justify needing to go to the clubhouse/pool/mate’s large shed where the club kit is stored by calling out “We need to have it ready for next season” as you head out the door.
I too have been sorting through kit. Dive centre equipment stores act like the extreme version of domestic garages and sheds. Who’d have thought we’d have not one but three Fenzi’s? Who knew that the kit box on the top shelf contained five two-piece wetsuits? And I think I need a bigger box for straps, clips and strange little bits of plastic that I can’t quite place, because I’m sure they’ll come in handy one day and I don’t want to throw them out yet. And there’s the rub, “it will come in handy one day.” I think I could make an absolute fortune if only I could learn to predict when that ‘one day’ moment will occur.
Our kit store should have a bench for kit preparation and rows of neatly stacked boxes.  In reality the amount of equipment in there means that the frequently used items are in on the floor in front of the storage boxes and the bench hasn’t seen daylight on its surface for months. Entering the kit store is like an archaeological project, everything is in layers relating to the time since its last use. The very act of tidying up is like a reverse trip down memory lane. But to combat the hoarding tendency requires more than tidying up. This requires a CLEAR OUT (cue dramatic music)!
There are three things required for a successful Clear Out. Firstly, you need to be in the right mood for it, ruthless, heartless, unsympathetic and a little cavalier. Who cares when ‘one day’ is likely to pop up? You need the space, you haven’t used this in 10 years and if you ever wanted to dive a horse collar again your mate has one you could borrow anyway. Secondly, you will make enormous progress in your decluttering if you think of a suitable recipient for the items that you want out of your way. Donating your old kit to the club means that it hasn’t actually gone, never to be used again. It still exists and you can get the philanthropic pleasure of knowing you donated it to a cause (and it will be the Equipment Officer’s problem now!). Thirdly, you need a reason to even start the clear out and what better reason than some new kit that needs pride of place in your dive emporium? Of course new kit won’t mean that you throw out the old stuff, not just yet, just in case… But perhaps you could clear out the kit you were wearing before the last set?