​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!