Some years ago I craved having a tropical fish tank. I’d had coldwater fish starting with the short-lived goldfish I won at the carnival hoopla stand, but tropical fish seemed like they were more interesting. The big problem is that a fish tank is a bugger of a thing to move and at that time in my life it became a chore and a burden. I relocated 6 times with the fish in bags inside a coolbox, hence it was with some relief that when the last fish died I emptied out the last of the water and put the tank away, promising that when life was a little less hectic I’d get it back out and set it up again. About 6 months later disaster struck when I cracked the glass at one end, but I didn’t get rid of the tank, just planned on repairing it. One of those tasks on my endless to-do list.
And then my goals changed. Stuff the guppies and their frilly tails, why not set up a coldwater marine tank? After all I spend a large amount of my life underwater, why not bring some of the great critters back? Several times a year I visit schools on the Isle of Man and bring a variety of sea creatures in to meet the children and explaining something about their lifecycles. I’ve developed a habit of going and collecting little stuff anyway. A chance conversation with one of our club members who wanted to rehome one of his tanks, ended up in him loaning me a pump and a chiller unit as well as a fish tank without a crack in the end. At 10am we were having a brew in the dive centre and by 2pm I was stood ankle deep on the slipway filling a cleaned out sofnolime container with seawater. Our marine tank was installed and populated within 24 hours. And if I thought the tropical freshwater tank was hard work, I had another shock coming. Weekly 50 litre seawater changes are just hard work. I now spend my time thinking about the ecological balance of the tank much more than I ever bothered with guppies. When you keep tropical fish there is loads of info about how many fish per litre of water etc, for British marine life tanks there isn’t the same guidance. A small edible crab was a disaster and massacred poor Kevin the Masked Crab within 24 hours. Kevin had a dodgy past himself, and was often seen amputating limbs from small brittle stars, so he was called Kevin the Killer Crab, but we had grown fond of him and it was sad to see parts of his exoskeleton scattered around the tank. Our current population includes about 10 hermit crabs, who mainly seem to fight over shells and ignore the rest of the inhabitants. We have two small shore crabs, although one of them is getting a little larger and consequently even hungrier. I’ve a feeling he’ll be heading back to the shore next weekend. We’ve ended up with about 30 North Atlantic Prawns who pounce any food in the tank, and will come to your hand if you put it in. Small Purple Henry starfish, a juvenile scallop, a small common sea urchin, some limpets, Top Shells and Periwinkles complete the scene. We’ve had small fish (they get eaten). The current star of the show is our Leach’s Spider Crab (Inachis phalangium). Leachy has a small triangular carapace which will reach a maximum of 3cm. I picked him as he ran across a sandy patch between rocks. I’ve seen small spider crabs before, but never really bothered too much about them. Leachy’s small size made him a target for the tank. After a short trip in an old ice-cream container, he was released in the tank. On the same day, another diver brought in 3 small Snakelocks Anemones. It turns out that Leach’s Crabs have a commensal relationship with Snakelocks Anemones, the crab benefits but not to the detriment of the anemone. Females stay with their anemone and males will rove around looking for a mate and then return home. They are beautifully camouflaged, with legs covered in sponges and algae. This isn’t by chance, Leach’s Spider Crab actively collects sponges and algae and attaches them to specially shaped spines on their legs and carapace. The sponges are unpalatable and stop predators from attacking the spider crab. The algae form a part of the diet, which also includes food debris from the anemone and the mucus from the tentacles. Our intrepid little Leachy has beautifully evolved to fit into his ecological niche. Admittedly, that’s not meant to be in a dive centre tank, but on the plus side, none of his natural predators are there. We’ve so far avoided large fish or octopus. Periwinkles occasionally find their way out past the pipe work so we’d have no chance of keeping a cephalopod and Leachy is safe for now and I’ve learned a lot more about him.
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Once upon a time my Editor and I went diving together. It was a few weeks after he had penned an opinion that back entry dry suits were an integral part of the buddy relationship. It was, he opined, important to trust your dive buddy to close the ridiculously expensive brass zip without trapping your undersuit or that annoying flappy bit of neoprene stuck in the back of several suits. Relying on your buddy to ensure the zip was closed all the way, contributed to the mutual support aim of buddy diving. As we stood kitting up for our dive, I happily fastened my front-entry plastic zip with the minimum of fuss and decided to tackle Simon about his ill thought-out piece.
I have a front entry suit because I like being responsible for myself…or more precisely I don’t always trust my buddies, especially if my buddy is a trainee or new to dry suit diving. I lack the ability to rotate my neck like a barn owl to check that everything is OK behind me. It only takes one trainee, who earnestly assures you that the zip is closed when in fact it’s half an inch open, to make you reconsider. When that cold rush of sea water starts running down your shoulder, you know that this is one mistake you won’t be making again! But how do you get the dive manager or boat crew to double check your zip without offending your buddy? Surreptitiously sidle over to the crew as you leave harbour, keep your voice low so it can barely be heard above the engines (and definitely not by your buddy) and assume some wistful position that doesn’t look like you’re hugging a large imaginary tree? And of course all the while you must try not to offend your buddy and generate “trust issues” because at the very first time you are supposed to rely on their assistance you bailed and found another source of help. So for me a front entry suit solves all of these problems. If my zip isn’t closed properly, then that’s my fault and my soggy right leg. For anyone thinking of getting a suit with a plastic dry zip, they are fabulous but never ignore the need for silicon greasing the stop end, even between dives if you’ve peeled out of your suit. But it’s my responsibility and I’m good with that. Front entry suits frequently have two zips, the dry one and a cover zip, and this can cause endless problems too. I took my eye off the ball one day whilst doing a dry suit introduction in the pool. I will accept some of the blame, but we had just done a session at the dive centre trying on suits, and the concept of a dry zip and a cover zip had been discussed as we established that this particular suit was a good fit. I am to blame for thinking that our discussion would be remembered barely an hour later when we kitted up on poolside. When I turned to look at my two eager divers, they had closed their zips and were ready for the stride entry. Yes, the cover zip was closed. No, the dry zip wasn’t. Yes, the suit filled with water (luckily the warm pool version). No, the diver couldn’t climb up the pool ladder unaided. The phrase “I seem to be getting a little wet” was a total understatement on her part. Once dekitted, we laid the unfortunate lady down and rolled her around on the pool surround to empty the water. To give her credit she laughed nearly as much as we did and gamely carried on the orientation session. Five years on she is still diving, in a front entry suit, which she knows has two zips and one of them is very important. Sadly she’s not the only one who’s been caught out in this way. Even some quite experienced visiting divers have missed the ‘hard to do up’ brass zip and relied on the ‘easy to do up’ cover zip in one of our rental suits. A cold shot of Irish Sea water down the leg is a salutary lesson in the need to familiarise yourself with hired equipment. So for anyone who read, noticed and remembered Simon’s treatise on the importance of back zipped suits for buddy trust and diving, maybe I was wrong to criticise him and perhaps divers with front entry zips could do with their buddy’s assistance, just sometimes. Summer is a busy time for any dive centre, and it’s almost with a sigh of relief that we watch autumn unfold so that things will quieten down a bit. However, sometimes summer has an unremittingly autumnal feel as misplaced jet streams bring repeated low pressure systems rolling across the British Isles causing havoc and mayhem. Many of our summer dive plans changed at the last minute as gale force winds and torrential rain made sea conditions treacherous and reduced visibility even in the sheltered bays.
When I lived in west London, all my diving trips necessitated organising towing vehicles, booking accommodation and stupidly early starts. I just don’t want to see 5am on a Saturday morning unless I have partied through the night to get there – and I suspect those days are behind me now. Back then my dive trips were organised with almost military precision and planned weeks in advance. Things are a little different now. When I first arrived on the Isle of Man two things struck me; firstly, how everything I’d been taught about dive planning, tidal flows and tides was completely trumped by local knowledge and secondly, how dives could be organised at 5 o’clock in the afternoon with the minimum of fuss and we’d all be in the water for 6.30. My gung-ho “It’s not too rough really. I’ve planned to go diving so we are” attitude didn’t cut it here. If you live with such fantastic diving on the doorstep, why have a slightly rough dive? Wait 24 hours, let the wind drop away and have a really good dive instead. The Isle of Man is close enough to the North West coast of England to be visible on a good day. In fact it’s a local story that you can go to the top of Snaefell (our one and only mountain) and see 7 kingdoms in one go. I’ll leave you guessing to name them all, but the location of the Isle of Man at the geographic centre of the British Isles means that every summer we have clubs setting out in their RIBs to travel across to dive in our waters. And we offer visitors copious amounts of help to locate sites, plan around tides, transport cylinders, locate parts for their broken boats etc. One of the visitors this year declared himself both very grateful and surprised that we should help him out so comprehensively and mentioned that other dive centres in the UK had been less than helpful. Although, it’s true that we are pretty nice folks who want the best for our visitors, there are darker reasons at work. The Isle of Man is a limited community of around 80,000 and pretty much any diving story will end up with some link to our centre, whether it’s commenting about closing areas to dredging, helping out a fishing boat towed into harbour with their own nets around their prop or getting involved with videoing the local swimming club in training. All diving links lead in our direction…..so it’s in our own selfish interests that we help out our visitors. A lifeboat shout for lost divers swept away on an unexpected current or the hyperbaric chamber being mobilised for a recompression all reflects on us. Some timely advice and guidance keeps the visitors out of the incident pit for a bit longer and keeps diving out of the news until we have a good news story to impart. Of course, managing the exposure of diving in the local press plays a role in how we manage our diving activities too. It’s been suggested that there are only 6 degrees of separation between any two people in the world, but on the Isle of Man that’s around 2 degrees. Word of mouth is incredibly important. We have to be safe and be seen to be safe, or our reputation would disappear overnight. Doing my Advanced Driving test a few years back introduced me to the idea that ‘accidents don’t just happen’. The same applies to diving, accidents are a culmination of a series of steps. The advice that we freely give to visitors is the first point we can intervene to stop that series of events unfolding. If you’re planning a trip across please feel free to get in touch. If you run a dive centre that begrudgingly hands out dive planning information please have a think about how this reflects on the industry as a whole. I promise you that it won’t undermine your charter service….the clubs that brought their own boats this year are booked to come and dive off our boat next year…..and looking forward to a less stressful trip. And in case you are wondering on a clear day you can see the kingdoms of Mann, England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Mann, Heaven and Neptune. One of the best things about running a dive centre is the diversity of the clients that walk through the door. One of the worst things about running a dive centre is the diversity of the clients that walk through the door. Our centre is multi-agency which means we can honestly offer the most suitable training to each person that comes to us. We’ve become experts at chatting to prospective divers about their interests, travel plans and diving aspirations and offering them considered and justified advice about their training.
But when people walk through the door the first thing they will say is “I want to do my PADI.” The marketing spend and brand awareness for PADI is huge and there’s the common misconception that only a PADI cert will be accepted elsewhere in the world. Like many experienced divers, I’m entitled to carry a range of cards covering a number of different aspects of diving, but I pick which ones I take on trips with me. Somewhere in one of my filing cabinets is my set of cards but rarely do they see the light of day. I once had the misfortune to be on a Red Sea liveaboard with a guy who when asked to prove his diver grade slapped a huge wallet of cards on the table with the classic line “There’s 50 years of diving experience in there. Take your pick.” It was unnecessarily aggressive and made all the sweeter when, later in the trip, this same guy was the one who surfaced from the night dive to check where the boat was before dropping back to 12m to finish his dive. Obviously the 50 years of experience didn’t include basic navigation. In truth, BSAC qualifications generally carry a large amount of kudos. We train in some really tidal, very murky conditions and our training includes a huge amount of dive and rescue planning that stands us in good stead wherever we pitch up in the world. On a particularly difficult pick up from the Rosalie Muller in the Red Sea it was our experienced divers who took over recovering the divers from the water, threw out grab lines and carefully timed their assistance with the pitching of the boat. No shouting. No fuss. They just stepped forward and stopped a difficult situation developing into one that would have ended up in the BSAC incident report. The Isle of Man hosts motorsport events throughout the year, the TT in June, Southern 100 in July and the Manx Grand Prix in August. These events attract large numbers of foreign visitors carrying a variety of dive qualifications, some stating CMAS equivalence and several requiring translation. We’ve met and dived with some fantastic divers from around the globe, and we’ve had some very deluded people walk through the door. My favourite has to be the bloke who walked in and announced in a very heavy Eastern European accent “I vant to dive vith the sharks!” A little gentle questioning established that he had done a try dive, in a hotel swimming pool in Turkey, about 5 years ago. We carefully explained how much legal protection covers the basking sharks that come to pup and breed in Manx waters, that they avoid divers, that he wasn’t qualified and no, we couldn’t just hire him some kit. He left muttering and we breathed a collective sigh of relief. We run two boats from our dive centre and when necessary have the services of a third boat. The skipper’s first question when I call him to book a group is to ask “Are they BSAC? That’s OK then.” He knows he will get divers who, thanks to the strong club system, will turn up as an organised team and just get on with it. Delayed SMBs aren’t a special course, they’re mainstream. Nitrox isn’t something just for multiple dives on a liveaboard, but for safety in everyday diving. And should anyone have any difficulty there will be someone throwing out a grab line and watching the pitch of the boat as they go to assist. But of course I’m not claiming BSAC clubs are perfect. We’ve had the divers who got confused when they ran out of dishwasher tablets and put washing up liquid in the machine instead (Don’t try this at home without a mop and bucket handy). We’ve had the clubs that plead for discounts, usually for the ‘poor students’ and their trip turns out to be comprised of university staff and post-docs on sizeable bursaries. And we all look forward to hearing about the club politics as the week goes on. Anyone who runs a retail business will tell you that they are regularly approached for donations to a variety of charities. It’s a common thing for businesses to choose charities that reflect their employees’ interests or even to have an annual pitch from the employees to pick a charity of the year. In our dive centre we have collecting boxes for the local Hyperbaric Chamber and the RNLI, both close to divers’ hearts and interests.
The reality is that I’ve never been to the chamber for anything more than a planned visit and I’ve never called out the lifeboat. In fact we’ve responded to several emergencies at sea and reduced the times that Port St Mary lifeboat has been scrambled. So although we actively fundraise for both these charities, we definitely count in the low/no user group. But it’s reassuring to know that they are both there if we ever need them. I have come to the conclusion that the RNLI isn’t always the diver’s best friend. With improved navigation aids and communications, excellent training and really powerful pumps our local lifeboat has been involved in many incidents. We know many of the crew, in fact we taught several of them to dive. The Isle of Man is blessed with numerous wrecks, many still unidentified. These are the product of two World Wars and, in the past, considerable navigation errors. Stick a lump of rock in the middle of the Irish Sea and it seems like a considerable number of vessels will manage to run into it! But all these wrecks are gradually deteriorating, leaving just the boilers and maybe the prop shaft behind amidst a collapsed mess of plates and ribs. As time marches inexorably onwards, the decay takes its toll and within the next few years several of these sites will all but disappear. So my big dilemma is this, where will the next generation of wrecks come from? I can’t have been the only diver who watched the Riverdance drama unfold in 2008. Once the crew and passengers had been safely lifted off and she was adrift towards the Blackpool coast, I admit I was willing her, telepathically transmitting a “Sink. Sink. Sink” message. The seabed between the Isle of Man and the North West of England is rarely more than 40m. Just imagine a wreck of that size as a dive site. The Zenobia of the North West. But oh no! A conspiracy between the RAF, coastguard, ship owners and RNLI meant that they had manoeuvred her towards the shore until she was abandoned and by then she was so far inshore that she ran aground. She rapidly became a big tourist attraction, but after several failed attempts to refloat her, the owners sliced Riverdance into scrap metal and carted her away to an ignominious end. What an utter waste of a brilliant dive site! So much as I love the RNLI I have come to the conclusion that they are not really a diver’s best friend. All this pumping out boats and towing them back to harbour malarkey is not good for maintaining a decent number of wrecks to dive. A recent faulty fire alarm panel in a neighbouring building saw the fire brigade arrive at 7am outside the dive centre. The building was locked up, but having established that no-one was in the building and there was no fire, they all accepted a cup of tea (in our DDRC mugs of course) and left with the alarm still ringing. I want the RNLI to take the same approach – if there’s no one in danger then just leave the ship to become a wreck. Don’t worry about where it’s going to end up, we have sounders and towable cameras to find it. A last known position will do and we’ll take it from there. Sir William Hillary lobbied for the inception of the RNLI after witnessing the destructive power of the Irish Sea around the Isle of Man. He took part in commanding a volunteer crew in the heroic rescue of all the passengers of the St George as she struck Connister Rock outside Douglas harbour in 1830. The Isle of Man is proud of our longstanding association with the RNLI and Douglas boasts the first Life boat station. But in the early days the rescues were aimed at saving lives, the saving vessels part came later. All I’m asking for is the crews to be a little more pragmatic…..the next generation of wrecks lies in their hands! As the dive season starts to hit full pace again we have the pleasure of welcoming visiting divers coming to the beautiful jade green waters of the Isle of Man, perhaps in search of sharks and seals, hoping to get to a couple of wrecks and all wishing for flat calm seas and sunshine to accompany their trip. For many of our visitors, their trip will have been several months in the planning, and I know that the many emails and phone calls I have dealt with are the tip of the iceberg in terms of the communications that have gone on within the club. Sometimes though it seems communications can be one-way. I’m never sure whether it’s a deliberate “knowledge is power” thing or just the consequence of a busy life for the trip organiser, but every year we will witness the confusion caused when the message just didn’t get through.
Last year a group hired a van to bring their kit over. It was probably just as well it was a hired van as the suspension was straining to hold the twin sets, stage cylinders and weights that were piled in the back. It seems no-one told them that we provide weights and cylinders and alas I didn’t have a camera to capture the look on their faces when they found out! But all credit to them for being prepared. It never ceases to amaze me how many regulators and drysuits we will be fixing at the end of day 1 of a charter. Kit that hasn’t been serviced, examined or even taken out of the bag since last year is transported across with the hopeful belief that “it’ll be OK” although usually with the caveat that “I can’t remember when I last used it”. After all the months of planning, the least you should be doing is checking your kit before you come across. And let’s not even get started on the idea of a shakedown dive before stepping off a boat into 20m + of Irish Sea and hoping everything’s working. Day 1 of a charter is plagued by First Day Faff. I’d like to pretend that the skipper and the crew are sympathetic, caring individuals who are standing by ready and fully prepared to sort out every kit and configuration problem. Don’t you believe it! In reality they are running a sweepstake in the cabin on how many of the party will have forgotten a vital bit of kit, turn on regs to find the air leaks and ask for insulation tape to try and salvage dry suit seals for the day’s diving. Whilst you are preparing your kit, look up at their faces. You’ll see the (thinly) disguised looks of despair, contempt, pity and enjoyment on their faces. They are not laughing with you, Orville…. For some reason the normal safety rules that divers use for diving activities seem not to apply while on holiday. Last year we dispatched one of our visitors to the Hyperbaric Chamber after he complained of pins and needles in his legs after his first dive. Apparently as he’d finished the course of antibiotics for his chest infection on Thursday, that must have meant he was fit to dive on Saturday. It didn’t. His reduced lung function meant that although his dive profile was reasonable he ended up in the pot. You see? Normal rules (and common sense) don’t apply on holiday. The problem diver have is that physics and physiology do still apply on holiday. And as any good A level science student will tell you “Don’t mess with physics”, although their version is a little more alliterative. So here’s my top tips for your trips this summer. Do get all the information beforehand. Do get your kit out and at least put it together and check it before packing. If you haven’t been in the water for a few weeks, get everyone together and have a shakedown dive – it’s a good way of getting to know who is going as well. Don’t forget to ask yourself the ‘fit to dive’ question. Please pack your sense of humour and common sense alongside your undersuit, fins, computer [insert other bits of kit that divers tend to leave behind]. We all laughed one year at the diver on one of our Red Sea holidays who produced a kit checklist that he emailed to the group. But do you know what? We all still have a copy of it on our laptops that we print out each time we are going away….We know that the crew are looking forward to First Day Faff, but we don’t intend to be the cabaret on our trips! Enjoy the summer! For a while just before Christmas a couple of years ago, the common description of the Isle of Man as ’80,000 people clinging to a rock in the Irish Sea’ couldn’t have seemed more real. Our only winter capable ferry managed to ingest some lobster pots cunningly set in the entrance to the harbour, destroying one of the bow thrusters essential for manoeuvring into the tight confines of her berths both here and in the UK. A period of windy and stormy conditions meant that several sailings were cancelled, the schedule went to the wall and running the Dive Centre during this time was a challenge. Customer orders couldn’t get through so there were a few ‘I ordered it in plenty of time, but it didn’t arrive yet’ apologies to some of the local divers on Christmas morning. But in general the poor weather meant there wasn’t much diving going on anyway however the security of supplies should actually be a worry for all divers. We see it as a challenge to arrange expeditions to remote locations, carrying with us tonnes of equipment, fuel and supplies to dive in some of the lesser known spots. The planning takes weeks if not months, and part of the satisfaction is diving knowing that you have overcome all the obstacles. But just think what your diving would be like if that was the level of organisation that you had to run to all the time.
It’s no secret that the current economic climate is hitting leisure industries hard, and that includes dive equipment manufacturers, retail operations, dive training schools and charter businesses. The whole sector has seen a contraction in spending, and those who depend on it for their living are working harder and longer than ever to keep going. I spent 2 hours last weekend advising a diver on kit, discussing the relative merits of different options, measuring him for a dry suit and painstakingly working out a competitive price for the choices. As I slaved over the pricelist and a calculator I saw the dreaded smart phone in his hand and watched in horror as he scanned the barcode and searched for an online price. Despite the time that I spent, the various configurations that I’d rigged for him to try and the detailed knowledge I provided, he ordered online whilst standing just outside the shop! It’s a free market and of course he can choose where to buy from. Some of the big dealers can get much better trade rates than the small guys and rely on high volume of sales to make their money. However, a word of warning; if the kit was supplied by us, we would happily set it up, take him for an orientation to his new kit in the pool followed by a weight-check dive. Any warranty issues would rest squarely with us and if we couldn’t sort it out in our workshop, we would happily lend him replacement kit whilst we dealt with the returns process. These are all little things that we would do as we recognise that the commitment to buying dive kit is a big step, and a little guidance along the way can make a huge difference. How many new divers buy exactly what someone in their club, usually the loudest person in the bar, told them to get? And how many change their kit within two years? With heavy hearts now we have had to introduce an admin charge to deal with warranty issues for which although we are a dealer but did not supply the item. If we didn’t make even a small amount of profit selling it, we can’t justify paying the postage to send it off to be repaired. And if the owner of new kit wants to try it out, then we will be charging him for the pool or open water sessions. So how much does the odd £20 that he saved really matter? Obviously to him that mattered a lot, but perhaps now he’s seen the value to the service we provide he’ll reconsider? The good news is that no-one has yet invented a way to download air via a USB cable, so we’ll be seeing him back in the store real soon. Have a think about the security of your supply chain for diving. Local Dive Stores have overheads and may cost a little more, but they will be around to supply your air, provide repairs at short notice, hire kit, give advice and support your purchases. Your diving activities would be infinitely more difficult if they disappeared. We rely on our diving buddies not only to share the safe diving we are all seeking, but to provide the support to take on more challenging dives and the back-up when things go wrong. Members of other sports don’t have to rely on each other in anything like the same way. Poor teamwork on a football pitch means you lose the match, but no-one’s life would be endangered by it. Poor teamwork on a dive trip means oxygen cylinders don’t get checked, dive briefs get skipped and the outcomes can be deadly serious. With strong dependency on the people in our dive centre can come strong emotions. Longstanding members of a club will know each other’s families, children will spend their summer holidays on dive trips and learn to snorkel or dive within the branch. Non-diving partners can frequently be found supervising a game of beach cricket for a coach load of divers’ children. So woe-betide any Johnny-come-lately who suggests that, instead of the annual pilgrimage to Weymouth, they would like to head to the Farne Islands this year. You are not suggesting that diving with seals might be a fun trip. Oh no! You are (inadvertently) criticising years of family summer holiday tradition! How very dare you?
Diving attracts people from a wide range of day jobs and with that diverse background comes a wide range of skills. The key thing for all of us is the ability to work within the team, to respect each other’s perspective, to negotiate change and to keep an open mind. The job of a dive instructor may seem simple but really good instructors will have a skill set that would make a recruitment agency go weak at the knees. Some time ago a study tried to calculate the value of a mother, checking all her many roles and pricing the commercial equivalent. The final figure was somewhere over £100,000 a year. Putting a value on your dive centre manager will reveal a similar scary figure. Can you imagine employing someone to check the training, observe instructors, meet and greet, strategically plan, keep tabs on the kit and manage the members within the club? For those frustrated members within clubs please note I specifically said putting a value on your DO, not a price! Dive clubs can be the most frustrating places in the world at times – but they can also be the most rewarding and supportive environments for your dive adventures. Choose yours wisely. Love is in the air. As divers we obviously prefer our air to be uncontaminated in anyway, but the reality is that many of us will meet our partners/spouses/significant others through our dive club, or on a course somewhere, or hanging around a dive boat. There’s an honesty that comes with having a diving partner. They already know about the hideously early starts to get to the slack water window on a dive site. They understand the stress when your weekend trip is looming and you still haven’t managed to get to the dive shop for an air fill. They are happy to abandon any idea that the garage will ever accommodate the car again as your collection of dive kit expands to fill the available space. They know that you will finish your dive with hair resembling a bird’s nest and a smear of snot across your face. And they won’t think any less of you for any of it.
In fact there is something evolutionarily positive about partnering up with another diver. You’ve got a basic health screen for starters. And there’s a reasonable level of physical fitness. The ability to carry a 15 litre cylinder is a fine test for being able to carry the shopping in from the car or a laundry basket of wet washing. Divers generally have a level of practical skills useful enough for most DIY. And any Dive Leader who has successfully buddied a nervous, newly-qualified diver will have people skills to deal with most situations in life. I once took a diver out in Cyprus on a nice easy shore dive, but the slight swell running made getting back to shore one of those nauseating moments where the seaweed and us were moving in harmony but the seabed was doing its own thing. This was too much for my nervous trainee who signalled and headed up. We ascended together and on the surface she spat her reg out before she’d inflated her BCD. Getting a firm grip on her, I reached for her inflator and hit the button. My reward was a face full of vomit as her seasickness overtook her. Never have I been so grateful for my mask and regulator. But what excellent training for parenthood! Anyone who has ever reared children will appreciate the desire to run away and get some SCUBA kit before changing an explosive nappy. Even if your conscience overcomes you and you decide to stay with the baby, at least your breath hold techniques will come in very handy. If your partner is not a diver then you will have to maintain the mystical air of the ‘deep sea diver’. For non-divers our world can be a strange and confusing place, and their concepts of divers will be guided by Sean Connery as James Bond stepping out of a dry suit in Goldfinger. His dinner jacket was immaculate. I tried this once for a film themed fancy dress party. I persuaded my dad to lend me his dinner jacket and dressed out of the back of the car, cunningly parked only 20 yards around the corner. Fully suited with my dive kit on I walked to the front door and rang the bell. It was July and by the time I had made my grand entrance perhaps 20 minutes had passed. My pièce de résistance was to open my drysuit and step out. And there I stood, in the crumpled, creased, soggy mess formally known as my dad’s dinner suit. It was an entrance alright. While paying the extortionate dry cleaning bill, I reflected on how the media portrays diving as such a glamorous sport and how we have a responsibility to keep that alive for our non-diving friends and relations. It’s only when we persuade the non-divers to come and try a SCUBA session that they will really understand what we’re up to and if we are lucky they may well be hooked too. It’s possible to get married underwater in a number of places in the world. Instead of saying “I do”, you can exchange “OK” signs and then go for the first kiss. It won’t be a long, passionate, drawn-out snog! But it will hopefully be the start of sharing life’s adventure with your buddy. At least you should reduce the number of guests to something manageable as you can limit invites to qualified divers. Why not score extra points with your dive buddies and make it a club trip? After all you’re a diver – you can take the pressure! Happy Valentine’s Day. The beauty of running a dive centre is that we become the first port of call for the ‘odd projects’ that come along. Over the years this has varied between organising dive conferences, running evening snorkel safaris, recovering plankton data recorders, surveying scallops, razor shells and caves, and every so often some film work. A while ago I worked with a German film presenter whose task was to catch and cook some scallops. Part of the director’s vision was that the poor presenter didn’t know the plan until she arrived on the shoot. This is a European programme so she’s seen Belgian chocolate factories, Swiss cheese makers and now she was headed for the bottom of the Manx sea bed.
In situations like this your Instructor Sense starts tingling as bad as Peter Parker’s Spidersense ever did. How much diving has she done? Has she dived in cold water before? Has she used a dry suit before? Has she ever used a full face mask and comms? The director shrugged the questions off with an air of nonchalance that only a non-diver could maintain. Would it be alright if they flew in on the Saturday morning, did the filming and flew out in the evening? Involuntarily my hand flew up to smack my own forehead as I briefly lost my air of professionalism. Cue a lengthy discussion about sea conditions, weather, familiarisation with new kit and skills, risks of DCI and flights. Oh and the scallops in question being out of season at the time they wanted to film, making us liable to a fine of £50,000! The Director of Fisheries was duly contacted and issued a special permit for us to collect and retain enough scallops for the filming. The TV director was persuaded that a three or four day filming period was needed to be able to teach his presenter the necessary skills, safety divers were lined up and we started anxiously watching the weather. I read somewhere the other day that many teenagers wake up and check their Facebook profile before getting out of bed, brushing their teeth, using the toilet or anything else. I’d like to think I’d never be that bad, but I’ve realised lately that I can find the weather apps on my iPhone before I’ve really opened my eyes in the morning. I’ve become a compulsive forecast watcher. And as filming days approached the weather was looking less and less favourable. We took the executive decision to go and catch our scallops early and store them so that we would at least be able to ‘seed’ a sheltered bay if the weather really turned bad. As the scallop season had closed in June we hadn’t bothered going near our favourite scallop spot over the summer. We dropped down in anticipation and were stunned by the state of the seabed. Port St Mary Ledges are a series of limestone gullies running out from the shore. Although the dredgers run up and down the sand at around 30m, they never usually come into the rock ledges – but that must have changed last year. If we’d sunk a tractor and ploughed the seabed it couldn’t have been any worse. The deep gouges through the rock and sandy gullies had cleared every bit of life; the hydroids, dead man’s fingers and sponges had all been ripped away. And there were no scallops at all. Luckily our back up plan for a slightly deeper, more tidal site came through and we collected our scallops for the shoot. The shooting days were long and repetitive. The weather was as bad as predicted and the visibility was poor. Our safety divers ‘seeded’ the seabed from the bottom of the shot line. Never before has a skipper so confidently said “Head North and you’ll find the scallop bed.” But our presenter wasn’t happy. The overwhelming amount of new skills and new kit, the demands from the director and film crew and challenging surface and underwater conditions tipped her over the edge. For a couple of hours she sulked in the cabin next to the heater, declaring that she had never been so cold and miserable in her life. Never underestimate the power of divers to ‘make things happen’. We dressed our male dive intern in the female presenter’s drysuit, gloves, mask and hood, dropped off the back of the boat and went and did some more filming anyway. The dive brief was short and sweet and mainly consisted of reminding him “Don’t look into the camera” repeatedly! |
AuthorMichelle has been scuba diving for nearly 30 years. Drawing on her science background she tackles some bits of marine science. and sometimes has a sideways glance at the people and events that she encounters in the diving world. Categories
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December 2024
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