The Israeli airforce is currently experimenting with giving their pilots Viagra type drugs. This is not just to help them get a stiffy as they kill Palestinian women and children. It appears that the drug also helps the pilot’s lungs function thus increasing their effectiveness.

So maybe we divers should try the same research and experimentation. Pop a Viagra before each dive and see if it makes liveaboard life more interesting. 

It is about the video games industry, often from a marketing perspective.

It is called Bruceongames.com and you will find it here: http://www.bruceongames.com/

It is great that so many people care enough to sign this petition. Please do your bit to help by adding your signature at the petition website.

To: Hu Jintao president of the People’s Republic of China.

Currently the Chinese people are eating a soup which is causing the biggest ecological disaster of our time. Supplying the demand for Shark’s Fin soup involves the death of what best estimates say are between 50 and 150 million sharks a year. This is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to all sharks becoming extinct, many species are already over 90% eradicated.
The shark is the apex predator that keeps the whole ecology of the sea in balance and healthy. Nobody knows what the effects of their removal will be but is can be guaranteed to involve a lot of unwanted harmful outcomes.
This petition seeks the Chinese government to ban the catching, import and sale of sharks and all shark related products.

The excellent news is that their instructor, Ali, has passed his full cave course with Phil Short (I should have done mine with a proper instructor like Phil instead of the idiot I chose). As a result Ali is now teaching the PADI Cavern speciality. This is a four dive course and costs just 299 Euros. So now you can nip out for a long weekend, work on your overhead skills and come back with your first ticket on the road to full cave. Talk to Helen at Salgar if you are interested, she can help with your trip arrangements.

Menorcean dives are very scenic but each year they are getting better as the fish population grows. The locals now seem to get their fish from the supermarket, leaving fishstocks on the divesites to recover. Especially impressive is the growing population of large groupers. Also by the cleaning stations along the top of the drop off at Stanley’s Drop Off you can now see very many thousands of fish at one time.

There are three seperate elements to doing what my instructor does. Being a diver, being an explorer and being a teacher.

Firstly as a diver he is very good. He should be, the amount of time he spends in the water and the training he has had. He is not the best I have seen, but then I have seen some excellent divers. His weakness, as I said in my original piece, is his tendancy to fin low ceilings, creating a shower of limestone snow as he goes along.

 As an explorer I have no idea. I know that I wouldn’t go near any of his exploration. The problem is the continual, boastful war stories he tells of his exploits. I have never come across this before in a diver with substantial exploratory achievements under their belt. That he need to make these boasts all the time indicates the position of diving in his ego and this is why I wouldn’t go.

 As a teacher he is terrible. The worst I have come across in diving, not fit to run a PADI bubblemaker course. And remember that I am myself a dive instructor and previous to this course I had been taught by 6 other technical instructors so I have some experience. The purpose of these courses is to develop skills to a required level. When a student has a problem with a skill you stop and work on that skill till it is mastered. On my course we were doing it by rote. This is lesson 1 we do this, lesson 2 we do this and so on. He did not stop and help me with my weaknesses. For instance I was having problems with valve drills, a skill I have done many times in the past. Instead of working on technique, exercises and tank position he just gave me a bollocking and got on with the next lesson. Yet we had several days in hand. I am sure that a cave instructor who was a good teacher would have got me through the course. Further proof of his inadequacies as a teacher comes from his delight in failing people, in fact I heard him say that if anyone comes for a rebreather cave course with a non standard chassis he always fails them. What he doesn’t realise is that every time he fails someone it is him that has failed as a teacher to get them through the course. He seems to think that failing someone is a measure of how good he is by having standards that other cannot attain.

I must say that I hope that PADI get DSAT right and that they go on to cover cave diving. This is an area that is crying out for good teaching materials, global standards and a proper professional system of instructor training and certification. IANTD, NACD and NSS CDS are well meaning kitchen table organisations that lack the horsepower to run this sport worldwide. GUE is vastly more professional but they are still a relatively small organisation. Cave diving is expanding massively worldwide and would grow more quickly and in a far more professional manner if PADI were involved.

As for me, this whole episode has really soured diving. It no longer carries any joy or delight. Experiencing the Florida caves should have been a special joy, instead it was a week of trauma with an idiot. In the four months since I have been on just 2 dive trips. To Menorca to spend a week, on my own, in the bay at S’Algar with my drysuit and a whole pile of reels. Just to get the whole skills thing out of my system. Then a single dive in Nemo when I went to Brussels. Normally I would have been diving in Menorca several time by now, but I just cannot be bothered. I have no diving trips planned and for the first time in years my main holiday this year is non diving.

The name comes from it being 33 metres (over 100 feet) deep and from the water temperature being kept at 33C. Their website is: http://www.nemo33.com/ . Nemo is filled with fresh water from a spring that is heated using solar panels on the roof, it is not chlorinated like a swimming pool.

It is very easy to get to Nemo, there are trains to Brussels from the UK as well as mainland Europe. The airport is connected to the train system and their are low cost flights there. Brussels has an extensive and efficient tram system which will take you to the door of Nemo.

When you get there you pay your 20 Euros and go into a bar restaurant, which has windows into the pool so you can see the diving, and wait your turn. Everything is timed like clockwork. You are allowed into the changing room at ten to the hour. You are allowed to snorkel for ten minutes starting on the hour. You then kit up and dive and have to be out on the next hour, so you get about a 40 minute dive.

We went on Sunday and there were just 4 of us in our hours use of the pool. The whole place is immaculately clean and you can see the full 33 metres easily through the crystal clear water. All we took with us were our masks and dive skins. They won’t let you take much else because they are so concerned about cleanliness, we had to reassure them that our skins had been through the washing machine since they were last dived. Nemo provide all your equipment. Regulators, BCDs, shortie wetsuits and fins. All in very good condition. You do not need weights, in the fresh water and the steel cylinder is enough to take you down. A computer would be good to take with you, this is one pool you could easily get bent in, though we just used a dive watch.

For the dive we obviously did the deep bit first. This was strange in that right from the surface you can see your own big shadow on the bottom, 33 metres below, and as you descend it gets smaller and smaller. There is no artificial lighting in the pool so you really do get the sensation of depth. On the ascent there are some “caves” to explore. You can surface in a couple of air spaces, one has been painted to look like the inside of a cave and the other to look like the inside of a submarine!

The changing areas is clean with cold showers and lockers that take 50C pieces. The restaurant seemed popular with people after their dives.

There is plenty of other stuff to do in Brussels. It is where NATO and the EU are based. Belgian chocolate and beer are rated among the best in the world and they are seafood mad, especially for mussels which they cook in many different ways. The Grand Place in the centre of Brussels is one of the finest squares in Europe and the Royal Museums of Fine Arts have world class collections of paintings.

So is Nemo worth doing? The answer has to be yes because it is such a unique dive. Would I do it again? The answer here also is yes, but only a) in the middle of winter to keep current or b) if I happen to be in Brussels anyway. It would be a brilliant training venue but for leisure diving there is not too much to see and do in the pool so I wouldn’t want to dive it a lot just for pleasure.

Nine years ago I did my PADI Cavern course at Salgar Diving in Menorca and really enjoyed it. I have been diving the caves and caverns of Menorca regularly ever since. Two years ago I did the IANTD Intro to Cave with Phil Short, also at Salgar Diving in Menorca. This was a fantastic course and Phil is a first class teacher. I learned a lot and really enjoyed it, so much so that I was determined to go on and get my full cave certification.

One huge problem with cave diving is the certification agencies, unfortunately there is no equivalent of PADI. The top standard (leaving GUE out) is supposed to be the National Association Of Cavedivers (NACD) and the National Spielogical Society Cave Diving Section (NSS CDS), both in America. The NACD qualification is necessary to dive the top Mexican sites and some American sites can only be dived if you are NSS CDS. Both of these organisations are pretty much unknown outside America so you also need a tech agency ticket and IANTD are the best for that. In other words if you want to travel and cave dive you need these three tickets and I found an instructor who could teach all three. Not only that, he was British and taught in Florida, the best place to learn. I will call this person CI for Cave Instructor. My massive mistake was to take him and his teaching at face value, I should have checked him out more. As it turned out he was the worst diving instructor that I have ever met. I knew from the second day of the course that he was going to fail to teach me well enough for me to get through. I would have known earlier but the first two dives were aborted when his DUI drysuit flooded through multiple holes, very unprofessional.

The main problem is that his teaching method is to berate you. Before, during and after every dive. It is like being a WW2 army recruit. He just did not support and instruct in the manner that I have experienced from every other diving instructor. Some people may find this works for them but it certainly does not work for me. I dive for fun and enjoyment, not to be treated like this. It is extremely wearisome to the soul to put up with this day after day. Another problem was that his telling offs bore only a scant resemblance to what had happened. For instance he told me off for “standing up” in a cave. A bit difficult when there was less than four foot of room and I am over six foot tall. What he meant was that my trim had gone a bit head up. Early on in the course I accidentally put my hand once into the mud on the cave floor. This got me not one, but several telling offs for the destruction and devastation I had wrought on the cave. I reached the point were I only turned half an ear to most of what he said, it was the only way to retain my sanity.

One time I was making a jump into a side tunnel. The gold line was very low, just above the mud floor, running between circular concrete blocks. I got down low with my buoyancy spot on and placed my cookie on the line. I then got a jump reel and looped it round the gold line. I was facing into the cave wall and needed to move myself back into the tunnel. I could have finned backwards but I reckoned there would be less chance of creating silt if I pushed back very gently off a concrete block, so I did. I got a massive telling off for this. CI said “what if it had been mud and not concrete?” well it wasn’t mud and if it had been I would have finned backwards instead of pushing back. I told other, experienced cave divers about this incident and they said that I had chosen the right option in not finning back so close to the mud on the bottom of the cave.

Every technical instructor has a different pre dive check routine. CI expected me to know his by telepathy and I got told off for not instantly memorising it when up to my neck in water in a spring. So I asked him to write it out in the classroom. This got me another telling off that I couldn’t bring a list with me on a dive. I explained that I just wanted it written down so I could memorise it. With this he did write it down, however he got it wrong and left out a key check. I didn’t bother telling him, I just added the check back in.

Every time I tried to explain why I had done a certain thing I was told I was making excuses. One time following CI out of a cave he dropped a pencil onto the cave floor mud and didn’t notice he had done so. I picked this up and handed it back to him when we were de kitting after the dive without saying anything. The excuses he came up with then were one of the highlights of the week.

When I did the Intro course with Phil Short we did a kit workshop which was excellent and necessary as cave diving is very kit intensive. I expected the same again at this higher level and didn’t get it. In fact I got zero response when I asked kit specific questions such as the height of my shoulder D rings and how best to bungee up my bellows pockets. What I did get was a long description of how customers who bough their equipment from his dive shop got the Rolls Royce treatment and that everything was tailored and fettled to the individual until it was perfect. The message was obvious, don’t expect any help if you bought your kit elsewhere, even if you are paying for a course.

One game I played when following him was snowstorms. Quite often his fins hit the cave ceiling in the low caves and a shower of limestone snowflakes would fall to the floor. I made sure that when I followed I made far less snowflakes. It is just a matter of buoyancy, trim and keeping a good look out where you are going.

Early on CI said to me that he doesn’t blow his own trumpet. I didn’t realise that he was being ironic. He spend the bulk of his conversations telling anyone who will listen a succession of Boys Own stories that are an attempt to make him look good. If anyone else has a story he will immediately come back with a bigger and better one about himself. In fact in all conversations he is doing the “my daddy is bigger than your daddy” schoolyard gambit to feed his ego, very tiring. His favourite boast, which I heard a lot, is “Tom Mount (the boss of IANTD) says I am the best cave instructor in the world”. Well I have news for Tom Mount, if he did say this he is very wrong. Another CI boast is “I have trained more rebreather cave divers than all other instructors put together”. And to give you an idea of his arrogance in one conversation he said that he always failed people learning on an Inspiration if they were using a non standard chassis.

One thing he constantly does is to rubbish, at length, other diving instructors. He told me lots of bad things about John Orlowski, Martyn Farr, John Thornton, Penny Glover (deceased) etc. Obviously he does this to make himself look good and feed his massive ego. One time he asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer. He said I should have been taught this on my Intro course so I said that I had forgotten. He said no, I hadn’t forgotten but that Phil Short hadn’t taught me it!! All this is incredibly unprofessional behaviour. In fact he doesn’t just rubbish instructors, he rubbishes most people and has certainly rubbished me to plenty of people.

 An example of how CI puts people down was a chat with Jill Heinerth, when she said she had been teaching in Russia he asked her if she spoke Russian, when she said no he said that he does and that it is essential to do so in order to teach there. But he doesn’t. He is learning Russian but told me that he is totally lost trying to understand spoken Russian at conversational speed. Afterwards I asked him about Jill being the first person to cave dive inside an iceberg and CI said that she had just swum underneath it, another put down. Look at this video and make your own mind up: http://www.evtv1.com/player.aspx?itemnum=5272

All week he was telling everyone that another UK instructor was coming out soon to teach an IANTD rebreather cave course and that he shouldn’t be allowed. He called this instructor Golden Boy. CI went on about this to every instructor he met, to some NSS CDS committee members, to the management of the divesites and to lots of other people. This was most unprofessional. In fact one instructor said to him that if CI had a problem then he should ring Tom Mount (the head of IANTD) and tell him. What that instructor probably realised is that CI was just going round rubbishing a competitor.

Also I got fed up with his general “know it all” ignorance. He told me that Egypt has “Shia” law, strange for a mainly Sunni country! What he probably meant was Sharia law, but even this would be wrong. Egypt’s law is ”based on English common law, Islamic law, and Napoleonic codes”. Another time we were talking to two female divers, one of whom had dived the Blue Holes in the Bahamas. I said Rob Parker died on a dive there and CI then said that I was wrong. So I asked CI where Rob Parker had died and he said in a sump somewhere. This time I wasn’t sure if he was just trying to put me down or if he was just plain wrong.

These technical courses are demanding so I like to be prepared. So for a month beforehand I swam 50 (and often more) lengths of the baths daily, losing a stone in weight in the process. I bought and fettled my equipment so it would be spot on using the book “Dress for Success” to ensure that everything was right. I rang CI and asked him about reading and told him I had the NSS Cave Diving Manual, he said that was OK and suggested no further reading. In Florida I noticed they had the NACD Cavern/Cave Workbook in the shop, I asked CI if I should buy this and was told that I already should have and could have bought it from his shop for £10. He sent me an equipment list before the course and obviously I made sure that I had everything on it including four regulators. Then during the course we were using 50% O2 for accelerated deco and I told him that my regulators were not oxygen clean. Obviously I got told off for this and was told that oxygen clean was on the equipment list. Well it wasn’t. I have just double checked. If it had of been I would have brought an O2 clean stage with me. As it was I had to hire one out there.

Now we come to the absolute peak of his behaviour and some of you will not believe that CI did this. On the last day I could not find my logbook in the classroom and asked CI if he had seen it and he said no. This turned out to be a complete lie. I searched the classroom and then the shop where I eventually found my logbook hidden. When I opened it I found that someone had taken a pair of scissors to it and had cut out the signatures from every page of the course. Well this he could not deny! It really does give you a measure of the ego and schoolyard mentality of CI.

Now for balance I will tell you that I do not deserve the Full Cave ticket. After 8 days of one on one instruction CI failed to get my skills up to the required level. There are two issues and he pretty much failed to address either. The first is that my drysuit buoyancy is not perfect, mainly when line laying. In a wetsuit I have passed the GUE Fundementals but a drysuit requires different skills. By the end of the course I could hold any position motionless even in the shallows but this is still not up to the level I have done in a wetsuit. My second problem was valve drills. Once again I could do these by the end of the week but not to the standard I have done in a wetsuit. Now both of these problems must be fairly common. Did CI work on them? Not really, except for the continual telling offs. I only improved these skills by practicing them on my own during safety and deco stops. What CI was doing instead was getting me to fin through countless thousands of feet of tunnel, an area where I had no problems whatsoever. In fact a woman came up to me in the car park and apologised for shining her torch in my eyes when we passed in a low and silty tunnel (Peacock 1 Crossover) she then went on to compliment me on how very clean we had left the passage with zero silt suspended in the water.

One day an experienced American cave diver asked me how the course was going. So I told him. He then told me that CI has a reputation in Florida for being very hard on his students and for telling Boys Own stories all the time and that he personally would never do a course with CI because he didn’t want to be treated that way. If only I had known.

So the lesson here is to be very, very careful when choosing an instructor for the huge commitment you have to make at this level. Talk to them a lot beforehand and talk to some of their students. I have done a lot of courses including trimix to the full 90 metre ticket and have qualified as a PADI instructor myself so know how instructing should be done. I have been fortunate enough to have good, supportive instructors. CI is the first disaster. In fact it really is a great pity that there is not a PADI like certifying agency for cave to ensure instructor quality and weed out bad practices. Too much is left to the individual instructor at this level. Maybe DSAT will get round to it one day. I should have done just the IANTD course with Phil Short who I know to be very good. Or perhaps chosen an American instructor who dives the caves there all the time. We bumped into John Orlowski a few times and it struck me how good he was with his student, really communicating his passion for the caves.

Warwickshire UK, March 14, 2007 — Sharks Fin soup, mainly eaten in China, is the cause of a massive ecological disaster, the near extinction of many species of shark. Now Bruce Everiss, the owner of diving website Scubabrucie.com http://www.scubabrucie.com/ has started an online petition so anyone can voice their feelings on this issue.

The petition http://www.petitiononline.com/SharkS/petition.html is worded as follows:

“To: Hu Jintao president of the People’s Republic of China.

Currently the Chinese people are eating a soup which is causing the biggest ecological disaster of our time. Supplying the demand for Shark’s Fin soup involves the death of what best estimates say are between 50 and 150 million sharks a year. This is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to all sharks becoming extinct, many species are already over 90% eradicated.

The shark is the apex predator that keeps the whole ecology of the sea in balance and healthy. Nobody knows what the effects of their removal will be but is can be guaranteed to involve a lot of unwanted harmful outcomes.

This petition seeks the Chinese government to ban the catching, import and sale of sharks and all shark related products.”

Bruce Everiss explains what led to this, saying, “SCUBA divers, uniquely, can see the ecology of the sea with their own eyes. We have seen the sharks disappear from the world’s oceans. Now, by signing this petition, anyone can let the Chinese government know that they need to act before it is too late and all the sharks are gone. The fishing practice of taking the fins off live sharks and throwing them back into the sea to die slowly over what can be several weeks is totally barbaric.”

I have used a wide variety of different backup torches, none designed specifically for the job and decided that it was time to get 2 matched torches and so set out to get the best tools for the job.

Here are the Halcyon backups http://www.halcyon.net/lights/scout.shtml

And here are the Salvos http://www.salvodiving.com/backup_lights

However I read lots of articles, posts on forums and technical specifications and concluded that the Peli Sabrelite 2010 was the light for me. This is a very well engineered professional torch designed for the emergency services. It is made of Xenoy polymer and is rated to 150 metres. It uses 3 C cells which give 50 hours of light, enough to get out of most caves!

Where it scores over the competition is the “recoil” technology which overcomes the problems of converting LED light into a good beam. What they do is to hang the LED over the middle of the reflector, in the manner of a lighthouse. This gives a far better beam for a given power of LED.

A big advantage fo me is that I have been using one for a while for recreational diving so only needed to buy one more. To convert it for cave diving I need to remove the pocket clip and lanyard and to tie on a stainless steel boltsnap.

You can buy them in yellow or black. They have one interesting option, a photoluminescent shroud round the reflector so you can find one in total darkness.

One final plus point, they are very good value for money!

http://pelican.com/lights_detail.php?recordID=2010
http://www.peliproducts.co.uk/torches.htm