Topic: News

There's an article on learning diving quickly...
http://www.cdnn.info/news/safety/s060808.html

"Dr Philip Bryson, head of the Diving Diseases Research Centre, gave evidence on Tuesday at Plymouth Coroner's Court... Dr Philip Bryson said modern diving courses allowed novices to do too much too quickly.

Dr Bryson, who specialises in diving accidents, said he was amazed beginners could be certified at advanced level after just eight dives. He told the inquest ...: "It is madness... I have been in this business for 23 years and I do not think someone with 47 dives is an experienced diver. The diving community needs to be totally re-educated.""

While there will always be different views on this, the issue of proper and thorough training cannot be underestimated. When we undergo training courses and feel the compulsion to speed things up, we must remind ourselves of the purpose of the training... always.

Extracts from a dive seminar that talked about diving prior, during and after diving, and how it affects decompression and DCI.

"There was a study done whereby they compared both mice and pigs that trained on a tread-mill for 2 weeks prior to an aggressive decompression event. In the case of the mice, the treadmill mice experienced a 40% incidence of DCS whereas the control group experienced an 80% incidence. The results with the pigs were very similar, with 42% for the treadmill pigs and 74% for the control group."

"When I woke up around 3 hours later, I noticed a throbbing pain in my left shoulder which became much worse when I flexed the shoulder. There was also some pain at the back of my neck and to a lesser degree at my right shoulder. At the same time, I noticed that my arms, stomach and chest were covered with blotches which looked almost like bruising below the skin."

Full article at finsonline forums

"As I watched John fiddling with the bag, I suddenly heard some gas leaking somewhere fairly loudly. Sound was coming from front of my body and my first thought was one of my second stages was free-flowing, so I looked over my clipped-off primary, my necklace, then my stages. I started losing my buoyancy and suddenly I realized the sound was my wing inflater going crazy."

Full article at tiswango.com

The ignominious sinking of the HMS Repulse, Battle-Cruiser and HMS Prince of Wales, Battleship, during World War II is a well chronicled story. Two of battle Britain’s finest warships, were attacked by Japanese aircraft on December 10th 1941 around noon in the South China Sea, off Kuantan, Malaya. A total of 840 souls were lost. What is little known, is the tale of how a group of scuba divers, mostly from the Tanglin Club, dived the Repulse wreck in 1983, possibly the first amateur civilian group to do so, and how they retrieved the battle cruiser’s Stepping Plate and then returned it to the British Naval authorities.

John Horsburgh's tale of how he tracked a significant piece of WW2 history across continents for over 20 years...
>>more...

Environmental group Greenpeace has been fined almost $7,000 (£4,000) for damaging a coral reef at a World Heritage site in the Philippines.

Their flagship Rainbow Warrior II ran aground at Tubbataha Reef Marine Park, in the Sulu Sea, 650km (400 miles) south-east of Manila

More from <a href=http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4395572.stm>BBC News