Scubaism

Undercurrent.org’s July issue includes:

• Isla Cozumel, Mexico
• Help with Project Cozumel
• Slow versus fast Cozumel boats
• SMY Ondina, Raja Ampat Islands
• Other Raja Ampat liveaboards
• Younger, Newer and Female Divers Show More DCI Symptoms
• So how many divers are there, really?
• Thumbs down: Sherwood Scuba
• Irrational fear of flashing dive computers
• Regulators: Two new recalls and NOAA’s new favorite
• Diving fantasy versus reality
• Our latest book pick
• Diver survives stingray attack
• New options for frequent-fliers
• Fainting and free diving

It costs just USD$38.95 to subscribe to 12 issues for the whole year.

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Lego’s new Aquariders series of toys features heroic men and “monstrous sea creatures”. The monsters at the centre are natural sea creatures like “sharks”, “eels”, “snakes”, “squids”, “angler fish”, “crabs” and “lobsters”. Albeit grown to over-sized proportions. The heroes are construction workers, drillers and explorers.

It’s as if Lego is telling kids that marine wildlife is dangerous and that macho men are for killing them. But then again, I’m not a kid. And the toys do look fun.

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Vladimir Kirkin, head of the Russian Divers Association, reported success after the precious watch was brought to the surface.

The divers, who found the watch at a depth of around 1.5 metres (five feet) using a special metal detector, said they would donate the 10,000-dollar (7,350 euro) reward to a local diving school.

The diamond-studded wristwatch is said to be a limited-edition Hellmuth chronograph worth USD$200,000 and became the subject of an intensive search after a visitor said he dropped it into the Neva River in St. Petersburg. The watch was lost by an unidentified “important guest” beneath St. John’s Bridge near the Peter and Paul Fortress during the White Nights Festival over the weekend. The tourist had arrived in St. Petersburg for the celebrations, and in an apparent emotional outburst, he threw his hands into the air while crossing the Ioannovsky Bridge over the weekend.

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THIS was a wolf eel, a 6-foot-long - docile, despite appearances - inhabitant of deep waters off the North Atlantic coast, including New Jersey. The creature breaks hard shells with its powerful jaws, like a tool for cracking crabs and lobsters that you get in a restaurant.

The puzzle: How did this smelly, half-decomposed specimen get to a fox den in Hunterdon County?

Susan Goeckeler had been walking with her dogs on her 50-acre farm outside Frenchtown one afternoon about six weeks ago when she came across the unusual jaws.

Goeckeler brought photos to state fisheries folks, who forwarded them to the museum in Philadelphia.

John Lundberg, the curator of fishes at the Academy of Natural Sciences finally identified the jaws but says he doesn’t know which of several wolf eel species it is, but the genus is Anarhichas. And it’s not a true eel, he says, but a type of fish that is edible.

Meanwhile, the question remains: How did a deepwater marine species wind up more than 50 miles from the nearest beach? (A saltwater eel, it could not have swum up the Delaware River.)

Lundberg’s best guess is that locals caught it while fishing at the Jersey Shore. Or found it while beachcombing.

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Reuters has a good feature on octopus hunters on the island of Rodrigues in Mauritius.

Then she sinks both hands under the waves. She brings them up again, grappling with a large pink-grey octopus, her prey’s dripping arms writhing and winding themselves around her wrists.

“The octopus is beautiful,” the 34-year-old mother-of-four says. “But it is our food, so we have to kill it.”

The octopus take a long time to die. Back on Rodrigues’ volcanic beach, she turns their heads inside out and washes out the ink, all the time chatting with other fisherwomen.

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A diver who filled two cylinders which had incorrectly sized valves said he was lucky to escape alive when both tanks exploded through his roof in Cornwall. Phil Luxford, 63, owner of the caravan park Trevair Touring Site near Penzance, which also offers air fills for divers, said the explosion knocked him into a water tank and that he was lucky to survive.

The two cylinders, a 12-litre and a 15-litre, exploded one after the other. Both hit the roof. Another cylinder was sent flying through a window where it smashed into a parked car, narrowly missing another diver who was asleep in the passenger seat.

‘The explosion must have knocked me out because I don’t actually remember hearing the bang,’ Luxford, an experienced diver, told DIVE. ‘People outside said one of the cylinders flew about 30m high. I am covered in bruises; all my legs are completely blue. The doctor has given me painkillers, but there is no serious damage luckily. My lungs still hurt, however.’

The two cylinders had been left to be filled by a visiting diver over the late May Bank Holiday weekend. According to Luxford, both he and the diver were unaware that the British standard cylinders had been fitted with European standard metric valves. European standard valves are smaller than British standard valves, which Luxford blamed for the explosion.

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The guys at DJL Diving posted some amazing photos and a dive report of an encounter with a whale shark at Chumphon Pinnacles, Thailand. The group enjoyed a 6 - 7 metres long whale shark, which remained around the dive site for at least 45 minutes.

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Cory Devereau took just 14 minutes of diving in Lake Wylie, South Carolina, to find a wedding ring dropped in the murky water the day before. “Had he not found that ring, I’m sure I would have killed my husband,” said Lucinda Lorkowski, married for just six months.

Devereau, 55, has built something of a cottage industry out of retrieving precious items from the lake bottom. Just two months ago he pulled up another ring from nearly the same spot. In decades of diving along the East Coast, Devereau has found rings worth more than $13,000. All he uses other than diving equipment is a metal detector.

Devereau made $100 for the short drive from his Rock Hill home and the 14 minutes spent retrieving Marty Lorkowski’s ring.

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Police in the southern Ba Ria Vung Tau Province arrested and asked prosecutors to indict Nguyen Thi Bich Phuong, the owner of three vessels found carrying tons of pillaged fiber-optic cable last month. Phan Minh Tiep, a boatman under Phuong’s payroll, was also arrested. Phuong and Tiep could be charged with “destroying major public national security projects” and possibly face the death sentence.The three ships’ captains have too been arrested and will face prosecution. Confessions obtained from the three have implicated Phuong as the ringleader of the thefts. The confessions also indicated they began stealing the cables in March this year.

In all, 43 km of cable have gone missing from two lines in Vietnamese waters this year. Eleven kilometers of the TVH (Thailand-Vietnam-Hong Kong) line and 32 km of the APCN (Asia Pacific Cable Network), linking nine Asian countries, have been stolen.

The theft may be partly attributed to the Ba Ria Vung Tau government’s decree last year permitting soldiers and fishermen to haul up unused cables laid before 1975 to sell as scrap. Amidst the scramble, several fishermen reportedly ‘mistook’ cables in use for unused ones, but Ministry of Post and Telematics officials said the acts were most likely thefts, not mistakes.

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Perhaps someone ought to tell Trevor Leyland, the director of Shootingandscuba.co.uk that promoting scuba diving in a shop selling lethal weapons is something that the FBI will want to talk to him about. Or maybe the San Diego marine authority. Then again, he’s not under American jurisdiction since his shop is in Christchurch, Dorset, England.

Check out Scubaherald’s really sarky editorial on Shootingandscuba.

The most relevant part of ShootingandScubas’ website is that in a smart marketing strategy Course Director Keyland (sic) has decided to promote the Emergency First Response Instructor course. The reasons are obvious, it is smart to have EFR instructors around in case of lack of aim in the shooting range….

Oh, how I so wish Shootingandscuba had a logo that featured a scuba diver firing an M-16. If only for the comedic irony…

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