Diving for clues – New police team targets waterways
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – Criminals who have used the Kanawha and Elk rivers as a ‘safe’ location to dump their weapons will need to find a different hiding place.
The Charleston Police Department has formed an evidence recovery dive team, which will enable detectives to search underwater to recover evidence.
“There’s a lot of water around here, and the team was definitely needed,” said Cpl. Dana Rowsey. He and Cpl. Herb Doss were responsible for starting up and heading the dive team.
“We have about 12 miles of the Kanawha River and about two miles of the Elk River in our jurisdiction along with boat ramps for recreational boating, commercial barges and vessels traveling on the river and several bridges.”
Officers have received several tips that evidence was discarded in rivers, lakes and ponds. They haven’t been able to search for this evidence, until now.
“Dive teams from other jurisdictions have had to be called to make searches. Now we can be called on to perform these services,” Rowsey said.
The team, composed of five Charleston Police Department officers, was started in late October. So far, the divers have worked only a few cases, including one in Rand, but they are eager for more.
“We are hoping to be instrumental all over the state. We are willing to go anywhere on a dive,” Doss said.
Most of the public – and even some Charleston police officers – aren’t aware of when the dive team is in the rivers looking for evidence, since the divers are usually out of sight.
Only Doss and Rowsey can go on the actual dives now, but the team’s other members, Patrolmen Jamey Noland, Tyke Hunt and Jason Webb, are going to dive school in the spring to become fully certified.
All three were selected for the team in part because of their previous “water” experience, including being former lifeguards.
“I’m already a certified diver. I have been around the water all my life,” said Noland. “I felt being a part of this team would make me a large asset to the department.”
Each dive requires three divers. The primary diver, or worker, searches for the evidence and the secondary diver, or safety, makes sure nothing happens to the primary.
The third diver remains on the surface and is called the topside. He records where evidence is found and communicates with the other divers using a “comm box” throughout the dive.
“Our team members are all qualified to perform these tasks, but for now, myself or Cpl. Rowsey have to go on the dives with them,” Doss said. “We really have a good group of guys here. They are really responsible.”
The divers have learned that patience is a virtue when it comes to underwater evidence recovery. Sometimes it can take a long time to find something, so the divers learn different sweeping techniques to use when they search for evidence.
“We have certain patterns to go by in order to thoroughly search an area,” Rowsey said. “We use the different sweeps depending on what the bottom is like, the visibility of the water and the size of the evidence.”
One pattern is the “Jack Stay” sweep, where divers run a line along the bottom of the water surface with weights on either end of the rope. Divers will search along the rope, then move the weight on the end forward when they reach it. Then they search back along the rope and move the weight on that end, Rowsey said.
“They move the weight back and forth so they are actually searching the area twice. It’s very thorough,” he said.
When evidence is found, the divers are taught how to measure the exact location. The secondary diver will run a tape measure from one end of the evidence to a stationary point near the water area.
“We use supports of bridges, trees, anything that is stationary that we’ll be able to use again,” Doss said.
The divers then tell the topside the distance between the evidence and the stationary object.
The underwater divers then repeat the process and measure the evidence from the other end to a different stationary object.
“It gives us a triangle and then we can say ‘OK, that evidence was found at exactly 13 feet 6 inches from this area,’” Doss said.
“We have the men measure the evidence in the water the same way that they would in a regular crime scene. We treat the different crime scenes the same,” Rowsey said.
The evidence is then put into a watertight container and brought back to the criminal investigation lab for minor forensics analysis.
“When we are recovering evidence from the water, we have to keep the object in the water it was found in because oxygen can taint and alter evidence,” Rowsey said. For major crime work, such as the recovery of DNA, the evidence is sent to State Police.
The Charleston Fire Department also has a dive team, but the two departments use their equipment differently.
“The fire department has a good dive team, but they are primarily a recovery team, which means they are looking for people. We search for small pieces of evidence,” Rowsey said.
Rowsey and Doss have both taken diver certification and training classes, and even worked as part of the team that has been excavating Queen Anne’s Revenge, the notorious pirate Blackbeard’s flagship that sank off the coast of North Carolina in 1718.
Rowsey was a deep-sea diver before he became a police officer. Doss had never made a dive before the North Carolina expedition.
They hope to bring their three patrolmen back next year to work on the ship.
“We learned more in that week than all of our classes and training together,” Rowsey said. “We worked hard that week, taking part of the collection of artifacts.”
While searching for evidence involved in crimes and hunting for pirate artifacts may seem like fun and games to most, the dive team members take their job very seriously.
“People don’t realize that this is work and it’s a constant threat every time we go into the water. A SWAT team isn’t in imminent danger until they are presented with their target. For us, we are in danger the second we hit the water,” Doss said.
My favourite kit – LEIGH BISHOP
LEIGH BISHOP, Britain’s foremost deep-wreck photographer, has been diving for 19 years, including the ground-breaking HMS King Edward VII expedition in 1997. He has specialised in exploring notable liner wrecks including the Britannic, Lusitania, Transylvania, Justicia and Egypt and discovered the cargo vessel Flying Enterprise. Leigh is also a full-time fire-fighter
WRECK-DIVING IS A PRETTY HARSH ENVIRONMENT, but my gear has to last many seasons – and it has to work. I may have only one stab at a wreck due to permits, or be on a filming project where the crew needs to wrap up a shoot, so I can’t afford to lose a dive through malfunction or broken parts in transit.
Everything I use has either stood the test of time or is so well-made it will obviously last for years. I prefer British-made stuff, because if there is a problem I’m more likely to get it fixed before the weekend’s dive!
CRATE All my kit lives in a basic fish-box that I found on a quayside. Nowadays you can buy them. I prefer these to bags, because when people sit on or fall on them, your kit isn’t damaged.
If it’s going to take some time to get back to shore after a dive, I often fill my crate with water and immerse my camera to prevent the sun drying it and leaving unwanted salt crystals. And using the crate, my car doesn’t get wet.
REBREATHER My main item of equipment is an APD Evolution rebreather with Vision electronics.
I haven’t dived open-circuit for years, because rebreathers come into their own at depth.
Most UK deep wreck diving is at 60-100m, so if I am on a week’s holiday I just take the little Evo.
It covers 95% of my dives, but for 120m-plus dives, or those beyond 100m, where I require long bottom times, I use an APD Inspiration.
With the Evolution, if I am diving abroad in shallow water I don’t have to transport a larger rebreather than I need, or incur unwanted excess luggage fees. The wing comes with it as standard, and does a perfect job.
PUMP For mixing any gas I use in the rebreather, especially on remote expeditions, I use a little DTB.5c portable booster pump from Stansted Fluid Power. The unit is designed for use with oxygen, and is extremely economical on the air that drives it.
This is a huge benefit in terms of pump reliability, and allows use of smaller air banks.
UNDERSUIT I’ve actually used my three-piece Fourth Element Xerotherm Arctic in the Arctic, and it was perfect. It’s not bulky, and it doubles up as thermal protection out of the water. The top bit is quite trendy, and you don’t get funny stares in the pub, as you do when wearing a woolly bear!
SUITS In tropical locations I use a 3mm O’Three shortie wetsuit. My drysuit is also an O’Three, an RI 2/100 in compressed neoprene. Its resin-impregnated outer lining makes it extremely strong and snag-resistant – excellent for wreck-diving. I’ve used O’Three for exactly a decade, since the first big Britannic project. I’m really happy diving in its suits. There are no buoyancy issues, and as they are less bulky than others I can focus on the dive, and move freely with my camera.
CAMERAS I still use film cameras, but I shoot more with my digital full-frame Cannon 5D these days, both systems tucked inside Aquatica housings.
When I started shooting stills years ago, Aquatica was the only company that could provide a housing guaranteed at 100m!
I have never had an ounce of water in it, and it’s taken a right bashing on boats and under water.
If there’s one piece of gear I’m confident is proven in the field, it’s an Aquatica housing. So when it came to digital there was no question.
For time-exposure photographs I mount the housing on a tripod. Many people have asked if it’s a special one, but it’s just a Velbon D600 that looked pretty cool in the shop!
COMPUTER For decompression I use a full trimix VR3. Nothing else on the market is in the same league.
LIGHTS My OMS 10W umbilical HIDs have never given me a problem. I bought two, in case one fails, and have never used the spare!
REGULATORS My bail-out tanks are 10-litre aluminium and first choice of regulator on them
are my Scubapro G500s. I’ve had them for 10 years. They don’t have a fit when I jump in the water, and I know they will work if ever I need them at 100m. When they need a tweak they go on holiday to Forward Diving in Poole, where they know more about regulator servicing than I do about shipwrecks.
FINS My OMS Slipstreams are rock solid.
BAGS & REELS To recover anything from the seabed, my trusty John Wise mother of all lift-bags is deployed. When I’m ready to come up, my AP Valves deco bag shoots to the surface, on line from a Kent Tooling reel.
MASKS For filming projects when I need communications I use a Dräger full-face mask on a replacement hose. Otherwise I use an OMS – I like big-eye-vision masks.
MP3 PLAYER My favourite bit of gear has to be my underwater Mp3 player. It needed a little modification, but seven hours of decompression can fly by when you’re listening to Led Zeppelin’s complete back catalogue!
Deco for Beginners
How best to shed that unwanted nitrogen we accumulate while we’re under pressure is a question we face on every single dive. But mastery of buoyancy control, some knowledge of different gas mixes and the right computer can dispel the uncertainty, says John Bantin
The human body has a great capacity to take change in its stride, provided you give it time to do so. We have all been taught that coming up from one depth to a lesser depth when there is a great pressure difference can cause decompression sickness (DCS), so we take it easy. Give our bodies time, and we can accommodate the change without ill-effect. The human body is a wonderful thing. In 30 years of diving, including 14 as a professional with thousands of dives with almost as many different divers under my belt, I have never knowingly seen anyone suffering from DCS. This must say something for both diver training worldwide and the assumptions of the physiologists who calculate our decompression tables and diving computer algorithms. Every dive is a decompression dive. On every dive you put your body under hydrostatic pressure and then take the pressure off again. Even if you are doing a dive that requires no formal deco stop, the speed at which you come up is part of your decompression schedule. I am not a physiologist but I do know that my body is extremely complicated. It’s certainly more complicated than that bottle of soda-water so often used to demonstrate the ill-effects of DCS in basic diving theory. However, I have come to trust my diving computer (and I have used a lot of different ones in my time) because it seems to work.
Pressure effects
I know that my body will absorb inert gas. I know, as I sit here and write these words, that it is saturated with nitrogen from the air at 1 bar of atmospheric pressure. I know that if I go up the Matterhorn I should take things easy until my body has produced extra red blood cells to cope with the reduced oxygen levels in the air and I have adjusted to the reduced pressure.I know that I can subject myself to the much greater pressures found under water, provided I give myself time and take the pressure off carefully afterwards. Under water, it is the inert-gas element of the air that I breathe that gets soaked up, rather than the oxygen that I can absorb or metabolise.
Keeping control
So what is the secret of this controlled ascent? Buoyancy control! A diver should be able to make himself neutrally buoyant at any time. In other words, he never sinks or floats upwards unless he wants to. This is done firstly by wearing the correct amount of weight applicable to the rest of his diving equipment, especially his suit; and secondly, by judicious use of the direct-feed control and dump-valves of either BC or drysuit. You can ascend using only the ascent-rate indicator on your computer, but an easier and more satisfying way is to give yourself some visual datum. If you are diving on a coral reef that comes up close to, or breaks, the surface, it’s easy. Just slowly follow the reef up and enjoy what you may see on the way. Remember to stay away from the reef once you reach the shallows, however, or you may get pushed over onto the top by the breaking waves. This will make picking you up by boat a little awkward, or even dangerous for you. If there is no natural datum, use the boat’s anchorline or a shotline that has been put in to mark the dive site.You should have planned your method of ascent before you went near the water, so if none of these options is available you may have to use your delayed surface-marker buoy. This open-ended bag, often sausage-shaped, can be filled with air at depth and sent to the surface, attached by a line deployed from a winder-reel or a shorter length of narrow webbing with a small weight on one end. Naturally you should not deploy it from a depth greater than the length of line or webbing available. Webbing is nicer to hold on to but can be carried only in short lengths. If you are diving in an area subject to currents, you can deploy your buoy from depth with a reel and this will clearly mark your position to your boat or surface cover from the moment you start your ascent. Seventeen years ago the British Sub-Aqua Club introduced its 88 Decompression Tables, with a mandatory stop at 6m. Many British divers complained at the time that it was impossible to stop at that depth, thus revealing a history of poor buoyancy control. When it was suggested that it was a good idea to be slightly heavy and hang on a buoy line, one group of divers from my local club were heard to say that it would not be effective because you would be going up and down with the waves! Always remember, depth is the vertical distance measured from the surface. Whatever system you use as a datum, it is nearly always best to be neutrally buoyant. Only very experienced divers have the control and discipline to come up carefully in bluewater conditions.
Nitrox and MOD
Give your body time to adjust. It’s clear that if you can reduce the amount of inert gas (the nitrogen) you breathe, you will absorb less in the first place. This is where nitrox mixes come in. By breathing less nitrogen, you subject your body to less stress. The convenient way to do this is to substitute more oxygen for nitrogen in the mix we call “air” (21% oxygen, 79% nitrogen). After all, oxygen is readily available. Nitrox is air enriched with extra O2. The only problem is that oxygen can be a hazardous gas when breathed under pressure, so as we increase the proportion of oxygen in the mix we reduce the pressure and therefore the depth at which it is safe to breathe it. This gives us the “maximum operating depth” of the mix. Some older divers like me can remember going to great depths breathing nothing other than air, but currently air is thought to have an MOD of 56m. Training agencies, ever with a mind to litigation, now usually opt for a 40m limit or even shallower, depending on a diver’s certification level. We should not lose sight of the fact that the human body has been designed or evolved primarily to breathe air with 21% O2 (nitrox 21) at sea-level. We can also damage ourselves by exposing ourselves to high levels of oxygen and higher-than-normal pressures for too long. All this is covered in the basic nitrox course. No-one should use nitrox unless they have been trained to do so. As the diver who has been breathing air at depth ascends, the pressure on him is reduced and the nitrogen absorbed by his body is passed from his tissues back into his bloodstream. It then turns back to gas in his lungs and is exhaled. He must allow sufficient time for this to happen or it will come out of solution within his tissues, causing damage. As he approaches the surface, the pressure changes get more acute. The pressure at 40m is 5 bar and the pressure at 30m is 4 bar, a ratio of 5:4 over 10m of ascent. The pressure at 10m is 2 bar but the pressure at only 5m above is still 1.5 bar, a ratio of 4:3 over only 5m. So you should be even more careful as you get nearer to the surface. Most contemporary computers now have a safety stop designed-in, and this will be displayed in the 5m to 3m zone. It’s a way for computer manufacturers to add some safety and deters users from making an impatient dash to the surface. Even though you’re off-gassing, you still have to breathe. And every inhalation during the ascent carries with it more nitrogen for you to absorb while trying to off-gas that which you have already absorbed. It’s a complex process. So what if you could find some way of reducing the amount of nitrogen going in during this stage of the dive? That would speed up the process of getting it out from your body.
Deco gas
This is where some divers will use a richer nitrox mix as a “decompression gas”. By switching to a rich nitrox mix (one with a greater percentage of oxygen and therefore less inert gas, one that would have been dangerous to use at depth)in the shallows, the pressure gradient at the lungs between the nitrogen in the body and that of the gas being inhaled is increased. This means that the offending nitrogen already absorbed is off-gassed far more quickly. Of course, the diver must have the discipline to use this gas only when he is sufficiently shallow to do so safely. Switching to the wrong gas at depth could be fatal. In fact, if a diver is prepared to carry the required number of tanks during a dive, he could break his ascent up into three parts, He could breathe air at a maximum depth of say 50m, swap to nitrox 32 at 30m, and then swap again to nitrox 50 at 18m. This would give him a lot more time at depth, combined with more manageable deco-stop times than he could otherwise safely take, and give his body time to adjust to the changes.
Trimix
Many of the recently qualified technical divers reading this will howl with derision at the idea of breathing air at 50m. They think everyone should use trimix. This is a breathing gas where both the percentage of nitrogen and oxygen have been reduced by the inclusion of a third inert gas, helium.Helium reduces the effects of that other problem many divers encounter, nitrogen narcosis, but it adds to decompression times because it is more readily absorbed by the body. If you live in an industrialised country where helium is available and you can afford it, that’s all very well. But trimix diving is a whole new ball game. Some professional divers will complain that you should not be breathing any nitrogen in the mix, that you should breathe a mix of oxygen and helium only, but then things get even more complicated, and much more expensive. Alas, if you look at a globe of our world you will notice two things. The first is that a great deal of it is blue, and the second that most of the best diving areas within the blue line lie a long way from the shores of industrialised countries. This is where most of the best diving is. Unless you think this sort of diving should be limited to an elite few who can afford to mount expensive expeditions to these places, taking all their helium with them, you are left with the option of breathing oxygen and nitrogen in the proportions best-suited to the job.These gases are available in our natural atmosphere and pure oxygen can be relatively easily generated.
Computers
Air as the bottom gas may not be ideal, but it is readily available. If we break up our dive into three sections, we can speed up our decompression, have more time available at depth, and spend less time hanging about on the way up. But how can we calculate the decompression times for this?
Enter the physiologist with his algorithm and the electronics expert with his computer. What we need is a nitrox-compatible computer that can be adjusted during the dive to calculate the exact decompression requirement needed for a particular nitrox mix at a given time.
When you change regulators, you change the pre-selected computer setting to match. Examples of computers capable of doing this are the DiveRite Nitek3 and Nitek Duo, the Apeks Quantum and Pulse, Delta P VR2, Cochran Commander and the Suunto Vytec and D9.
Examples of computers that can manage trimix dives are the Delta P VR3 and Dive Rite Nitek He.
Review: Kiss Rebreather and Megalodon Rebreather
With rebreathers now an established part of the diving scene, interest is no longer strictly limited to the Buddy Inspiration. Experienced technical divers give the low-down on two new ‘alternative’ rebreathers
Sealed with a KISS:a rebreather revolution
One of the best-kept secrets in the diving business over the past year has been the KISS rebreather. This closed-circuit rebreather has a growing following of owners and yet there has never been any public launch or hype. News of this rebreather has spread by word of mouth. There is now a core of enthusiasts who dive the KISS and, with more than 50 units now in use, the KISS is quietly evolving into a mainstream unit that is especially popular with the technical, deep and cave-diving communities.
KISS manufacturing is based in Vancouver and is masterminded by diver and designer Gordon Smith. He set out to build a rebreather that was as simple as possible (hence the KISS name-tag, which stands for ‘Keep It Simple, Stupid!’), yet which incorporates ruggedness and redundancy and does not rely on computers to control the breathing mix. The resulting unit is fully closed and uses a novel, metered orifice and an uncompensated first-stage regulator to supply oxygen at a preset rate that approximates to the expected metabolic rate of the diver. Any differences on a dive are manually adjusted using an override injection control.
As supplied, the metered orifice allows the KISS to be dived to a maximum depth of about 60m. If the orifice is replaced by an alternative smaller item and the supply pressure of the oxygen is readjusted to suit, then the KISS can be dived to a depth of about 100m without further modification. However, one KISS rebreather has been further modified to reach depths well beyond 100m, simply by adding an additional first stage that is depth-compensated.
The oxygen partial pressure is measured by three totally independent displays mounted on the diver’s wrist. But it is important to appreciate that there is no automatic control of the oxygen partial pressure. If one oxygen cell reading deviates from the other two, it is up to the diver to decide which cells are displaying the correct reading rather than relying on the ‘majority vote logic’ incorporated by the computer systems of rebreathers such as the Buddy Inspiration, the Prism and the Biomarine Mark 15.5.
Similarly, if the oxygen partial pressure rises too high or drops too low, there are no alarms to alert the diver and no injection solenoid to correct the problem. The entire ethos of diving a KISS is that it is the diver who is in control and who takes full responsibility for checking and correcting the partial pressure to the desired level. Deeply engraved on the back of every KISS unit is the warning ‘Danger! This device is capable of killing you without warning’. Surely this is the ultimate product liability statement!
In practice, however, diving a KISS is surprisingly simple and stress-free. Unlike over-the-shoulder counterlungs on some other rebreathers, the back-mounted counterlungs of the KISS give a free and uncluttered chest area. While this does not give identical breathing characteristics in all diving positions, the KISS nevertheless breathes exceptionally well and is a pleasure to dive. It also includes some very useful features as standard, such as automatic diluent addition and an integrated open-circuit bail-out mouthpiece.
The KISS rebreather is not a CE-certified unit, so individuals must import their units directly from Vancouver. The rebreather comes as a kit, with all critical O-rings deliberately left unfitted. Each owner must strip and rebuild his unit to fit these O-rings, thereby ensuring that he or she has a complete understanding of how the rebreather works before being able to dive it.
Configuration of the KISS rebreather is very much a function of how the owner wants it and there are a variety of different-looking units in use. Owners must provide their own backplate, harness and wings, and their own cylinders. Two Apeks regulator first stages must also be provided. Some units utilize small, 1-litre cylinders for no-decompression diving, while other divers prefer much larger cylinders, to allow sufficient bail-out capability for deeper trimix dives.
• The basic KISS kit costs about £2,500, once imported into the UK. For the cost of regulators, cylinders, backplate, harness and wings (if you do not already have them) add about £1,000 making a unit ready-to-dive for around £3,500. For more information contact: Jetsam Technologies on tel: 001 604 469 9176, email: info@jetsam.ca or see the website: www.jetsam.ca
Mega-dive: the Megalodon closed-circuit rebreather
The Megalodon is a new rebreather which has taken the American cave-diving community by storm. It is now available to all, but because of its popularity there is a long waiting list.
So why did I decide to go for the ‘Meg’? I was attracted by its high-quality engineering, as well as the manufacturer’s reputation for excellent customer service. Designed by Leon Scamahorn (a US Army special forces veteran) of Innerspace Systems Corp, alongside engineer Morgain Harris, the unit is very small and very simple. It can take its users to a maximum of 150m, and the CO2 scrubber allows a duration of four hours (Innerspace is working on a radial scrubber that will allow longer dives). In my opinion, it can be safely used from sports diver level upwards.
The unit itself consists of an aluminium canister (it comes in two sizes, large or mini-Meg), which contains all the electronics and 500-hour batteries. The unit also has its own decompression software. It works with a tertiary redundant-oxygen-sensor display and an automatic diluent-addition system. Any size of diving cylinder can be mounted to the outside of the canister and there are over-the-shoulder neoprene counterlungs, which can be easily attached to any type of wing and harness. We bought new wings and harnesses from Custom Divers, which were ideal for the job.
People have a way of talking rubbish when it comes to rebreathers. The fact is that they are actually quite easy to use, and therein lies the danger – they are almost too easy to use. The key to using rebreathers is to remain vigilant and continually monitor the oxygen levels on the display, because too much or too little oxygen can lead to death underwater. As with most rebreathers, the Meg requires meticulous daily preparation: scrubber filling, cleaning, greasing O-rings are all part of the routine. But the important part is that none of this preparation work is particularly difficult – it just has to be done methodically.
The key skills of the course are emergency drills to deal with the various problems which can theoretically arise with rebreathers – hypoxia, hyperoxia, CO2 build-up and loop flood are the main drills, which we practised four or five times on each dive. The Meg weighs 26kg and is compact and easy to wear.
It’s certainly lighter than wearing twin 12-litre cylinders with twin 7-litre sidemounts. At the moment, courses are not available in the UK – the current instructors for the Meg are all based in the US or Thailand.
• The Megalodon closed-circuit rebreather costs $6,500 (about £4,040), plus training courses and shipping. For more information contact: Innerspace Systems Corp on tel: 001 360 330 9018, email: info@customrebreathers.com or see the website www.customrebreathers.com/products.html
DSAT Gas Blending Course Completion
Today is the graduation for Oskar and Darran who completed their DSAT Gas Blender course with Big Blue Tech.
Like most courses we deliver we added our own flavour giving the student practical tools and skills to use their certification to the full extent.
Although DSAT offer a good basis for theoretical education they lack in giving the student an understanding in gas compression, compressor usage and a strong minimum amount of time blending both air and nitrox.
So we gave them the standard DSAT Gas Blender course and then gave them more. Over the past 2 full days ( 9-5 ) Oskar and Darran completed the following skills.
Day 1
- Bauer Compressor operation and maintenance (changing filters, synthetic oil, operating procedure etc)
- Twin Cylinder with manifold dissemble and assembly
- Cylinder and Valve cleaning with visual inspection
- Gross cleaning cylinders to remove corrosion.
- Using Compressor and Banks to fill air.
- Using 3 different filling whips to fill air.
- Theory and slide show presentation.
( during this time the students filled 25 air cylinders and 5 twin tanks)
Day 2
- Final Theory and Final Exam
- Partial Pressure Blending
- Filling oxygen only systems
- Continuous Flow Blending Methods
- Cylinder labeling and marking
- Oxygen Cleaning
(during this day the students filled 17 Nitrox Tanks including 2 Twin Sets and 2 deco tanks with 36%, 32% and 60% nitrox)
Because Oskar and Darran completed their course with Big Blue Tehc and we know they have the hands on skills required to actually work in this role so they’ll be earning the money spent on their course back in a few days after we complete 5 students doing their nitrox course on the 29th, that’s 10 tanks and they’ll be first in line to fill them back up and get paid for it!
For more information on this course and how you can do it, please contact us for more information.
Ottawa moves to restrict hakapik club in sealing
Ottawa says it wants to make sealing more humane by restricting how hunters use the controversial hakapik club. The government faces pressure from the European Union, which has threatened to ban imports of Canadian seal products next year.
The hakapik is a spiked club first developed by Norwegians and is designed to deliver a lethal blow to the animal. But critics say the tool is a symbol of the cruelty of the hunt.
On Saturday, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans released a report on amending the Marine Mammal Regulations (MMR).
The amendments “are proposed to provide for a more acceptable humane method of harvesting seals,” says the executive summary of the proposed regulations.
“The proposal would modify the three-step process (stunning, checking, and bleeding the seals) to prohibit the use of a hakapik or club for seals over one year old, to require sealers to verify death only through palpation of the skull and to require the animal to be bled for one minute prior to skinning.”
It’s believed most sealers already use rifles to slaughter seals. But last April,Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams called for an outright ban of the hakapik.More than 70 per cent of the seals are killed off the north coast of the province.However, many hunters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence favour the hakapik because they work in close proximity to one another, so rifles would be too dangerous.
The European Union has proposed a ban on seal products from countries that “practice cruel methods” — that could include bludgeoning seals with a hakapik.
Rebecca Aldworth, spokesperson for Humane Society International, told CTV Newsnet on Saturday that the move to ban the hakapik was “a cynical and cosmetic gesture by the federal government to cover up the cruelty of the commercial seal hunt in the wake of the European Union ban on seal product trade.”
Sealer Jack Troake, of Twillingate, N.L., told The Canadian Press that most seal hunters use a rifle to hunt their prey rather than a hakapik.
“We’re trying to appease the protest movement (with the new regulations),” he said Saturday.
“We’ve been doing this for years.”
The Department of Fisheries and Oceans said the new restrictions would ensure sealers are still able to make a living, by ensuring Canada would not come under any EU ban. “Implementing the proposal would help to maintain market access for an industry with a present export value of ($13 million),” says the document.
“The proposal makes it possible to maintain an important economic activity for the coastal people of Canada,” it adds. “It would also align itself with the latest veterinary advice and recommendations, requests of the European Union, and concerns from animal welfare groups.”
The DFO report also estimates how much it would cost to implement the proposed restrictions: $1.8 million to $3.6 million. That amount would include increased costs to sealers and local coast guard crews.
Along with preventing hunters from using the hakapik as the primary tool to kill seals, the restrictions would also clarify the process of harvesting. The three-step process includes stunning the seal, confirming its death and bleeding the animal.
To ensure sealers follow the guidelines in 2009, the DFO says it would use helicopter-mounted cameras to film the hunt. Actual enforcement would be carried out by coast guard officials aboard icebreaker vessels.
Aldworth said “the overwhelming majority of Canadians want the seal hunt to be ended.”
“So, if we’re going to invest public resources in the seal hunt, it should be in ending the seal hunt and finding constructive solutions for the communities that are impacted by ending that hunt,” she said.
Treasures from Sunken Frau Maria to be Salvaged
The schooner Frau Maria that sank near Finland in 1771 when transporting treasures for the Hermitage Museum will be raised to the surface in 2010.
The hold of the ship lying at the depth of 41 meters contains paintings by Dutch artists, as well as chinaware and decorative art items of bronze and precious metals, all purchased at an auction in Amsterdam for Catherine the Great. When studying some archives experts discovered papers concerning the auction, where the paintings had been bought.
Thus, they learnt that onboard the ship there are works by Hendrick Van Balen, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Van Goen, and Gabriel Metsu, as well as a painting by Gerard Dou, a disciple of Rembrandt.
The experts hope that the paintings had been packed not into boxes, but into leaden containers and coated with wax, and so the canvasses might be rather well preserved.
Russia and Finland have been negotiating about the raising of the ship since the beginning of 2008. The issue of ownership of the treasures has not been settled so far.
See related story here.
Event – DSAT Gas Blender Course
On December 27th we will be conducting our signature DSAT Gas Blender course. This course already has several participants signed up and it’s available for more technical inclined people.
The course will cover the following.
- Compressor Use
- Compressor Operation
- Air Filling Methods
- Oxygen Cleaning
- Continuous Flow Blending
- Partial Pressure Blending
- Cylinder Visual Inspection
- Oxygen Handling
This is a 3 day course where you will operate a compressor for a total of 6 hours (3 air and 3 nitrox). This is a crucial element missing from the course as many learn the theory but don’t get enough hands on experience. At Big Blue Tech we fill that gap with our in house gas compressing station.
Manual and certification included. Contact us for course price.
Mussel diver makes six-hour swim to safety
Coastguard and police have described diver Ian Foden’s survival as “extremely lucky”.
On Tuesday night, the 59-year-old became separated from his boat and had to swim more than 5km to shore in choppy seas.
And instead of taking a well-earned rest, he immediately helped to free a boat belonging to one of the volunteers searching for him that had become stuck on a dangerous sandbar.
Then he was back out in his boat – which his wife Bubs and coastguard helpers had brought to shore – to pick up mussels he had attached to a buoy for safekeeping when he realised he was in trouble.
But yesterday there was another sting in the tale: The mussels Mr Foden had planned to enjoy on Christmas Day were off the menu because of a toxic shellfish warning.
Mr Foden, from Little Waihi on the Bay of Plenty coast, said he never feared for his chances during his six-hour swim in the 2m swells, and was prepared to spend days in the water if necessary.
“It was no bother. I just wondered if I was going to be as good as that guy Hewitt.”
Mr Foden, who runs the Bledisloe Holiday Park with his wife, said thoughts of former All Black Norm Hewitt’s brother Robert – who survived more than 72 hours in waters off the Kapiti Coast – went through his head as he kept his eye on lights on the shore.
Mr Foden, a veteran diver with 35 years’ experience, swam and drifted with currents for between 5km and 7km before making it safely to the coast at midnight.
He was about 3km off the coast from Maketu, which is around a headland from Little Waihi, when he became separated from his boat, and eventually made his way ashore at the Kaituna Cut, 2km north of Maketu.
The drama began about 6pm when Mr Foden surfaced after diving for mussels at a reef called Town Pt and saw that his boat had come loose from its anchor on the rocks.
His wife was aboard and spotted him, and they yelled to each other, but she could not get the 4m aluminium craft to her husband before the currents separated them and she lost sight of him in the swell – then about 1.5m.
After searching unsuccessfully, Mrs Foden raised the alarm and asked the coastguard to help get the boat to shore, as her husband usually took the helm and she was inexperienced in sailing longer distances.
But she didn’t panic and told the coastguard she was confident her husband of 37 years would be able to get to shore.
However, the Maketu Volunteer Sea Rescue and two private boats began a search about 9pm, joined soon afterwards by the Tauranga Coastguard and police.
Maketu coastguard Shane Beech said Mr Foden was “extremely lucky” because conditions were worsening and the swell increased during the three hours they were searching.
“We were suspecting the worst.”
Mr Foden, meanwhile, had tied his haul of mussels to a buoy and prepared to make the journey to the coast.
He discarded his weight belt but kept his breathing gear and dive bottle, to conserve energy if the swells got bigger.
When Mr Foden arrived at the Kaituna Cut he felt neither cold nor tired, then saw a local fisherman – who had been searching for him – had got his boat stuck on the notorious bar.
“He was out trying to help me so the only decent thing was to try to help him,” Mr Foden said.
He waded on to the bar, pulling the fisherman’s anchor into deeper water to drag the boat free as the tide came up.
This took about an hour, then Mr Foden went back to the holiday camp, where other campers were anxiously awaiting his arrival.
“I had a bloody good beer when I got back.”
His biggest concern during the ordeal was his wife, who he feared might have come to grief taking the boat back to shore.
He was proud of how she had handled the situation and the couple wished to thank the coastguards and other volunteers who helped bring their boat in and search for Mr Foden.
Shark Finning on Great Barrier Reef – Act Now
An alarming new proposal by the Queensland Government will establish a dedicated shark fin fishery in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and other marine parks in Queensland.
The Australian Marine Conservation Society (and anyone who cares for our oceans) is astonished by this proposal, in which Queensland’s fisheries department (DPI&F) plans to legitimize one of the most unsustainable forms of fishing on the planet – shark fin fishing. With over 90% of the world’s sharks and other big fish gone from our oceans, this project is unsustainable, unethical and will be flatly rejected by the Australian public.
Not only is the Queensland Government proposing to hand out specific fishing licenses for shark fin fishing, which will entrench the practice for years, they are planning to legitimize shark finning in the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and in the Marine Parks of Moreton Bay and the Great Sandy Straits with this new license proposal.
The proposal will create new licenses to fishers to catch unlimited sharks and also to catch sharks with nets over a kilometre long in our off-shore waters.
Shark finning at sea, where the fins are cut of the shark and the carcass is thrown overboard, is banned in Australia (thanks to our efforts). However, shark fin fishing continues – sharks are still being targeted for their high value fins although their carcasses are now kept and sold as low value waste products.
AMCS has pressed DPI&F to phase out shark fishing and they have failed to do so. What does it say for the sustainability agenda of this agency when it fails not only to protect one of the state’s most vulnerable group of species, but promotes their exploitation?
During 2000-2004 shark fishing in Queensland increased four-fold with a massive 1240 tonnes of shark being landed in 2004*. The main pressure on sharks in the Great Barrier Reef is fishing, and this pressure is increasing. More than 90% of the Great Barrier Reef commercial shark harvest is taken by the gillnet fishery with the remainder taken by the line and trawl fisheries. However recreational fishers catch and retain a significant number of sharks.
Sharks are extremely vulnerable to fishing impacts. This is because their biology is more like whales and dolphins than other fish. Sharks are slow growing, have extremely low reproductive rates (producing very few young) and are mostly long lived. This means that they are very slow to recover from impacts on their populations. Many shark fisheries around the world have collapsed.
Sharks are apex predators, helping to control populations of prey species. Consequently, reducing the number of sharks may have significant and unpredictable impacts on other parts of the ecosystem. The Queensland Government must revoke this proposal and commit to a program with fishers to save sharks, not hunt them. We urge anyone who treasures Queensland’s sharks to have their say on this matter.
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We have sent the following email to: Peter.Garrett.MP@aph.gov.au
Hon Peter Garrett, MP
Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts
Parliament House
Canberra
Dear Minister
Re: Stop shark fishing on the Great Barrier Reef
We the undersigned are alarmed to hear that your department is about to entrench one of the most unsustainable forms of fishing on the planet – shark fishing. We understand that you are planning to license and legitimise shark fishing on the Great Barrier Reef (and across Queensland) and we strongly oppose this proposal.
With over 90% of the world’s sharks and other big fish gone from our oceans, we cannot afford to lose our precious sharks due to unsustainable and unethical fishing practices.
We understand that sharks are increasingly targeted because of the value of their fins to export markets and that this practice has grown more than four-fold in recent years. We also understand that the Great Barrier Reef may have already lost as much as 90% of its white-tipped and grey reef sharks. Minister, We are very concerned about the health of the Great Barrier Reef with the loss of these critically important species.
We have also been informed that a quarter of the shark catch in Queensland is taken by recreational fishers. This is surprising and deeply concerning. In our view, recreational fishing can be enjoyed without sharks being taken.
In essence, Minister, We urge you to work with fishers to save sharks, not hunt them. Please revoke the proposed shark fishery licence symbol you are considering. In our view this licence would legitimise and entrench shark fishing (and finning) on the Great Barrier Reef. Please also set a zero bag limit for sharks for both the commercial and recreational fishing sectors in Queensland.
We hope you shareour concerns and take action now on this matter. We look forward to your earliest response.
Yours Sincerely
Big Blue Tech
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Send yours now!
Merry Christmas
Would love to write the news, but it’s christmas. So happy holidays to all our readers and customers. We’ll be back to news as normal tomorrow.
Divers find 1903 shipwreck near Block Island
MYSTIC, Conn.—A group of divers says it has found the wreckage of a schooner that collided with a steamship and sank in 1903 near Block Island, R.I.
Mark Munro of Griswold, Conn., said his Sound Underwater Survey group and the Baccala Wreck Divers began looking for the remains of the Jennie R. Dubois in 2002, searching a few times a year in an area that eventually stretched to 17 square miles.
The group positively identified the shipwreck in September 2007, but kept it a secret until Monday so more research could be done and others interested in the ship couldn’t claim the find, Munro said.
It was discovered about six miles southeast of Block Island in federal waters, he said.
“We were pretty elated,” Munro said Tuesday. “It was one of those projects that you were starting to wonder if you were really going to solve the mystery of what happened.”
The 2,227-ton, five-masted schooner, which was launched only 19 months before the collision, was named after the wife of a Rhode Island Supreme Court justice who owned stock in the company that built the ship, Holmes Shipbuilding Co. of Mystic.
Munro said the vessel, which cost $100,000 to build, was the largest ever built on Connecticut’s Mystic River. Jennie Dubois christened her namesake ship with a bottle of wine on Feb. 11, 1902, in a ceremony that attracted 6,000 people, Munro said.
The Jennie R. Dubois went down on Sept. 5, 1903, after colliding with the steamship Schoenfels in dense fog about seven miles southeast of Block Island. All 11 men aboard were rescued, Munro said.
A lot of people had looked for the wreckage over the years. Munro said it was difficult to find because the Army Corps of Engineers blasted the wreckage with dynamite in 1903 so it wouldn’t be a hazard to other ships.
“They were looking for something that would look like a schooner,” Munro said. “In this case, it was not what you would typically see at the bottom. It was spread out.”
Munro and his fellow divers were able to identify the shipwreck by its anchors, size and location, he said. They researched local newspapers, examined the national archives in Washington, looked at Mystic Seaport records and talked with Block Island residents.
Members of Sound Underwater Survey and the Baccala Wreck Divers plan to present their findings at the Mystic Yachting Center on Feb. 11, the 107th anniversary of the Jennie R. Dubois’ launch.
Can Antioxidants Protect Scuba Divers?
A new study, published in The Journal of Physiology, shows that acute oral intake of largely accepted antioxidants Vitamin C and E prior to a scuba dive can reduce alterations in cardiovascular function, particularly acute endothelial dysfunction, that are caused by a single field air dive.
People scuba dive for recreational and professional purposes. However, only recently has evidence of the different cardiovascular changes that appear after each scuba dive been seen. In most cases those changes are silent or subclinical, posing little or no threat to the health of divers, but is that always the case?
Obad, Dujic and their colleagues at the University of Split School of Medicine, collaborating with the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, studied a group of professional scuba divers before and after a moderate load scuba dive (a dive to a depth of 30 meters for 30 minutes, similar to those enjoyed by countless recreational divers). Different cardiovascular parameters were investigated, including endothelial function. A single scuba air dive induced mild changes in cardiac function and a significant decrease in endothelial function. The authors thought that these changes could be influenced by oral ingestion of antioxidant vitamins C and E prior to diving, and that endothelial function, in particular, might be preserved.
This intervention showed a positive effect on vascular endothelial function, whereas other cardiac functional changes were unaffected. Although generally very safe, diving may be associated with serious, and sometimes fatal, consequences, which are usually related to decompression sickness. These new data raise the possibility that pre-dive intake of antioxidant vitamins may prevent some of the negative effects of diving on vascular function. The results of this study are of interest for those involved in all types of recreational and professional diving.
Antioxidants can be found in fruit and vegetables see here for more info.
Tec Basics Course Completion
Today Big Blue Tech celebrates the graduation of Paul Leech who completed his Tec Basics Course.
Paul is an avid diver in the Uk and spends much of his time in quarries around England. His interest in the tech course was not about going deeper but having the safety and comfort of technical diving gear in his normal recreational limit.
For Paul who wears a drysuit and dives in colder water, having the ability to dive in technical gear will provide him longer dives with now having twice the air as before.
Paul had previously completed his Deep Specialty and Enriched Air Nitrox Specialty with us and Drysuit Specialty and Wreck Specialty in England. Bringing his specialty collection to 4, this course is equivalent for a 5th Padi Specialty making him eligible as a Master Scuba Diver (now free from PADI).
So Paul not only leaves Koh Tao as an entry level technical diver but also as a Master Scuba Diver!
Below you can see a video of Paul exiting the water.
Keyport Museum’s Deep-Sea Vessel in Shipshape Form
The Trieste II was anchored in a parking lot, not in metal-eating saltwater.
Yet salty air off Dogfish Bay and red duct tape were ravaging the deep submergence vessel. A fixture at the Naval Undersea Museum since the facility opened in 1991, the Trieste II was rusting away.
A Port Orchard company, with $80,000 from the Navy, is reclaiming the historic vessel. A two-month renovation will wrap up in a couple weeks.
“It’s gone places they don’t build equipment to go anymore,” said Pat Spicer, project leader for Q.E.D. Systems. “It’s as interesting as it gets, but it’s a huge, huge challenge.”
Museum visitors aren’t likely to give the Trieste a second glance. It looks like a giant propane tank with little orange propellers, but its feats are impressive. Certified to operate 20,000 feet under the sea, it discovered and photographed debris from the submarine USS Thresher, which sank in the Atlantic Ocean with all hands on board on April 10, 1963.
In 1969, it again submerged 10,000 feet to investigate the wreckage of USS Scorpion, which sank May 22, 1968, southwest of the Azores. It photographed the submarine and compiled a report to determine how it was lost. And you can bet sunken American subs weren’t the only ones it investigated.
The Trieste II was the first submersible to recover man-made items from the ocean floor, first to certify “hydronauts” for extreme depths and time in the vessel, and first to operate a tethered “flying eyeball.” It was deactivated in 1984.
The ship’s condition didn’t seem too bad at first. Only 4,200 square inches appeared damaged. When workers looked deeper — and pulled off strips of red duct tape that had been on the vessel for years — another 24,000 inches was discovered, said Ron Roehmholdt, museum exhibits chief.
Spicer and his crew found rust holes as big as basketballs, he said, and there were little trees growing on top of the ship.
First they had to pressure wash the vessel, then blast the good part with a Sponge-Jet system — like sandblasting but with softer projectiles. They took power tools to the rusty areas and had to rebuild some places with fiberglass and metal epoxy. Those spots were smoothed over with putty. About all that remains is the final painting.
“We’ll probably never do something like this again,” Spicer said of the company, which is accustomed to working on submarines, tugboats and barges. “It’s been fun. It’s nerve-racking, I tell you that. It’s easy to get overwhelmed because there’s so much rust.”
The Trieste II, which was featured in National Geographic and TV documentaries, was like a big balloon, Roehmholdt said. It carried aircraft fuel, which is lighter than seawater, for buoyancy. To descend, seawater was pumped in. To go up, it discharged iron shot. Powered by batteries, it could stay down for 12 hours traveling at 2 knots. The three-person crew only had a little port hole to see through.
“As far as technology goes, it’s an absolute marvel, a national treasure,” said museum curator Stephen Crowell.
Row, row, row your boat madly round the world
Oliver Hicks, the British adventurer, sets off this week in an attempt to become the first rower to circle the globe. He tells of the perils of icebergs and roaring seas that lie ahead.
Alone at sea, Oliver Hicks will have plenty of time to contemplate an old mariner’s saying as he attempts to become the first person ever to row around the world. “Below 40 degrees latitude there is no law; below 50 degrees there is no God.”
That means, whatever misfortune might befall the solo rower and his 24ft-long boat, there is no one to come to his aid. Not even prayer will help. On his journey across the Pacific and the Southern Ocean, the 27-year-old adventurer can expect, as a minimum, piercing cold, hurricane-force winds, 30ft-high swells and plenty of growlers – icebergs too small to show up on his tiny radar set.
When it comes to ocean-going feats, there are few records left unbroken. Circumnavigating the globe solo and unaided in a rowing boat is one of them. Hicks aims to paddle for nine hours each day, covering 30 miles, for 500 days (with one stop-off in the middle), a total of 15,000 miles. This is a shorter route than circumnavigating via the equator (a distance of roughly 25,000 miles) and his record will reflect that. Following roughly a line of 55 degrees latitude, his route will take him from New Zealand, across the Pacific, through the perilous Drake Passage past Cape Horn, then down into the Southern Ocean, all the time hoping the inevitable calluses on his hands don’t become infected and that he doesn’t succumb to long, debilitating bouts of seasickness.
After several false starts, due to poor weather and technical problems with his specially built carbon fibre vessel, Hicks is due to set off later this week. He will take advantage of favourable currents and winds to travel eastwards, nonstop, until he reaches the island of South Georgia, a British island in the southern Atlantic Ocean, hopefully by June or July. He then plans to overwinter there for four or five months to take on more supplies and avoid a build-up of ice on his craft. Once the ice has thawed sufficiently, Hicks, who has had his appendix removed as a precaution, will set off again, aiming to arrive back in New Zealand by the autumn of 2010. He will have nothing to entertain him but a CD player and his own thoughts, and will survive on a diet of dehydrated food and multivitamin pills.
If it were anyone else, you could probably safely bet on the mission ending in failure. But Hicks, a softly spoken, intensely wilful, former public-school boy from Suffolk, has a reputation for succeeding where others have given up or been defeated by overwhelming odds.
At age 17 he cycled from Land’s End to John o’ Groats, and at 21 he ran the 150-mile Marathon des Sables. In 2004 he finished fifth in the Yukon River Quest, the world’s longest canoe race, but a 460-mile paddle clearly wasn’t long enough. In 2005 he became the youngest person ever to row the Atlantic, taking 124 days in a secondhand boat. It was this form that persuaded Virgin Atlantic and Google to stump up the £200,000 for this latest wheeze.
According to the Ocean Rowing Society (ORS), Hicks is the first person to ever attempt a solo circumnavigation by rowing boat. Jim Shekhdar, another long-distance British rower, is also preparing to take on the challenge, but has yet to set a date for departure.
If Hicks gets back to New Zealand in one piece, he will have achieved the ultimate in ocean rowing without any help – no supply ship, no back-up team, no rescue helicopter on standby. His progress will be monitored from an office in London, using GPS locators on the boat and a satellite phone. The ORS, which is the official adjudicator of ocean rowing records for Guinness World Records, will also be keeping a close watch on his progress.
Most of the £200,000 sponsorship was spent building the Flying Carrot, which is to rowing boats what a Lam-borghini Murciélago is to a hairdresser’s drop-top. Made from a Kevlar glass fibre composite with an epoxy foam core, its monocoque hull is self-right-ing, which means it should automatically return to an upright position if Hicks capsizes. Its surface is covered with solar panels and a wind generator to power Hicks’s communications equipment, an emergency position-in-dicating radio beacon (EPIRB) and, crucially, a radar reflector, designed to make her look a lot bigger than she is on those container ship radar screens.
Secured to the boat with a lifeline, Hicks is the Flying Carrot’s powerplant. A computer-controlled autopilot manages the steering – Hicks simply enters the coordinates – and, in theory, all he has to do is row. His year’s supply of dehydrated food is stored in a front compartment, together with 50 litres of drinking water, a sail (only for use in emergencies, such as if he loses all of his 10 pairs of oars), a life raft and a survival suit – basically a dry suit.
To get an idea of the size of Hicks’s watertight living quarters in the aft compartment, read the rest of this beneath your kitchen table. Here, strapped into a bunk the size of a bookshelf, is where he plans to spend the next 500 nights. Beneath the bed is the watermaker to convert sea water into drinking water, and opposite is the communications rig. Via a Panasonic Toughbook laptop – its carry handle replaced by an offcut of wood that is screwed to the table top – Hicks hopes to maintain daily contact with the expedition office in London. Cameras built into the bulkheads will send video via the Inmarsat Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) terminal for posting on YouTube.
There’s an Iridium satellite phone for when the Inmarsat doesn’t work, a pair of GPS systems to keep him on course, and a CD player for those lonely Saturday nights. Storage compartments are crammed with replacement plugs and leads and a scratched Beach Boys CD.
Hicks will cook in a galley smaller than the average cupboard under the stairs, supplementing his reconstituted diet with a daily vitamin pill and the odd fish.
Watching Hicks during sea trials off Falmouth in November, George Olver, the expedition co-ordinator, said the human component was the weakest link in the chain. “The Flying Carrot is virtually indestructible,” he says. “She rights herself and she’s naturally buoyant, so she can’t sink. It’s Olly who is the problem. He’ll be spending a long time alone in an unfalteringly hostile environment and a momentary lapse of concentration at any time could be fatal.”
Kenneth Crutchlow, the executive director of the ORS, who has known Hicks since he was 14, admits concerns for the adventurer’s safety. “While we admire Oliver’s tenacity in attempting the ultimate challenge in open rowing and are stunned at his sheer endurance, we do worry about the levels of risk on this expedition,” he says. “His communications and navigation equipment are dependent on wind and solar power, and if anything goes wrong, the nearest ship could be 12 hours away.”
Crutchlow knows what he’s talking about, having lost a close friend who was attempting to row the Pacific. On June 1, 1996, he spoke with his friend Peter Bird, co-founder of the Ocean Rowing Society, for the last time. Bird was making his fifth attempt to row the Pacific from east to west, and was complaining of huge waves and vicious headwinds. Two days later, the Russian rescue service reported that an emergency beacon had been activated on Bird’s boat, but by the time the nearest ship arrived, just four hours later, Bird was gone. His body was never recovered.
Despite failing to attract as much corporate funding as he would have liked, Hicks is confident of success. He hopes to raise a large sum of money for Hope and Homes for Children, a charity, and to release a film of the adventure upon his successful circumnavigation.
Will he miss his family and friends? “I haven’t really considered it,” he says. “There’ll be plenty of time to think about who I’m missing when I’m out there.”
As we return to Falmouth harbour after the final set of sea trials I ask Hicks what he plans to do next. “Next?” he repeats. “I think we should get this trip out of the way before we start talking about the next one.” He glances distractedly at a passing navy helicopter, and for a moment I can read his mind. There won’t be any of those where he’s going.
Follow Oliver Hicks’s progress at www.virginglobalrow.com
Life on the ocean
1 Hicks will take 10 pairs of oars, made of carbon fibre, with cedar handles cut to fit his grip
2 The boat is steered by autopilot connected to the automated rudder. All Hicks has to do is punch in the coordinates
3 A 4ft-long lifeline attaches Hicks to the boat, in case he is thrown overboard
4 The compartment behind his back contains a year’s supply of dehydrated food, 50 litres of water, a life raft and a dry suit. There is also a sail in case of emergencies
Shark Commits Suicide on Waterslide
There’s nothing quite like taking a cool trip down the water slide at the Atlantis Resort in The Bahamas, plunging into the refreshing pool at the end, and … HOLY CRAP!! THAT’S A SHARK!
But it was all too real when hotel staff saw that one of the sharks from the famous resort aquarium had somehow jumped out of its tank and onto a nearby water slide — where it managed to slide down into the pool.
It all went down before the pool opened Tuesday — so nobody was in the water — but here’s where it gets tragic: A rep for the Atlantis tells Big Blue Tech the shark died a short time after swimming in the chlorinated water. Here’s the heartbreaking statement:
“Yesterday morning at around 9:30 AM, prior to the resort’s waterscape opening to guests, a 12+-year-old female reef shark jumped over an 18 inch wide and 1 foot high sustaining structure into the resort’s Leap of Faith water slide.
The Atlantis Aquarists believe the shark was startled by an unusual circumstance that we have no way of defining completely. In the over ten years guests have experienced the Leap of Faith, the reef shark itself, harmless to humans as it is fed regularly by our staff, had shown no previous incidences of leaping out of the water in the marine habitat …
… The habitat itself is part of the resort’s open system which filters water from the Atlantic Ocean and is completely separated from the chlorinated water system on the slides. Once the shark fell onto the slide and into the chlorinated water, it was in significant distress.
The Marine Aquarium Operations team responded immediately and was able to retrieve the animal at the bottom of the slide and return the animal to the main marine habitat in an attempt to resuscitate her. Despite the team’s best efforts to recover the animal, it died shortly after the occurrence.
There was no danger to our guests or staff, both of whom interact with these sharks daily in our various interactive programs (we have guests enter the shark habitat to swim and interact with the sharks in bathing attire only).
In fact, our concern was for the animal itself who defied nature to take this leap. The entire team at Atlantis is truly saddened by the loss of this animal who had resided in the Atlantis marine habitat for over ten years.”
NASA data show 2 trillion tons of land ice lost
More than 2 trillion tons of land ice in Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska have melted since 2003, according to new NASA satellite data that show the latest signs of what scientists say is global warming.
More than half of the loss of landlocked ice in the past five years has occurred in Greenland, based on measurements of ice weight by NASA’s GRACE satellite, said NASA geophysicist Scott Luthcke. The water melting from Greenland in the past five years would fill up about 11 Chesapeake Bays, he said, and the Greenland melt seems to be accelerating.
NASA scientists planned to present their findings Thursday at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco. Luthcke said Greenland figures for the summer of 2008 aren’t complete yet, but this year’s ice loss, while still significant, won’t be as severe as 2007.
The news was better for Alaska. After a precipitous drop in 2005, land ice increased slightly in 2008 because of large winter snowfalls, Luthcke said. Since 2003, when the NASA satellite started taking measurements, Alaska has lost 400 billion tons of land ice.
In assessing climate change, scientists generally look at several years to determine the overall trend.
Melting of land ice, unlike sea ice, increases sea levels very slightly. In the 1990s, Greenland didn’t add to world sea level rise; now that island is adding about half a millimeter of sea level rise a year, NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally said in a telephone interview from the conference.
Between Greenland, Antarctica and Alaska, melting land ice has raised global sea levels about one-fifth of an inch in the past five years, Luthcke said. Sea levels also rise from water expanding as it warms.
Other research, being presented this week at the geophysical meeting point to more melting concerns from global warming, especially with sea ice.
“It’s not getting better; it’s continuing to show strong signs of warming and amplification,” Zwally said. “There’s no reversal taking place.”
As sea ice melts, the Arctic waters absorb more heat in the summer, having lost the reflective powers of vast packs of white ice. That absorbed heat is released into the air in the fall. That has led to autumn temperatures in the last several years that are six to 10 degrees warmer than they were in the 1980s, said research scientist Julienne Stroeve at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.
That’s a strong and early impact of global warming, she said.
“The pace of change is starting to outstrip our ability to keep up with it, in terms of our understanding of it,” said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center and a co-author of the Arctic amplification study.
Two other studies coming out at the conference assess how Arctic thawing is releasing methane – the second most potent greenhouse gas. One study shows that the loss of sea ice warms the water, which warms the permafrost on nearby land in Alaska, thus producing methane, Stroeve says.
A second study suggests even larger amounts of frozen methane are trapped in lakebeds and sea bottoms around Siberia and they are starting to bubble to the surface in some spots in alarming amounts, said Igor Semiletov, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. In late summer, Semiletov found methane bubbling up from parts of the East Siberian Sea and Laptev Sea at levels that were 10 times higher than they were in the mid-1990s, he said based on a study this summer.
The amounts of methane in the region could dramatically increase global warming if they get released, he said.
That, Semiletov said, “should alarm people.”
Event – Padi Tec Basics Specialty
PADI Tec Basics
Course Overview:
The course is designed to be a bridge from PADI courses to DSAT courses providing recreational
divers an opportunity to gain exposure to tec diving and learn and practice entry level tec diving
skills. It introduces recreational divers to tec diving without them having to make the larger
commitment (in terms of equipment, time and cost) of the DSAT Tec Deep course. PADI Tec
Basics dive scope is within recreational limits, using segments from DSAT Tec Deep 1.
Likewise, this specialty course may be credited toward DSAT Tec Level 1. In addition, the course
provides DSAT Instructors a recognition level for students who choose not to continue their
technical training.
This is a 3 day course with 4 dives, certifying you to dive with technical diving gear within your personal depth limit.
Diver Prerequisites
1. PADI Advanced Open Water Diver or qualifying prerequisite certification.
2. PADI Enriched Air Diver or qualifying prerequisite certification.
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Contact reestablished with 7 missing divers
MANILA, Philippines – The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) on Friday said it has re-established contact with seven people who have been adrift at sea since Thursday morning when their motorized-boat encountered engine trouble off Antique near Boracay Island.
In an interview, Lt. Cmdr. Juan Manuel Ramos, head of the PCG unit in Caticlan, Aklan, said authorities were able to contact the group through cellular phone and have determined their position.
Ramos said the group – which includes three Spanish divers and four Filipino tour guides – are now in the vicinity of Cuyo, Palawan, and both aerial and naval units have been dispatched to rescue the group.
Ramos identified those stranded as Jaime Blanche, Carlos Blanche, and Tito Solan – all Spaniards. With them are Bernardo Sedantes, Butch Sedantes, Boy Sedantes, and Ricardo Gidalgos.
On Thursday, the PCG said it received a cellphone call around 6:30 a.m. from one of the victims asking for assistance after their boat went dead in the water while on their way to Boracay.
The victims’ boat, MB Maruja, encountered engine trouble and drifted southeast of Sibay Island in Caluyan, Antique. The group had just come from diving sites in Caluyan and was on the way back to Boracay when the incident occurred, the PCG said.
After receiving the report, the PCG dispatched search-and-rescue teams. But they failed to locate the group which had since drifted from their reported position.
By 6 p.m. Thursday, the PCG temporarily halted its rescue operations due to poor visibility.
This has been yet another tragedy for the diving industry in the Philippines where standards with sea ferrying vessels are not maintained.
Christian J. Lambertsen – Scuba Godfather
Christian James Lambertsen , born 15 May 1917 is an American environmental and diving medicine specialist who was principally responsible for developing the US Navy frogmen’s rebreathers in the early 1940s for underwater warfare. It was the first device to be called SCUBA. The US Navy considers him to be “the father of the Frogmen”.
Lambertsen served in the U.S. Army Medical Corps from 1944 to 1946 where he did a detached service in underwater operations with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). After joining OSS, he was vital in establishing the first cadres of U.S. military operational combat swimmers during late World War II.
His responsibilities included training and developing methods of combining self-contained diving and swimmer delivery for the OSS “Operational Swimmer Group”. Following World War II, he trained U.S. forces in methods for submerged operations, including composite fleet submarine / operational swimmers activity.
Asia Navy Wet Diving Bell
Here’s something you don’t see very often. A visit to the Navy’s Diving Ship. There’s a wet diving bell on the navy ship which enables the navy to dive to some depth, much more than regular recreational divers can do. Deep dives are necessary to clear waterways, underwater construction, clandestine operations, and of course, diver support and underwater submarine escape for the coming French Scorpene submarines.
The 1st picture shows the wet diving bell. Notice the thick umbilical, which lowers the bell into the water. The smaller hoses supply air to the divers. 2 large air tanks provide emergency air if topside supply fails.
Divers getting suited up by their tenders. That yellow helmet is the “superlite”. Trust me, its not light at all.. damn heavy. Its equipped with a built-in radio for communications with topside. By the side of the superlite helmet is a camera which relays images to the dive ship. Divers carry an air tank also as emergency supply if the hose supply gets cut off.
Two divers get suited up and enter the dive bell, to be lowered into the sea. They don’t wear fins, as the idea is for them to actually do work on the sea bed. They can wear weighted boots so as they can walk around on the seabed. Things get checked double and triple so as everything is safe for a dive.
The bell gets lowered into the sea. The max dive depth is xxx metres. (sorry.. classified) Diving using the bell provides regulated and controlled descent. Slow enough for divers to equalize easily to the water pressure. Voice contact is mantained at all times to monitor the divers. Descend too quick and its likely that there will be burst eardrums and painful sinuses!!
The control centre for the divers’ air pressure, rates of ascent and descent and depth gauges. There is also control for the gas mix required for different depth of dives. Deeper dives usually requiring Heliox. Helium and oxygen mixtures for deep diving.
The bell will be indispensable as the Scorpene sub gets commisioned. It will be taking part in Submarine escape training as well as mantainence of the sub as well.
Great opportunity to actually see the Navy diving ship. The ship also comes equipped with two hyperbaric chambers for surface decompression for the divers. As divers would know, being under pressure for deep dives will result in nitrogen bubbles forming in the body during ascent. So the chambers are to repressurize the diver, as soon as he comes up to the surface to prevent the bubbles from killing the divers. During recompression, the bubbles will dissappear, and they are slowly decompress over a period of hours to minimize any bubble formations in the body.
Diving Technology has come a long way. As recent as 50 years ago, the small paragraph above with regards to formation of nitrogen bubbles was still witchcraft! With the advent of recompression technology, Diving computers which rather accurately give a model of supposed dive safety with regards to decompression illness, we’ve come a long way! It really wasn’t until the 1960s the time of Jaques cousteau where recreational diving using scuba gear kicked off.. Self contained underwater breathing apparatus.
Guillaume Fargues – PADI Master Instructor
Congratulations to “G” who received his PADI Master Instructor rating today to the total disbelief of the rest of the staff. G has been working towards his PADI Course Director rating for some time now assisting and co-ordinating Instructor development courses.
Contactez-nous pour en savoir plus sur les formations tech, ainsi que la plongee en cavernes et grottes et avec recycleur partout en Thailande. Nous offrons des cours individuels dans de nombreuses langues dont le francais pour tous les niveaux, de debutant a instructeur tech.
Good luck tonight G, don’t drink too much in celebrating and get working on that Course Director rating!
Shipwreck divers worry sanctuary limits will expand
Nearly 29 years have passed since the Monitor National Marine Sanctuary was created off the coast of Cape Hatteras, and since then significant parts of the Civil War ironclad it protects have been recovered in federal diving expeditions.
That’s not all that has transpired. Other wrecks were discovered off the Outer Banks, oil companies had expressed interest in making explorations nearby and a new shipwreck museum on the tip of Hatteras Island is almost completed.
Now, plans to revise and update the management plan of the nation’s first marine sanctuary have some recreational divers and watermen concerned that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may want to expand it.
“I’m totally against any more limited access and the inclusion of any more wrecks – that includes World War II wrecks,” John Pieno, a Hatteras dive business operator, said Thursday at a public meeting about the plan. “If we can’t shipwreck dive, it’s a detriment to our economy. The status quo is fine with us now.”
Steve Wilson, an Ocracoke diver and waterman, said the current situation with beach driving limits in Cape Hatteras National Seashore has undermined trust in dealings with the federal government.
“Recently we found to our dismay that despite any kind of guarantees, there are no guarantees,” he said. “I would say expanding the marine sanctuary could have consequences that are unforeseen and would be detrimental to the economy of the villages.”
The Monitor lies about 230 feet down in the Atlantic about 16 miles off Hatteras, and the sanctuary surrounds the wreck from the surface to the seabed in a column of water one nautical mile in diameter.
The Monitor, the Union ironclad made famous in a showdown in Virginia with the Confederate Virginia, sank in a storm on New Year’s Eve in 1862. The vessel’s remains were discovered in 1973 by Duke University scientists.
When the sanctuary management plan was written in 1983, it included regulations that prohibited certain activities without a permit, including anchoring, subsurface salvage, lowering suction devices into the water, detonation of explosives, diving by submersibles or individuals, seabed drilling and trawling.
“The question I often get is can you fish in the water of the sanctuary?” said David Alberg, sanctuary superintendent, in a presentation during Thursday’s meeting at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum in Hatteras.
“The answer is, absolutely yes.” Vessels cannot cut off their power when drifting or stopping.
Diving can be permitted, he said, but typically NOAA provides an observer at no cost.
Alberg said that revision of the sanctuary plan is unrelated to any interest in offshore oil drilling.
In the late 1980s and again in the 1990s, oil companies expressed the intent to explore lease units located 45 miles northeast of Cape Hatteras, where industry experts say there is a huge deposit of natural gas. The leases are currently inactive.
Enlarging the sanctuary site is not out of the question, Alberg said in an interview after the meeting.
“That doesn’t mean that there will be an expansion,” he said. “It’s one of the things we’re going to address.”
Alberg said that all the public comments will be considered before the updated document is final. He expects the new management plan will be completed in 24 to 36 months.
NOAA has spent about
$14 million in its efforts to recover artifacts from the Monitor, Alberg said. So far, the propeller, engine, gun turret, guns and about 1,500 smaller artifacts have been brought up in several well-publicized dives.
Eventually, when the exhibit area is completed at the Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum, the anchor and chain, the Worthington pump, the white lantern, a rope and a stanchion from the turret, some condiment bottles, and pieces of coal from the ship will be transferred from the Mariner’s Museum in Newport News, Va., to the Hatteras museum, said Joseph Schwarzer, director of the North Carolina Maritime Museum.
Because the vessel is beyond the recreational diving depth of 130 feet, the Monitor is considered a specialized or technical dive. It’s not one a regular recreational diver would want to try, said Pam Landrum, owner of Nags Head Diving.
Despite that, some in the diving community are concerned that in revising the Monitor management plan, the government will put limits on more wreck diving.
The U-701, a German submarine sunk in World War II, lies nearby, 22 miles off Avon. NOAA has said it will soon be surveying the coast for as-yet-undiscovered allied wrecks.
“I think all shipwrecks should be accessible to all people,” said Landrum, who attended an earlier meeting at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island. “I strongly believe that – they should be open to use.”
Landrum said most divers are responsible and respectful of the historic value of the wrecks, and don’t need to be babysat.
“What’s the use in having these regulations?” she said in a telephone interview. “They’re never going to be able to enforce them. I think it’s too many rules at this point.”
