I was not in the country when my personal copies of “The Physics of Scuba Diving” arrived in Colorado from Nottingham University Press. It seems only appropriate that I was on a scuba diving trip with my wife Audrey at the time. We were spending a week diving in Tobago, in the extreme south east corner of the Caribbean.
We had an exceptionally nice trip. The dive operation was excellent, the coral reefs were marvellously healthy, the currents were fun, and the fish life was abundant. As a great bonus, we had two dives featuring extended manta ray encounters. Manta rays can be curious and playful with divers, and on both these dives a lone manta made repeated circular passes to check us all out.
We were happy to see that lionfish had not yet made it to this far corner of the Caribbean. Introduced into the Atlantic by humans in the 1990s, this spiny Pacific fish has continued to spread inexorably in the Caribbean, since they are prolific, and have no natural predators in the Caribbean. As explained in this article. They are forcing out native fish by eating them, or starving them out. When we dived in Belize in January, we saw dozens of them on a single dive.
By chance we were in Tobago when a rare fatal diving accident occurred at a nearby resort. This had a large impact on the small local diving community. Reportedly this accident was the result of exceedingly unsafe dive profiles. Recreational diving is an extremely safe sport, but only if the diver follows the kind of safe recommendations all training agencies promote; the science behind those safe profiles is explained in detail in “The Physics of Scuba Diving”. These days this is easy to do: every diver should dive with a good dive computer, and understand how it works and what it is telling you. For lots of great information about safe diving, and help in case an accident does still occur, you should look at the Divers Alert Network website.
Audrey and I often encounter people who are surprised we scuba dive, considering that we live in land-locked Colorado. But actually Colorado ranks high per capita for scuba divers among the states of the United States. I think this has to do with the active outdoorsy nature of the Colorado population. And in most parts of the country, to do any warm-water diving, you have to get on an airplane anyway!
Meanwhile, we’re now looking forward to our next dive adventure – this time in Turks & Caicos.
Marlow Anderson
0 comments:
Post a Comment