Name: John Bantin
Bio: John Bantin has specialized in having a great time. Based in London n the '70s and '80 he was first a photographer for Penthouse Magazine but graduated to doing the photography and film-directing for many Award-winning advertising campaigns for which he got paid megabucks. So much so that in 1992, he took a year off to go diving. Seventeen years later he's still doing it and has developed a reputation instead for being a scurrilous hack, feared by diving resorts and equipment manufacturers alike yet he still knows how to get a picture in focus. He is too often mistaken by the non-diving public for Sean Connery or Prince Michael of Kent, both of whom are much older.
Posts by John Bantin
Isn’t Diving Wonderful?
August 20th, 2010
What’s the most interesting animal you’ve met while diving? Is it the whale shark or the pigmy seahorse? Is it the octopus of the leopard seal? I’ll tell you my favourite and it’s one of the most difficult, if nigh on impossible to predict creatures you’ll ever come across. It’s the human being.
I recently went on a liveaboard safari that hosted a week’s photography course. In order to illustrate the feature I was writing I needed pictures of the participants at work. It proved very difficult to second-guess what each might do next; You simply cannot tell what is going on in someone’s mind once the power of speech is lost underwater.
That said, I have met an immeasurably wide range of people while on diving trips and from all over the world. I have shared cabins with divers of all nationalities, of all ages, all sexual inclinations and of all income-ranges. With the common interest that diving presents, they have all proved interesting and worthwhile companions to spend time with. In fact our activity of diving is a great leveler. It proves very difficult to assess someone’s income or standard of living once they are deprived of the trappings of their wealth.
Take my friend John. He lived in Switzerland. He had formerly worked in the film business (like me) and had a young wife (like me) and a young girl child (like me). He invited me to stay if ever I was in his country so one day I did.
I have a nice house in London. It’s not spectacularly nice but it’ll do. When I saw it, I calculated that John’s house was 26-times bigger, with an Olympic-size indoor pool too! That was a surprise. I hadn’t realized that his father was a famous author (deceased) and that he had inherited everything.
George comes from Scotland and lives much more modestly. He is though, one of the most honourable men I know, a great wit and sage and great fun to spend time with. We met Richard and Caroline during a trip to the Maldives and were rather surprised to spot them (on television), guests in the Chapel at Windsor during the last Royal wedding. My wife is now Godmother to their youngest son.
Another time I met two guys traveling together from Oregon. One was a carpenter while the other owned a large share of an Internet search engine. Both were hilariously funny and great to spend time with. Mauricio is a very talented wild-life photographer but probably doesn’t earn very much. This list is endless. Aerospace salesmen, government mandarins, miners, hairdressers, lawyers, truck drivers, schoolteachers; I have met and enjoyed the company of such a wide range of personalities through diving with them.
More recently I took my family to stay with a friends in the USA. That included an old friend, Bret, and another diving friend I’d met who lives in Tennessee. My Southerner friend was one of a pair of guys I’d had a great time with, from that part of the world, while staying on a very basic and inexpensive liveaboard. I had no idea what his life-style was like and, although Bret had made joking references to banjos ‘and squealing like a pig’, it turned out he lived with his small son in a spread akin to that of a Texas oil baron. We had a great time, enjoyed incredible hospitality from him, his family and his friends, and it would have been the same even if his life-style had been more modest. My eldest daughter now has the ambition to live in Tennessee.
Of course, as expected, Bret showed us a great time when we were with him and his lovely missus in Maine and my youngest daughter has learned that she loves to eat Maine lobster!
The point I make is that we had a great time with friends, and would have regardless of what they might possess, simply because I got to know them without the trappings of wealth in evidence and really liked them regardless of that. Sometimes, these material things obstruct our view. Diving strips us down to the bare essentials. We are all ‘in the same boat’ so to speak.
It reminds me of a novel I read a long, long time ago. It was called ‘Sea Queen’ and was about a group of men and one woman who found themselves cast adrift in a lifeboat. Their lives and survival became predictably entwined and after much hardship,they all eventually survived. It was only when they met up gain, their endurance their common bond, did it become apparent to the men that the woman they had shared such an intimate time with was actually a Catholic nun.
Diving isn’t necessarily about survival but once we are away from home and in our diving suits (or not) it becomes very difficult to distinguish between rich and poor, harlot and nun. We are left only with the personalities of those we spend time with. As I said, isn’t diving wonderful?
Deep Breath: Professional v Amateur
August 5th, 2010
My family and I love going on holiday. Who doesn’t? My wife went with some girlfriends to the Costa Brava. They had a great time. They sunbathed, they ate some fine meals, they drank probably too much, and they had a lot of laughs. I went to the Maldives. I enjoyed myself, I ate some fine meals, had a lot of laughs, but I was not there on holiday.
I have got a great job. A successful dentist friend of mine, just taking delivery of his brand new Aston Martin, told me that his real ambition was to change careers and become an ‘inspector of tropical dive sites’. That’s more or less the job I’ve got, and I ride a pushbike.
He takes dentistry very seriously. He is good at what he does and he obviously enjoys it. If he were not good, he’d soon be out of business. It’s the same if you travel the world going diving, taking photographs and writing about it. You have to approach it with a professional mindset or you’d soon be out of business. When you are surrounded by people who are on holiday, it’s important not to lose focus on why you are there. No one wants to hear that you simply had a good time. Where are the results?
Now you may think that I do a lousy job. That’s your privilege. I’m always interested to hear how I can do better. No one is more insecure than someone trying to keep up a standard. I can assure you that to compete with all the other contributors to magazines, you have to do the job professionally.
Some years ago, I travelled across the world to the Solomon Islands to do a feature for a magazine. I found myself sitting next to one of the paying holidaymakers also on the trip. He told me he was a professional photographer who had been assigned to cover the trip for a rival magazine. He showed me his camera equipment and I don’t mind telling you that he had twice as much, and better, equipment than me. I felt very insecure. I really didn’t see how the money he would be paid for a feature would warrant that kind of capital expenditure.
As it turned out, he was actually a successful car salesman who got satisfaction from seeing his stuff in print. There’s nothing wrong with that. The difference is that he was on holiday with his wife. He had a different agenda. I was there to do a job. I was not surprised to see that, despite his superior quality photographic equipment, his results tended to be strictly amateur.
Now that is not to say that amateurs do not produce some startlingly good work. The difference is that if your livelihood depends on it, you have to produce every time. No one wants to hear that you had a problem with your camera or that there was nothing interesting to write about. Amateurs are as good as their best work. Professionals are as bad as their worst.
So that is why I spend a lot of time in my room or cabin when I’m away. In fact since the advent of digital photography I no longer have a permanent tan. Downloading pictures to a laptop and backing them up on to another medium takes a lot of time. It’s got to be done. Jumping in and getting no pictures during a dive for whatever reason is not just irritating. It’s a disaster. It cuts into the overall time in the water and reduces the total throughput of work. Of course, if a trip goes dramatically wrong, that’s a good story!
When I’ve been on trips that have gone really wrong, it’s often heard from the malcontent fare-paying passengers that it’s all right for me - my trip was for free. Well, it’s worse than that. I’m being paid to be there, and I’d better come back with something good.
Scuba-diving, like all leisure activities, attract the serious amateur. In fact there is an ethos of amateurism about it. The man who owns you local dive shop probably got made redundant and because he was a keen amateur diver, he decided to start a shop with his redundancy pay. Few get into diving because it’s a good business. Instructors start teaching because they worked their way up through diving certifications until there was nowhere else to go. On the other hand my dentist friend did not simply drift into dentistry and I bet his patients are glad of that.
I often meet people at parties who tell me that they are a diving instructor. Why do they think I’ll be impressed? They obviously don’t recognise me and when I interrogate them, it usually turns out they hung round a dive centre in some far away place and helped load the tanks on to the boat. Similarly, I often meet people while on dive trips that tell me they are there to do an article for this magazine. I then wonder why the editor sent me, if that was actually the case.
So how do you get a job like mine? Well, first you will need to send in unsolicited contributions and bear the disappointment of the rejection slip. We all had to do this. However, if you really focus on doing a professional job, you supply eye-catching photographs accompanied by copy that is a little bit more than a diary of your holiday, copy that is well written and has a slant to it, copy that makes a point, eventually you might get noticed. It can take years.
It took me about four years before I started getting commissions. Once you get a commission, you’ve got a monkey on your back. You go off on a trip with the responsibility of the professional. Regardless of the weather conditions, the diving opportunities and whether the wildlife turned up or not, you need to stay focussed on coming up with the goods. That can be difficult when all around you are intent on having a good time and you won’t be doing it for the money. Be professional. My dentist friend can never say, “Oh sorry, I seem to have buggered your teeth but then the weather wasn’t right!”
Can You Trust Your Instructor?
July 14th, 2010
British dry wit Comedian Jimmy Carr claims to have put a classified-ad in a newspaper that read along the lines of, “Good looking, young, millionaire seeks gullible stunner.” We can all be gullible at times, especially when undergoing training with a trusted instructor, but how well can you trust your instructor?
I still remember a young teenage diver doing a series of dives with diving guru Rob Palmer. Rob was a pal of mine but it still didn’t stop me from protesting that they should not be going to 120m on air. “We know what we’re doing,” the kid had said. What he meant was that he trusted Rob. It was Rob that died on one of the following dives.
Of course, buying training or owning the equipment should confer a degree of expertise but it not always so, especially if you have an instructor whose credibility is invested in incorrect information. I have never owned a rebreather but I’ve done a quite few dives on different ones. When I offered an opinion on a rebreather forum I was shot down because I did not own a unit. One of my detractors was an airline pilot. Presumably he didn’t own the airliner he flew but he owned the rebreather he died with shortly after our paths had crossed.
BskyB and the HSE jointly released a haunting video that recorded the very near miss one of its cameramen had with a CO2 hit. It makes sober watching but the diver in question reveals that he was taught to tip out the partially used material from his scrubber, break up the lumps and put it back. This is an absolute No, No. We have covered the subject in this magazine as long ago as 2005. He nearly paid with his life. His instructor should be pilloried if that is what he teaches people to do.
It’s time that training agencies came clean. As well as telling people how easy it is, they should tell people how easy it is to die if they do it wrong and diving instructors should be subject to much more control.
I continue to see wrong information disseminated by both amateur and professional instructors alike. That’s from simple things like rigging the octopus on the wrong side of the diver so that its very difficult to donate in case of a real out-of-air situation, dumping air from the BC by means of the oral inflation valve at the end of the corrugated hose thereby letting water back in the other way, tightening up the cracking pressure of a regulator to make it harder to breathe from and thought to conserve air, and so on. I still see people diving at the limit of their no-stop times rather than “get into decompression” and I see them rush from 6m or so in order to get to the surface rather than risk entering the red zone on their pressure gauge and off-gassing gently in the shallows with the last quarter of their air because they were told they had to be back on the boat with 50 bar. A huge trust is put in the buddy system when too often many poorly trained buddies are little more than useless in the heat of the moment.
The most obvious error taught is the overweighting caused by instructors who need their heavily breathing trainees to kneel comfortably at the bottom of a shallow pool. They then wear the same amount of ballast on real dives. Someone should make it mandatory that all trainee divers have an understanding of neutral buoyancy. You only need to pull one dead diver out of the water to feel passionate about this subject - and I am.
Instructors are not infallible. The wreck of the Thistlegorm was pulled apart by ignorant dive-guides, presumably instructors, tying off heavy dive boats to vulnerable parts. Did they really think a 150 tonne boat bobbing on the waves would be held in place by being tied to a motorbike or some flimsy rusted railing?
I have done Instructor courses and exams with a couple of different training agencies. I was startled by the lack of skill of some of those that passed the grade. Some of them had never even dived in the sea. One young person, not yet eighteen years old, argued that if he could do all the skills he was qualified to be an instructor. I thought that at his tender years the responsibility for other people’s lives might be too onerous. Years later when we met and he’d matured, he told me how right I was. Thanks Steve.
One girl candidate was such a poor swimmer, I swear she was stationary for long periods during the stamina swim test. Another asked me what the Recreational Dive Planner was all about the night before the Instructor Exam. Evidently he’d learnt to dive without needing any decompression theory. He, like the others, was a fully-fledged instructor by the next day. These instructors are then let loose on an unsuspecting public.
What is done to keep the consequently rogue instructor in check? Nothing. In the early days of rebreather training one instructor distinguished himself by being responsible for the training of a high proportion of those that later became casualties. The manufacturer wanted his instructor badge taken from him but the training agency insisted it would be bad publicity for them so he stayed teaching.
When you decide to learn to dive, you are both vulnerable and have a tendency to be gullible. How do you know what you are being taught is correct? The short answer is that you do not. It’s a matter of trust. However, when things go wrong, the instructor should be investigated. In the UK the HSE has some responsibility for this but the UK is only a tiny area where diving is being taught. More importantly, the training agencies should insist on applying better quality control to those that practise in their names.
How to be Stylish
June 7th, 2010
The boss at Wraysbury Lake, a UK inland dive site near London, reports that, on hearing that he knows me, many visitors to ask him if I’m gay. It’s something to do with the way I look in pictures in Britain’s Diver Magazine but the numerous women in my life would take issue with that. Richard tells these people that I’m not gay but that I’ve got a sense of humour. Maybe it’s my style. Of course style comes in different types, both good and bad.
The British Sunday Times newspaper devotes a whole supplement to ‘Style’. Many sports and activities can allow you to be seen as stylish. Golf, tennis, skiing, surfing; all these activities attract people who not only want to be good at what they do, they want to look good while they’re doing it too, although, obviously, none of you have seen the way I do these things.
Diving is different. Surfacing with a yard of snot hanging from your mask and your mascara run (OK, not all of us go in for mascara) is not conducive to a stylish look but we could always start as we meant to go on. The problem is that we strap diving equipment to our selves and chuck our bodies into an inhospitable environment. You’ve probably never seen a stylish-looking astronaut in their working clothes either.
On seeing a picture of me in the Fusion drysuit, Bret Gilliam, never short of an opinion, offered that he thought I looked like a cross between Mick Fleetwood and the Terminator. Now that’s a scary thought, but I suppose it’s a style of some kind. It’s not flying though. Like Buzz Lightyear, it’s falling with style.
The question is whether the diving equipment you choose imparts a certain style or if it is something within you that cannot be easily defined. Some people think you can buy style by buying the most expensive things but a Porsche in dusty turquoise is certainly less stylish than a clean and shiny black Golf. A 250lb body in a membrane drysuit will never look good unless you happen to be two metres tall.
I know of a very stylish lady who doesn’t balk at buying her clothes in budget stores while at the same time Knightsbridge and Sloane Square in London are filled with women with access to the most expensive things, but somehow don’t get it right.
This month I reviewed in Diver Magazine two drysuits bearing the same brand but with very different price tags. One was three times as expensive as the other. Does one impart more style to the wearer than the other? I, for one, would contend that there is nothing more stylish than coming back from a dive having had a great experience and in good health. It’s telling that the British Sunday Times newspaper has an entirely separate supplement for ‘Culture’.
Fortress America: Heightened Security for Flights to the USA
April 22nd, 2010
In the first three months of this year I have travelled from the UK to the farthest reaches of Indonesia via Singapore and Manado, to Cebu via Hongkong, to Marsa Alam in southern Egypt, to Malta and to Spain, so I guess you could say I was well travelled even if you didn’t include the countless trips I have made in a twenty year career as a travel writer.
Nobody in their right mind wants to be blown up during a flight especially happily-married old-age pensioners with paid-up mortgages like me but we are all aware that there are very gullible people that are preyed upon by evil men, so we all happily subscribe to airport security measures as and when they are developed.
We now have to take off our shoes at airports thanks to the half-witted Richard Reid who attempted to set fire to his plimsolls on a flight to America. He had obviously failed to eat sufficient burgers and beans to make his farts potent enough to cause an explosion and carried on into history as the man he had always been, a dismal failure.
Last year, a young Nigerian, one Umar Mutallab, feeling disillusioned and emasculated presumably because he had failed to get anyone to respond to his e-mailed entreaties to send him the contents of their bank accounts in return for a share of the money a dead relative had embezzled, decided to try to emasculate himself by setting fire to his shorts. This was during another flight to the USA. We now have to endure the close examination of the inside of our trouser waistbands by security people who themselves would have problems if were they to introduce racial profiling.
None of us would mind any of this if it were effective but alas the quality and training of the people in whom we are expected to put our trust leaves something to be desired. In April I travelled to Fortress America from London Heathrow for the first time since the Nigerian ingrate had been apprehended, balls on fire. Enhanced security measures are now in place.
This entails a hand-search of everyone’s carry-on at the gate plus the aforementioned intrusive body search. Additionally, one or two passengers are selected to have their hold-baggage brought up to the departure gate and hand searched in front of them. Obviously wishing to avoid any allegation of racial prejudice, the security personnel select a number of passengers at random and this inevitably includes passengers who are elderly or infirm. A cynic might think that they avoid the bags of solitary young men because they wouldn’t want any nasty surprises.
Naturally, a 63-year-old male travelling with his 34-year-old-son seemed a safe bet but not the younger man. Obviously that might be far too risky! It was I that was asked to wait while they found my bag and brought it up to the departure gate from the aircraft. They asked me to open it and were rather surprised when I told them I could not. The bag was sealed shut with a plastic cable-tie and I suggested that as a checked-in passenger I had no knife, no scissors and not even toe-nail clippers to cut the tie. This resulted in an impasse.
None of the security staff carried any tool suitable either and gawped at each other hopelessly. Nothing seemed to be happening so I helpfully suggested they might call for the services of an engineer from Virgin Atlantic but that seemed to be something they were patently unwilling or unable to do. This scenario had obviously not come up during their extensive training in security procedures.
Eventually one of the security people was found to be carrying a sewing kit and by dexterous use of a needle we got the cable-tie undone and they were able to examine the contents of my bag item by item.
Out came the wetsuit. Out came two towels. Regulators with hoses were examined with knowledgeable expressions but none that fooled me. My BC was withdrawn and inexplicably held up to the light. They examined my extending emergency flag. My fins were found to contain very ominous looking masks. They examined my hexagonal wrenches, my spanners and my diving knife until they finally found something really suspicious. Inside a wetsuit boot they found a torch concealed. Why was it concealed? Well, it was formerly concealed with everything else in the bag, wasn’t it?
Bear in mind that while all this is going on there is a 747-400, fully loaded with passengers, at the end of the jetway waiting to depart.
Finally, the gathered group of a dozen or thereabouts security personnel decided they had done enough to warrant their day’s pay and attempted to repack the bag but of course none of them had done a PADI dive-bag-packing specialty. After some time, they asked me to do it instead.
I then enquired how they intended to re-seal the bag since there was now no cable-tie. They didn’t have any. It’s not part of their training. I used to carry spare cable-ties in my carry-on but during a previous encounter at London Gatwick these had been confiscated because it was alleged I might have tried to restrain an aircrew member with them. Meanwhile the delay to the aircraft was building up. I assume delays have a cost-element. We’ll all be paying for that. Eventually I found an odd cable-tie in the lining of the bag.
It was at this point that my amazement turned to incredulity. To save delaying the departure of the aircraft any further they invited me to take the bag into the aircraft cabin as carry-on! I was disinclined to face arrest by the security officials at Miami for carrying illegal items in the cabin. I insisted they put it into the hold delaying the departure still further.
Never mind. I joined the plane to the cheers of long-suffering passengers and crew, reflecting that, although none of us mind enhanced security if it works, what a pity these specially trained security people missed what to me was obvious. There they were examining the contents of my bag, the bag of a passenger travelling on a long-haul flight. What none of these specially trained security personnel spotted was the fact that I appeared to be embarking without any clothes or personal effects in my bag. That was in my other checked bag, the bag they failed to spot; the other bag of the potential 63-year-old white middle-class potential suicide bomber; the one with the spare cable ties and my weapon of choice - my pen. It’s mightier than the sword!
God help us all.
