Undercurrent Online Update for Non-Subscribers

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July 21, 2022

Ghost Fishing Nets Recovered. At San Pedro, California, in early May, six volunteer divers from Ghost Diving USA teamed up with nonprofit Healthy Seas to recover 200 pounds of abandoned fishing nets that had become draped over the wreck of the USS Moody, sunk in 1933 for a prop for the movie Hell Below. Ghost fishing nets continue to trap and kill marine life long after being abandoned.

Get Organized Before You Go Diving. If you’ve given diving a rest during the past couple of years, get your regulator serviced and try it out before you travel somewhere exotic, where you may not be able to get any problems corrected. The same goes for your computer -- get its battery replaced and the unit pressure tested by a qualified technician to avoid disappointment later.

On Diving Deep with Air. Older divers will remember when we only had air in our tanks because that’s all that was available, and yet some divers went very deep with it – so deep that younger divers brought up with Nitrox training often don’t believe what was achieved. John Bantin reminisces about those days, when diving was more dangerous. You can read it in an Undercurrent Insider Blog here.

Two Women Killed by Sharks in Egypt. A harrowing video was posted on YouTube of a 68-year-old Austrian woman, attacked and dismembered by a shark near a pier at a bay south of Hurghada, Egypt, on July 1. The body of another woman, a Rumanian in her late 40s, was later discovered about 600 yards away. An oceanic white-tip is thought to be responsible. The Egyptian authorities banned in-water activities for three days.

But the Risk of a Shark Attacks is Miniscule: Worldwide in 2022, sharks killed 11 humans. Nine attacks were unprovoked (attacks on spearfishers are considered “provoked,” since they carry dead fish), says the Florida Museum of Natural History. They reported 73 unprovoked shark bites on humans worldwide and 39 provoked bites. These are tiny numbers when compared to the likelihood of drowning; in the U.S. alone, there are an average of 3,960 drownings every year, an average of 11 per day.

COVID Quarantine Risks Persist. And what could be worse than nine days’ quarantine in a “filthy, run-down” government facility in Puerto Princesa, Palawan, Philippines? COVID is still affecting many divers’ international trips, and we’ll report on this in our August issue.

Diving post-COVID Blog. David McGuire, the Director of Shark Stewards, writes honestly how the COVID lockdown affected his mental health, and then, after his bout with COVID was over, how it affected his breath-holding ability while free-diving. David, a good friend of Undercurrent, reports how he emerged from his personal dark period in this revealing Undercurrent Insider Blog here.

COVID Can Still Imprison You Abroad. Keep in mind that if you’re traveling and test positive, you may be stuck awhile. Katherine Burns (Alameda, CA) had a good diving trip in June to Fiji’s Blue Lagoon Resort and reports, “To return to the mainland, the resort was obliged to test us again. Five people from the same dive group tested positive. Immediately everyone pulled out their masks, and those who tested positive were separated and were transferred later in the day to the Pearl Resort for their seven-day quarantine.” So, add seven days to that vacation, and a lot of extra expense, especially in changing plane tickets.

Dive Boat Operator Fined. On April 16, the Malaysian company Winter Snow had several divers drift away for hours (one 14-year-old boy died) before they were located and recovered (Undercurrent April). Officials have now fined the equivalent of $1,135 for operating a dive boat without an adequate crew, as Malaysian law requires.

Komodo Now Only For the Well-Heeled. To limit the number of visitors to the Komodo National Park, the government is set to raise the foreign visitor’s fee in August from around $12 to a whopping $240. The number of visitors has more than doubled during the last decade, affecting the dragons’ behavior and the environment. Let’s hope the additional money goes to conservation, not pockets.

Diver’s Rebreather Technology Used to Help COVID Patients. A British designer learned hospitals had a ventilator and oxygen shortage during the pandemic, so he designed a more efficient machine. As the human body only uses five percent of the oxygen breathed, Martin Stanton’s machine recycles the excess air into a reusable bag. He attached a soda-lime canister containing a CCR diver’s CO2 absorbent to the machine to remove the carbon dioxide created as a by-product of exhaling. The machines cost about $4,500, much less than the huge cost of a typical VC70 ventilator used in intensive care units.

This Month in Undercurrent: A Trip to Little Cayman Beach Resort, Cayman Islands . . . The Difficulty of Traveling to Little Cayman . . . Dolphins a Casualty of War . . . Lionfish Leather? Could It Be a Solution? . . . Undercurrent Readers Dive the World and it’s Not All Good . . . Continuing Sherwood BC Troubles . . . Amos Nachoum Authors a BIG Book . . . A Reader has Nothing but Bad Luck . . . What’s the Significance of “Advanced” in PADI AOW Certification? . . . Decompression Stops: What We Don’t Know . . . The Perils of Coral Cuts in Tropical Climates . . . A Court Award Catches up with a Dive Center . . . The Yucatan Stonewalls its Diving Deaths . . . The Vortex Incident raises Questions of Liveaboard Safety . . . and much, much more.

Why You Should Subscribe to Undercurrent. Undercurrent is financed by the subscriptions of its readers. Ten times a year, subscribers receive a newsletter packed with information and stories traditional diving media, indebted to advertisers, cannot publish for fear of losing revenue. We ask the questions that embarrass the diving industry. Not only that, but subscribers contribute their own experiences of diving destinations, resorts, and liveaboards, without fear or favor, adding to more than 400 already made and recorded on the Undercurrent database since they started diving again after the pandemic, which they can search without restriction. Serious divers can’t do without it.

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Stay Safe

Ben Davison, editor/publisher
BenDDavison@undercurrent.org