Around and Around and Around and Around We Go

I just wrote my annual round robin newsletter to my friends and family. These are most commonly written at Christmas, and indeed mine usually are. In 2013, it's taken until April to get to a point when the dust from the selection process, the house-buying, and everything I had to put on hold and then pick up again has settled.

Or, as I put it at the start of the letter:

Hello again, and welcome to the very delayed letter for 2012. Why the delay? Let me start by saying that I nearly began this letter by copying and pasting from last year’s, which began:


“And yet again it is time for my annual letter to friends and family. This one has been somewhat delayed, since I normally write this letter during my leave between Christmas and New Year, when I can look back over the year just gone and pick out the highlights. However, this year, I spent that time preparing for an interview on January 9th 2012. For my own job. Those of you who have spoken to me recently may well be thinking “What, again?” Because, yes, I did have to do that earlier last year. It has been a year of great change.

I’ll start by saying that yes, I was successful earlier this year, so I’m still employed by Newcastle City Council, hopefully for the foreseeable future. I say “hopefully” because although I have a permanent contract with the Council, like anyone else, I can be made redundant, which unfortunately has happened to several of my colleagues in 2011…”

Were I to change the interview date to “18 January 2013” and the year at the end of the last paragraph to “2012”, this would be a good description of the start of this year.

Still, let's not be negative. I spent most of the letter extolling the joys of having my own place, and holidaying in Scotland (cycling), Malta, Crete, and Oban in Scotland (diving). This year, I'll be off to Glastonbury. So here's to the future!

Assertiveness for Divers, Part 3: Your Buddy is Not a Telepath

And the final section of this little essay, and one of the trickiest things I've had to learn as a diver: assertiveness with your buddy.

By this, I don't mean aggressiveness, or in-your-faceness. I don't mean a situation where you're telling your buddy "We have to do it my way!" Unless they're proposing something completely hare-brained, like diving to 40m on a 10l cylinder, playing with Great White Sharks, diving in caves with one torch with elderly batteries, in which case, have at it and / or, find another buddy.

For me, it's always been a more of a subtle thing. It's easy not to rock the boat, particularly if it's your regular buddy. After you've done it a few times, a buddy check can seem a bit superfluous. And you know which route you're following round the site - after all, you've dived it umpteen times before. And you're pretty sure you've both got the same goal for the dive. And you don't want to sound too much like a newbie diver who does everything the PADI manual way...

...except that, without the buddy check, you might not realise that your buddy has recently started wearing integrated weights, not a belt. Or that they've bought a new BCD with different releases. Or that one of you wants to stop and take pictures with the new camera. And when you get into the water, it turns out that the visibility is a lot poorer than you expected. And your buddy still wants to take photos, and the next thing you know when you pause to look round, they're not there and you can't see them.

I could keep going in this vein, but I think the point is coming across. Admittedly, everyone dives differently. I wouldn't try telling more experienced divers than I am what to do with their buddies. I do know, however, that it took me a while to get this point in my head, and to have the courage to risk looking like I'm overly-cautious, or that I do it too much by the book, and ask my buddies to do a proper buddy check with me. I'll also ask everyone I'm diving with to confirm the plan for the dive, anything they want to watch out for on the dive, what the plan is if we get split up, and where the car keys are. (By which I really mean "If it all goes tits-up and we have to drag you back to land, what's the quickest way to get to the mobile phone and call the ambulance?").

As for under the water... I say this goes double. Maybe it's me, but I find it can be tricky to communicate with other divers at the best of times, which is why I now carry a slate and pencil at all times. Sign language is great when it's all going well, but throw in some more vis or an unexpected problem, and trying to get the point across can be tricky. I came across this on a dive to Malta (remember that?) when my BCD shoulder valve leaked on the first dive of the holiday, and dumped all the air out of the jacket, and thus out of my cylinder.

I think there's a temptation under the water to not want to have to hold up the dive, to stop and say "Actually, I think there's a problem". This is not helped by the fact that some divers like to take off like rockets into the distance. I'll admit this is a pet peeve of mine; I really wish more divers in groups would actually stop and look around to check everyone is okay and keeping up, rather than leaving it to anyone having a problem to signal this. There can be a real temptation, when the dive leader signals "Ok?" to reply "Ok!" instead of "Problem over here!" and just think, "hey, it'll sort itself out".

I fell prey to this. I did, eventually, manage to signal my buddy that I had problems, but that was twenty minutes into the Dive of the Leaking Jacket (albeit it took me ten minutes to figure out what was happening). The first time around, I tried writing on the slate "Jacket leaking?" My buddy checked and wrote "Looks fine!" (Of course it did, I later realised - it had leaked all the air out, and thus wasn't visibly bubbling - I should have filled it with air whilst she was looking!)

It took me another five minutes to pluck up the nerve to go back to my much-more experienced buddy and try again to say "Actually, this dive really isn't working for me". This time around, I figured the solution, and showed her my air gauge, which showed I'd used about twice the air I normally would on a dive at this depth for this duration. This got the point across, she swam off to notify the dive leader, and he and I headed off at 3m to return to dry land and repair the valve.

And again, I learned a valuable lesson. Don't misunderstand me. I would never abandon my buddy or leave them to struggle, and I know they would do the same for me. But when it comes down to it, you are going to go play in an environment where, as Captain Bob Bates memorably paraphrased it, "where a single breath of the ambient atmosphere will, kind reader, fucking kill you" (Snappy Banter website.) 

The more I dive, the more I firmly believe that if you are not prepared and able to complete the dive using your own resources, if you are relying on your buddy to get you through it then, unless it's a teaching environment when your buddy is the instructor and is there to keep an eye on you, you are in a really dangerous situation. To quote another scuba website, "It's a buddy, not a crutch". You don't need to be prepared to do the dive if it all goes right. You need to be prepared to handle the dive if it goes wrong. If something happens to your buddy (leaking regulator, cutting themselves badly on some sharp wreckage, severe cramp meaning they can't swim), then you are going to have to be prepared to take charge of the dive and get the two of you safely back to terra firma.

I love diving. I also love driving my car. In both cases, I keep my skills in tune, my equipment maintained and an eye on the prevailing conditions. And because I do that, I've returned safely from every drive and every dive I've had (so far). And I find that when you include the risks in your dive plan, you can head out feeling more secure than if you ignore them, because you know what to do.

Happy diving, folks.

Assertiveness for Divers, Part 2 - Self-Assertiveness

I was originally going to write this as "Assertiveness with your buddy", followed by "Assertiveness with yourself", but found that didn't work, as the one in many ways precludes the other.

In sense, what I'm writing about is not assertiveness at all, but honesty with yourself. Perhaps self-assessment is a better term than self-assertiveness?

I suppose what I am getting at is this. I don't know whether what I'm about to describe is true for all divers; the answer is "probably not all, but some". I feel there's a tendency among newer divers to fail to take full responsibility for their safety when diving, and if this continues as a habit it can be a real danger.

The reason for this is pretty simple. When you learn to dive, you are learning to do an entirely unnatural activity in an environment that can kill you. This is not unlike learning to drive, and both activities involve a very early stage where you have little idea what the hell you are doing, you don't know what all this equipment does, and you must have absolute faith in your instructor. With diving, even more so than with driving; your instructor literally has your life in their hands. They know far more than you do, and in the interests of learning to do it safely, you must suspend relying on your knowledge, place your trust in them and let them guide you.

The main difference between the two activities is that when you pass your driving test, you will shortly afterwards find that you are in a car, on your own, with no-one there to hit the brakes for you if you bugger it up. This is the point at which you realise they make the driving test so bloody hard so that when you find yourself in this situation, your skill level will be high enough that you should be able to get yourself out of the inevitable mistakes you'll make without killing yourself or any bystanders.

With diving, however, you continue to dive with someone else, due to the buddy system. And, due to your own lack of experience, this person is more experienced than you. It can be very, very tempting to rely on them to do a lot of the hard work of planning a dive - choosing the location, timing and date, checking the tide and weather conditions, planning the route and, not least, planning what to do if it all goes horribly wrong.

In the early stages, this is pretty inevitable. It takes quite a few dives to really get the hang of managing yourself and all your gear in the water, much as it takes quite a lot of driving experience after you pass your test before you master it to the extent that you can drive the car without thinking about it. However, there comes a point where you must start to take responsibility for yourself.

Why? Simple. Because you only get one life.

I had this knocked into me when I overbreathed my regulator at 22m in the Farne Islands, with my two buddies out of sight in front. The sensation of being unable to get enough air to breathe properly with 22m of water overhead is uniquely horrible. It scared the hell out of me, and to this day it's why I'm not sure I'll ever try technical (decompression) diving. I made it back safely then by resisting the urge to hit the inflator button and rocket to the surface by repeating to myself "You are getting enough air to survive the few minutes it will take you to rise at a safe speed to the surface, and once you're up there this horrible feeling will go". The thought of having a near-panic attack with twice the water over my head and no possibility of a direct ascent to the surface scares me rigid just sitting at my desk writing this.

And from this experience, I took away a useful lesson: you have one life, which you take down there with you, and if you don't manage your dive properly, you are the person who will feel the consequences. Not your buddy. I don't blame my buddies for what happened. I should have realised that I was overexerting myself and slowed down to stop the situation before it started. But when that happened, it was me who felt like I was suffocating, me who nearly panicked, and me who, if I had panicked, would quite possibly have ended up in a hyperbaric chamber with a nasty case of the bends (or worse). Not them.

This is not me having a go at the buddy system, which I think is an essential part of recreational diving. It's me saying that I don't always know if every diver really takes on board the fact that if there's any aspect of the dive you personally didn't plan or think about, you're putting your life in the hands of the person who you trusted to do that - and, if they didn't do that, that's your safety at an unnecessary risk.

So be assertive with yourself. Ask yourself if you really know what the dive involves, what equipment and skills it requires, and whether you can handle it if it all goes wrong. If not, think twice about doing it. Because, again, you only get one life.

Selkie in Spring

(Written for my church's Spring Miscellany service.)

Many island cultures around the world have folklore tales of selkies, mythical creatures who were half-human, half-seal. Traditionally, every seven years the selkie would come ashore and slip off its seal-skin to reveal a human form. Having visited the land, the selkie would don its skin again, unless prevented by a human who wished to marry it, and slip back beneath the waves. Many legends tell the tale of the selkie wife or husband pining for their seal-skin, locked away in a chest by their human partner, who feared the return of their loved one to the sea.

Around the time of spring I feel a certain empathy with the selkie, as my other skin is currently hanging in the cupboard under the stairs, and has been since last autumn, when the weather turned cold, the sea turned cloudy, and the animals and plants dwelling within it went to sleep for the winter. The British scuba diving season is generally considered to run from the Easter bank holiday until October, or whenever the winter begins to make its presence known. Like the selkie, the landlocked scuba diver may stare forlornly at their skin, dangling uselessly from a hook.

Unlike the selkie, the diver is free to don their other skin as soon as they choose, and spring is the time for doing so. Like most divers, I actually have three “other skins”; a thin wetsuit for warm water, a thick wetsuit with hood, boots and gloves for cold water, and a two-layered drysuit for colder water, which is the one that tends to see most use in spring.

As I re-don my scuba gear for the first dive of the year, I wonder at what a strange beast the scuba diver is. Jacques Cousteau called us “menfish”, and indeed we are a very odd species. It’s hard not to be aware of the limitations of the human form in water. We are highly capable surface swimmers and shallow divers, but to dive deep, we need to find some substitutes for the abilities other species have evolved as part of their physical being.

In place of fish-eyes to focus in water, I place an air-filled mask over my face to enable myself to see. In place of a seal’s tail, I don large plastic fins to propel myself through the water. An inflatable jacket and weight belt take the place of a fish’s swim bladder to control buoyancy at depth. A torch supplies the extra light that eyes which evolved on the savannah of Africa need to see clearly in depths where the red light from the sun’s rays cannot penetrate.

The drysuit mimics a seal’s insulation. Where the seal has blubber, a diver has a quilted jumpsuit, and where the seal has fur, the diver has a watertight suit that traps warm air next to the skin. Finally, where a seal can rely upon its highly efficient lungs and blood chemistry to dive for up to two hours on one breath, the human diver must strap a large tank of air to their back and fit a mouthpiece into their jaws if they wish to be under the water for more than a few minutes.

It’s perhaps no wonder that a scuba diver on land can be nearly as clumsy as a seal on a rock, and as eager to get into the water, where all our weight is supported and we move freely in three dimensions. As we re-enter the water, it’s good to pause a moment and reflect. Are we less than the seals, since they can so effortlessly do what it takes us so much effort to achieve? Are we more than the seals, since instead of evolving all these adaptations, we instead evolved a brain that can built devices to enable us to dive deep, to fly and to travel faster than the fastest land mammal on earth can run? Are we simply equal, but different?

These questions are important, but they tend to last for no more than a moment. The seals at the Farne Islands are calling, and it’s easy to feel that they miss their human playmates, as they rush to the edge of the rocks to see our boat, barking excitedly. As we slip back beneath the waves and the seals wriggle towards us to nibble our fins and allow us to pet their heads like dogs, we modern selkies might spare one more thought for the origin of the selkie myth.

Some people think it originates from when travellers of different appearance to the natives of the islands came to visit. Upon seeing humans with dark hair and eyes appearing from the sea, the islanders’ tales of their visitors became tales of human-like seals. Most people who have interacted with seals might be tempted to think that the answer is simpler. No one can look into those huge, expressive eyes, and not see a fellow creature looking back. Life returns to the sea in spring, and so do we.

Valar Doheris

 Really not much to say this week, except I'm feeling happier that in earlier weeks. Sometimes the best thing to do when you're utterly tired of a situation is to remove yourself from it with speed. Which I have done, and now things are better.

Hopefully I'll be back in the water soon. Spring is springing, the daffodils are poking their heads up, and I'm back on my bike.

I'll also soon be back at work, but hopefully the break and the chance to have some fun (see photo!) has given me back the resilience to go there and do what I have to do.

Onwards.