Why I hate british Diver - a rant.

The title sounds very aggressive, I know. It's a result of me getting more and more tired of the british dive magazine 'Diver' and its ability to time and time again front what can only be, in the developed diveworld, be seen as hazardous and narrowminded diving. I won't be throwing in actual examples, as I am short on time, but if you bother to pick up one of the monthly copies of the magazine, you'll be able to find them yourself.

I started buying the magazine as there's a limited supply on avalible recreational reading around, and I quite like to keep myself updated on what goes on in the diveworld. Diver magazine is ofthen full of relatively well-written stories from around the world. Divetrips and divelocations are presented with nice big pictures and the ocational amusing anecdote of cultural shocks and clashes. But that's where the good part stops. The articles are RIDDLED with romantic notions of how diving was conducted by the british 30 years ago, when the article writers first set out to get wet behind the ears, and how everything have changed for the worse in recent times.

What was good, and what has made things turn less good, according to Diver magazine? Well, there's a whole lot, and I won't be able to throw in the multitude of claimed examples, but if one was to sum it up it would be about all the new thinking going on. One such example of this new thinking is how diving has turned into being about skill. Being a skilled diver who likes to focus on safety, which includes diving on mixed gasses, is apparantly a negative thing. The magazines scribents are also very fond of talking down on one of the newer ideologies of scuba, which is DIR (google it if you don't know), which supposedly takes away the individual freedom by frowning upon divers taking with the every single bloody piece of kit one could ever think to need underwater.
Articles have discouraged against using a kidney OPV on wings and BCDs while using a drysuit. Which ofcourse is pure bullshit. If you are unable to dump air from your boyancy compensator by using anything else than the inflator while diving a drysuit, you are clearly way out of your element and should find a divable pool as soon as possible.

And if you are diving from a boat, which seems to always be the case for british divers, you must make sure you have all the gear you need, in case the boat looses it's directions. Everyone can agree that a closed SMB, reel and a main + backup torch is pretty usefull for signaling and grabbing attention in and out of water. But did you know that you also need a couple of bottles of water? a cap to avoid sunburns? a flag to waive about to catch attention? a flute to be heard with (lol)? An perhaps some emergency flares and a waterproof GPS with a locator beacon? the list goes on.

Obviously you won't need anything but something bright ( a decently siced SMB) and a proper lightsource with a respectable burntime. What diver fails to do is to communicate the need to first and foremost assess the dive one is about to do. Which, if they did, wouldn't have helped much as they have the romantic notions of diving as deep on air with as much customized gear as possible.

And when they get about to reviewing divegear... it can sometimes be helpfull to view viable alternatives, but for some reason they tend to talk down upon equipment inteded for DIR purposes without being able to analyze what techniques are inteded for using the gear in question. Nor do they care to ask themselves what enviromental needs the DIR gear has been created to meet. Being unable to use gear properly and thereby judge it by actual working criteria is simply just small minded - I can understand the want for having divegear that you can put on twice a year and put back in the closet without a second glanze or understanding of its servicing needs of functionality, but thats not how diving works. When you dive, you move in an alien and hazardous enviroment. To be as safe as possible, you need to analyze the hazards and eliminate them the easy way instead of adding to the complexity of gear by bringing along something to compensate for the eventual hazard. This is ofcourse not doable at all times, but if the old farts at Diver Magazine could open their eyes to a a new world where divers are concerned about their personal safety aswell as that of their divebuddy, I wouldn't have to put the main boddy of british divers in the same category as the main boddy of russian divers: cowboy divers who are seeking extremes without comprehending the hazards or their own lacking knowledge of hazards and how to handle them.

Rant over.