Welcome to Scuba shack Radio season 6 episode 141 recorded Monday, 07/01/2024. Scuba shack radio is a bi weekly podcast in support of our mission to empower individuals with knowledge ability and experience to venture underwater in pursuit of their aspirations and to advocate for ocean health and sustainability. Hello again, everyone. And as always, thank you for tuning in to this latest episode of Scoop shack radio. I'm your host, Jeff. Welcome also to July and the second half of 2024.
Wow, that first half of the year went by really quick. And 1 thing for sure, we've had some very hot weather up here, and I know much of a country has as well. Now, do you miss those cold winter days yet? Not me, but still 98 to a hundred degrees in New England is not what I'm looking for either. We are also getting ready for the fourth of July holiday.
With it coming on a Thursday this year, I'm sure there a lot of people are going to be taking a nice long 4 day break as they head out to visit friends and family. They say it's going to be a really busy travel time this year. We're just going to stay put here in Connecticut and just take the the 1 day off and they get back to the shop for the weekend. Although, we're expecting it'll be very quiet. Now on today's show, I wanna talk about my thoughts on complacency in Scuba diving.
But first, let's do some shop updates followed by wet notes, news and information. Well June was certainly an incredibly busy month at Scuba Shack. First off, we crossed a very important milestone here at the shop. We have surpassed 11000 patty certifications. Now earlier this year, I was talking to Josh Cohen, 1 of our patty and he let me know that we were closing in on in this mark. I guess I was a little surprised that this was coming up.
Looking at our numbers, Of that 11000, there were 6258 open water divers. We are very fortunate to have a group of instructors who are passionate about diving and opening up the underwater world to so many people. 11000 is certainly a nice achievement. Now, as I said, June was a very busy month. It's K Shack. There were 5
weekends in the month, which is unusual. So after not having any classes the first weekend, we proceeded to pack in a combination of confined water and open water certification weekends. As we have started to do over the last few years, we alternate between the classroom pool and then the open water dives. Fortunately, this year, the weather seems to be cooperating a little more for our open water dives. Last year it must rained every time we headed it out for those open water lives.
Also, it seems that everyone has tanks that need to be serviced. Just when we think we're caught up another crop of tank shows up for us to either do their visual at... Or annual visual inspection or that 5 year hydro static test. Ned has certainly stayed busy at the tang station. And now, it's time to start the second half of 20 24. This is Wet notes here on Scuba shack radio from Monday, 07/01/2024. First off, let's start with some very good news.
I received an announcement from Dana Miller, senior director strategic initiatives at Ocean. And the email outlined an announcement that Amazon will be replacing 95 percent of the plastic pillows from their North American deliveries. The plan is to replace the pillows with 100 percent recycled paper. Now if this happens, Amazon will avoid about 15000000000
plastic pillows per year. Wow. These pillows are made up from, plastic film, and that is the most common form of plastic pollution in near shore at areas. It's also the deadliest pollution to large marine mammals. I for 1 won't miss this stuff. I find it hard to dispose of when trying to get all the air out of the bubbles. This does beg the question of how much of this stuff is already in the pipeline with the manufacturers of the product.
I'm sure once Amazon pulls the plug. There'll be a lot of other places that will try to sell plastic pillows to companies that do a lot of shipping. I wonder if there can be some sort of initiative to stop using the stuff. In any case, we need to build on the momentum from Amazon and maybe we can even get Walmart to do the same thing. And while that last update was some good news, Here is the flip side with some bad news about Whale hunting.
You see, there was a story recently in the online Scuba diver magazine news section with the headline, thin whale protection hopes dashed iceland. I'm pretty sure I reported on this 1 before. And recently, Iceland just granted the only remaining whale w company, Valor a permit to harpoon up to 128 citations this year. The thin whale is the second largest whale next to the blue whale in size. The thin whale is also on the I sees red as vulnerable to extinction.
Last year, there were 24 fin whales taken. On a somewhat bit of good news though, Valor has indicated that they will not be able to go after the whales this year because of a late decision. Their boat won't be ready to go out during the mid June to September season. But this still leaves both Japan and New our way out there, hunting whales this year. That leads me to wonder just when all w will be stopped.
Last week, I attended a special webinar that deemed a sponsor to discuss the lobbying efforts supporting Scuba diving. The presentation was done by Emily Coy, who is deemed as federal lobbyists. The webinar title was how politics shapes to dive industry. Bet a lot of you like me never realized that there are a lot of things that go on in Washington that impact the diving industry. Either positively or negatively.
Laws that sometimes look good on paper failed to recognize the serious impacts on another area. The small passenger vessel liability Act is 1 of those laws. And through our lobbying efforts, hopefully, that will be rectified with the dive bo act. Emily took us through a lot of details about how congress is shaping up and how the changes impact the efforts that are going on. I learned something interesting about something called the 4 corners.
That is where the committee chairs and ranking members must all agree to something thus allowing various legislation to move forward. Now I'm pretty sure back when they set up our constitution, the founding fathers didn't contemplate 4 corners. But this is where we are today, and we are certainly fortunate to have emily lobbying for the dive. Community.
Now here are a couple of stories about underwater discoveries, and they are very, very different First, there was a news article that I saw on Fox News 35 out of Florida by brief. The headline is, Florida treasure hunters amazed by discovery in 300 year old ship wreck. You don't expect that. So there is this group of treasure hunters who have been working with Sal Ga who runs the 17 15, fleet Queen's Jewels Llc.
Now, his company is the Us district courts custodian as the exclusive sal, for the Spanish ships that sank during the hurricane, in July 17 15. According to the article, this group was out treasure hunting off of Indian River County. That's near Vera Beach. They've been doing this for several years from a boat named Lily May. Well, they were in luck 1 day and discovered 214 coins and other artifacts from wrecked ships.
After all this time, this is amazing this is an amazing find Now, what is it that Mel fisher said? Today is the day. Now, in the other story about an underwater discovery? I don't think these divers we're expecting to find this. This story was reported on W v and Tv out of Miami. Now, a group of divers were down in Key la, and going out on a reef to do some cleanup with rainbow reef.
They said that the reef was in at about a hundred feet, and that is where they discovered 25 individually wrapped kilos of cocaine. The coke was wrapped in plastic display in plastic, displaying the Nike logo. All the kilos were salvage and turned over to the authorities. Somehow, I don't think Nike would appreciate having their logo on the kilos of cocaine.
In key la this October is now open for registration, Every year I talk about this, and it seems every year it falls during our October dive trip. This year is no exception. Well, Fast runs October seventeenth, that's Thursday through Sunday, October twentieth. Activities include Scuba diving, snorkeling, kayak, Ocean seminar, socials in nature tour. If you wanna learn more and take a look at the detailed schedule, go to WWW dot reef dot org slash fest. Fast is 1 word, REFEST.
I'll bet it's going to be a great time. And finally, I wanted to let you know about a new 3 part series coming out soon from Brian Scary. The series has titled sea changed, the gulf of Maine. Now, Brian gave us a little sneak peek at of this at the last month... Last March at the Boston Sea Rover show, and it should be really interesting. This series is part of a project by a scary to document how warming waters are affecting the golf.
It also, a cover story for the June edition of National Geographic magazine, beck Looks like this is going to be a Nova series on Pbs starting July 20 fourth, and some schedules that I saw have it running over a 3 week period. The 3 episodes are titled bounty, peril, and survival. I'll definitely be making some time to watch all 3. Set your Dvr now and catch sea change the golf of Maine with Brian Scary. Well, that's it for this installment of wet notes here on Scuba shack radio.
In the most recent addition of alert diver magazine from Dan, there is an article title don't let complacency kill you. Well that got me thinking a bit, and it seems that the more I read through the various scuba of publications, It appears that this concept of complacency jumps out. In another article in that same addition, Francois Berman and Mark G warned us do not be complacent. Our scuba gear is life support equipment that we fully depend on when underwater.
And then in the May addition of Scuba diving magazine, Art Douglas lessons for life article is titled left behind. For 1 unfortunate diver, familiarity leads to complacency. Okay. So the term complacency is being thrown around a lot. But is it really complacency or is it something else? Let me start by defining complacency? We might have an idea of what the
concept means. But if we look at the definition, it literally means a feeling of quiet pleasure or security often while unaware of some potential danger, defect or the like. It can also be defined as a feeling of calm satisfaction with your own ability or a situation that prevents you from trying harder? Now, are we using the term complacency to soften what we might really mean in some circumstances? Is this really careless? Is it really irr responsibility or is it reckless? Or is it all above?
Careless is the failure to give sufficient attention to avoid harm or errors. Irr responsibility is having no sense of responsibility, while reckless is when you act without thinking or caring about the consequences of an action. Let's go back to the story by Eric Douglas. The story is about a woman who is a regular diver on a boat. She's also out to hunt Lobster. It seems the conditions were okay. And as the lobster hunters descended it, they all went their separate ways.
Her tells us that the last time the woman's buddy saw her was at 15 feet as they descended. As the divers returned it a boat, it seems there was some confusion with the roll call given the mix of photographers and lobster hunters. Seems they finished the roll call, pulled up anchor and headed to another dive site. The woman was not on board and never seen again.
Since the woman was a regular on the boat, the crew did not put her name on the list, We don't know if the woman ever surfaced or and was lost at sea or if she carried an Smb or another signaling device. How many things have gone wrong here? Now is this complacency or careless or maybe even negligence by the boat crew? The other thing that I know is that I always stay with my buddy. It's not die... It's is not diving with your buddy complacent or reckless.
Maybe we think by using the term complacency, there is a lessen of responsibility. And here's another article for Eric Douglas. His lessons for life common column is really something that all divers should read because you never think you are being complacent reckless or irresponsible. So stories from the March 20 24 Scuba diving magazine about questionable fitness. This is a story about a student diver who's trying to overcome their fear of the
ocean. Not only that, they are overweight with high blood pressure. Student didn't disclose any of their, of this on their medical form. After doing 2 certification dives in a lake, they had it 5 miles offshore, and there were 4 foot c's. The student did the giants stride and immediately had an issue. Couldn't climb the ladder. With the helping instructor, they made it back on board where they lost consciousness and died. I don't think the student diver here was
complacent. Maybe the instructor was because he had done this so many times before and felt that they could overcome any anxiety or fear from the student? You be to judge. So how do we avoid this trap of becoming complacent or careless with our diet? Thing. It should be easy. Right? We might well know that our equipment needs to be serviced because it's either it's time or we had an issue with our last dive thing In our desire to get new water, we might not do our function check.
We're we might ignore some other small problem with the equipment. Sometimes, we might take on a dive that's beyond our training or capability, and we leave it in the hands of the dive master to take care of us. There are just too many easy ways for us to become lazy or quote unquote, complacent. As a small local dive shop, we cannot not afford to be complacent careless or responsible or reckless. It is making sure that when a custom
comes in to get their tank filled. We verified that they are a certified diver, make sure the hydro static test is in in and visual inspection are up to date. It's ensuring that equipment is serviced in accordance with the up to date manufacturers specifications. A stress up to date because they do change and we cannot afford to be complacent in the service.
Sometimes, it is hard to deliver the message to a customer that their tank is no longer serviceable or that there are expensive fixes needed to their regulator. It is being diligent and not complacent. Look, we love scuba diving. We do something that most people don't do. We experience a whole new world every time we go diving. We also know that there are inherent risks in diving. We are some place where we naturally are not supposed to be.
We are able to do this primarily because of the equipment we have coupled with the training and experience we have gained. To minimize the risks, we have to be prepared and diligent every time we go diving. Even the so called easy dives cannot be taken for granted. I guess I really don't like using the term complacent when it comes to diving because we know better. We are aware of the risks associated with faulty equipment are diving beyond our capabilities.
It's not being... Is is not being prepared complacent or is it something else? What do you think? Whatever you call it, complacency, careless, irr responsibility or reckless. I think we all agree that they have no place in diving. Well, that wraps up this latest episode of Scuba shack radio. Thanks again for listening, and have a happy fourth of July. I'll talk to you again in a couple of weeks Until then, take care everyone.
Scuba shack radio is a bi weekly podcast supporting our mission to empower our individuals with knowledge ability and experience to venture underwater in pursuit of their aspirations and to advocate for ocean health and sustainability, and talk to you next time.