Mailing List Archive Mailing List Archive
(To scuba-l subscribers: any messages that you send in reply to this, please send me a copy personally, as I am not in scuba-l email list.) In reply to these 2 messages that came to ndg@gs*.bt*.co*.uk*:- ................................. From: awright@gs*.bt*.co*.uk* (Alan Wright) To: ndg@gs*.bt*.co*.uk* Subject: Diving banned in Lanzarote I just read the news about diving being banned in Lanzarote on the WWW server. There is another issue on diving in Spain and Spanish Islands: it is actually illegal to dive deeper than 10m. I've dived in the Canaries 4 times over the past 5 years and I found this out by accident just last year. I guess a DCS incident was bound to happen. While diving the wrecks at 37m in Puerto Del Carmen I've seen all sorts of loony things happen. People running out of air, and diving without a depth gauge or watch. Alan awright@gs*.bt*.co*.uk* ................................. Date: Mon, 11 Jul 1994 15:16:45 -0400 (EDT) From: Gordon Henderson <Gordon.Henderson@me*.co*> Subject: Re: Diving banned in Lanzarote To: Alan Wright <awright@gs*.bt*.co*.uk*> Interesting! I've been out to Tenerife (last November) and I didn't have any trouble diving. It was regulated though and you had to have a medical (Bs-AC medical wasn't good enough at one place!) And you needed to obtain a permit to dive. not sure of the exact details, as I wasn't organising it. Gordon ................................. (1) (What is the `WWW server'?) What happened actually or allegedly at Lanzarote? Divers and their kit cluttering the beach? Bends cases or other needs for rescue? Officials not liking divers `blowing the whistle' on sewage or other dumped rubbish getting into the sea? Someone wanting the diving centres to shut down so he can buy them up cheap to build ordinary holiday flats there instead? Or what? (2) There is too much unnecessary restriction on sport divers, likely caused by (a) officialdom for the sake of officialdom liking a feel of authority, and (b) a naval attitude that "diving is for work and combat as duly ordered when needed, not for civilian sport." or the like (except for the minimum necessary to bring in foreign exchange via the sport diving holiday trade). Plus trouble from inshore fisherman types who don't like seeing anyone else in their fishing areas. Plus cases of possession of scuba gear being treated as evidence that he was a `frogman' on some unwelcome undercover mission. Enough of that! I am sorry to use the email as a flamethrower, but I have felt angry for many years on hearing about that sort of anti-diver attitudes and actions, for no good reason or for a few accidents, or a few hooliganisms that happened long ago. Be it far from me to suggest anything like a succession of mass demonstratory "dive-in"s in prohibited places and countries (like the demonstratory mass trespasses in the 1930's on private shooting moorlands in England), but it may come to that. Or write infinity letters to the official organizations involved to swamp their mailboxes: that is how some time around 1970 public pressure managed to abort a plan by California (USA)'s state government to pass a big law restricting scuba diving because of accidents. The above articles mentioned bends cases; but accidents there will be, among so many divers. Will sport diving freedom be forever hostage to one hooligan or one bends case? (Was there ever a year's car traffic in a town without a road traffic accident or two? Then let's ban cars and car driving except for the minimum necessary!) I read recently that incredibly tight restrictions on sport diving in Greece that have lasted for many years after some cases of looting of ancient wrecks in the 1960's, have been slackened at last after much pressure from scuba diving organizations etc. (Anyone got more information on this?) I read that diving in Greece is controlled by, of all things, their Antiquities Board: I can understand their respect for things Ancient Greek, but Ancient Greece ended 2000 years ago, and there must be a limit to what the long-dead stop the living from using! (Not only in diving: I pity modern Greek school children having to learn to spell their modern Greek ancient-Greek-fashion, with e.g. 6 ways of spelling the `i' sound, and an initial `h'-sound symbol that has been silent for 2000 years!) Ref the previous paragraph, I saw recently a UK TV program that described a tradition of local illegal (= without permit) sport scuba diving on Crete (a Greek island); if they see antiquities, they leave them alone and say nothing. That way the antiquities are indeed left alone; but archaeology is deprived of good free extra eyes to find underwater sites. In Yugoslavia it was worse, with even snorkelling banned in some areas, it was suspected to hide local naval places training Palestinian and other terrorists as frogmen, another threat that sport divers don't need. Plus Serbian military `control-ism' (which the Bosnians know too well of on land). Now that Yugoslavia has gone, now is the time to pressure Slovenia and Croatia (who seem to have inherited the greater part of the Yugoslavian coast) to, in the name of their newly-won freedom, give freedom for sport scuba diving to dive at will and organize its own affairs. In Israel I can understand some restrictions, such as (except in one place) no night diving allowed, so that any frogman-type sonar echo can be treated as a likely terrorist (see the previous paragraph). They let divers run the body that controls diving, not some hard naval commandant like in Spain. If you get hassled in diving in Spain, `vote with your fins' and slip over the border to Portugal, which as far as I know has no such official controls on sport scuba diving. (If it is otherwise, please correct me.) Other countries copy such official controls on diving by mere copycattism. E.g. Cousteau had to plead `need for necessary repairs to my ship' to India to get in a diving biology expedition on (I think) the Maldive Islands once. Luckily in UK there are no such laws, and any `no diving' areas to protect particular wrecks are kept as small as possible. But on the south coast of England in 1991 I was told of cases of UK naval divers attacking sport divers who they found underwater while on operations in non-naval sea areas. (But my informant told me that Royal Marines divers leave sport divers alone.) (Not only in diving: I read of cases of sport rock climbers being shot at by troops who came across them when practising cliff-climbing assault on the same rock face.) We don't need `naval-ism' getting in control of civilian diving. In the 1970's I read of something alarming in France: French diving police trained to dive on unauthorized sport divers (e.g. in a forbidden area, or spearfishing) and to force them to surface, e.g. by turning their air off at depth. I hope that that won't be copied by all sorts of official bodies, and even by inshore shellfish fishermen now that many of them can scuba dive. I heard recently of an incredibly massive armed police action to seize all diving gear on a sport diving centre at Kusadasi in Turkey, merely because its permit has lapsed a week or two during a change of ownership. We don't need that. I read in the 1970's of a sport scuba diving club in Turkey: the article said that its members were `listed as members of the frogman branch of the Turkish Navy', as if those clubs were a cheap way of training action frogmen and not for any proper freedom of the sea: I don't know whether it is so now. We don't need this sort of thing. We want free use of the sea.
Navigate by Author:
[Previous]
[Next]
[Author Search Index]
Navigate by Subject:
[Previous]
[Next]
[Subject Search Index]
[Send Reply] [Send Message with New Topic]
[Search Selection] [Mailing List Home] [Home]