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> Wrecks '95 - April 29, 1995 in Framingham, Massacusetts ... > > The 3rd Annual New England Wreck Diving Symposium, Wrecks '95, will > [feature, as highlights,] slide and video presentations by such notable > speakers as ... John Chatterton ... I'm sorry. The other people on this list might be fine speakers--I don't know--and the rest of the events might be good, but I would *not* regard a talk by John Chatterton as a highlight of any symposium. Not, at least, if he hasn't improved as a speaker since he spoke at the New Jersey Tech Diver Symposium on October 8. John's talk at the symposium, to me, was the low point of an otherwise fine eight hours of talks that featured Hal Watts, John Crea, and Glen ... darn, the last name escapes me right now. It's not that John wouldn't have had something interesting to say--after all, the talk was billed as a talk about diving the Lusitania--but he basically gave a 20 minute talk in 1 1/2 hours. It seemed like the talk featured about six or seven slides--*all* of them above water--and one slide stayed on the screen for about thirty minutes. John promised to talk about the technical details of the operation, and said, as I recall, very little about logistical details: i.e., average number of dives per day per diver; schedules, depths, temperatures, times of dives; surface intervals; *specific* safety procedures and contingency plans; *specific* cost of the trip (at one point, after John talked about the importance of costing it all out in advance and knowing costs exactly, someone asked him just what the exact costs were, and he didn't remember); what *specifically* they learned about the condition of the boat, or from penetrations; the specific backgrounds of the people who went on the trip; what these other people were hoping to gain from the dive; how they went about deciding what mixes to use; how much of the trip the Brits with whom they were diving planned, and how much the Americans planned, and what exactly was planned by both groups; and so on, and so on. I do remember some talk about drinking beer in pubs; about saving some fishermen from drowning; about the British drinking lots of tea and coffee, then "overflowing their nappies" and wondering why the Americans didn't wear diapers (admittedly, one of the funnier bits in the talk); and about the legal problems that they've had with the heir of the Beamis fortune, who wants to salvage and melt all the brass fittings on the Lusitania, and to turn them into key chains; and a little about the history of the ship. But .... this talk was a real bust. I hope, for the sake of the people at the conference, that he'll have improved it by April 29, or that someone who's organizing that conference passes my note along to him. Respectfully, -- Phil
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