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George, The message got screwed up somehow and got truncated. I am resending. Maybe it will make more sense this time. BTW you have been pretty civil lately compared to some of your earlier posts. Then again, I haven't seen any stuff from Tom Mount lately either. George, I couldn�t agree with you more on this subject. I worked for 10 years for one of the world�s largest scuba retailers while going high school and college. I got to see how hypocritical most divers were on a day to day basis. They would come in totally out of shape and tell me what big dives they did. My favorite was a 300 � 350 pound guy that had twin Genesis 120�s. He told me he would air dive to 300 on a regular basis. I saw him a few times at La Jolla Shores. I checked his Monitor II computer when he wasn�t looking and the last ten dives were less than 60 feet yet he claimed �went to 315� today!!!� I put my time in over fifteen years. Taught recreational at every level, staffed ITC�s, could hold my breath for 3 minutes, free dive to 100� and stay there long enough to shoot some fish, I pulled more abalones than anyone on the boat, and finally completed my Course Director cert and started teaching ITC�s myself. I taught for SDSU and logged about 250 � 300 dives a year but still I would get a few morons in the shop spouting off about how they could swim circles around me. That I needed to rip the masks off my students during training. That they could dive deeper than me on air and did more diving than I could ever imagine despite they had a C-card less than 6 months old. Meanwhile you could smell the stench of beer on their breath as their 350 pound frame waddled around the store. Besides getting no respect for all the time I had put it, it made me realize that a lot of people have absolutely no business in diving in general. Even more startling, technical diving seems to attract these kind of people. While I do not agree with a lot of how you conduct yourself on the net (I do think it is pretty funny to see how upset people get over it. Especially Tom Mount!) I do give you credit for one thing. You do make very valid points and you are single handedly dragging tech diving into the present day with a pretty incredible safety record and impressive accomplishments. Promoting gas diving, staying fit, decreasing decompression illness exposure, and maintaining a well thought out diving rig makes perfect sense and I don�t see why anyone would have a problem with that. My dad told me once that he saw a diving course in the 60�s for $99 bucks and his first tank cost $75. I look at the shops today and I still see $99 courses and $75 tanks forty years later. Meanwhile I pay a golf instructor $125 an hour to improve my swing. The diving industry has been stagnant for years. It has not kept up with the times and the best people that are attracted to it initially, leave after a short time because it is run so poorly and you can�t make any money at it. Diving needs someone like you. You may shoot your mouth off and everyone that �built the diving industry� may hate you, but the diving community hasn�t really done anything but flame for the last 40 years. With PADI�s recent entry into the tech field we can expect to see the death toll rise soon. So keep doing what you�re doing. You are waking people up, changing an entire industry for the better, and probably saving a few lives. Todd TB __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send online invitations with Yahoo! Invites. http://invites.yahoo.com -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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