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In `Diver' magazine April 1995 (publ. Eaton Publications, 55 High Street,
Teddington, Middlesex TW11 8HA, England), pp 40-42, Andy Blackford describes a
recent BSAC diving expedition to the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. They dived
at Sozopol. He describes some features of diving in Bulgaria. He writes in a
semi-jocular style with likely some exaggeration. He says that in Bulgaria:-
(0) Until the fall of Communism there, sport diving was unfamiliar there,
but there is established work aqualung diving.
(1) The rapan (a filter-feeding sea mollusk) came there from Japan on ships'
bottoms and without local natural enemies bred; Bulgarian divers dive up to 30
meters for them (to sell to Japan) without decompression, and suffered heavy
casualties from resulting bends. The rapan (at least in some places) threatens
to swamp out the native mussel, except where divers keep the rapan population
down. The sea (at least in parts) is much eutrophicated by fertilizer etc from
the big rivers (which drain much of the south of the former Warsaw Pact), and
there is serious deoxygenation from resulting excess plankton which dies and
sinks and rots; but the mussels and the rapans increased much on it.
(2) The Bulgarian diving authority comes under their lifeboat service, which
comes under the Red Cross!
(3) The locations of ancient shipwrecks is a State secret. Apart from that,
there is no law there protecting them.
(4) The local aqualungs are Russian-made. Blackford needed an adaptor (a
stainless steel disk) to fit a Scubapro regulator to a "Siberian twin set,
circa 1949" that he used there. The local cylinders need O-rings, but Western
O-rings won't fit them.
(5) The rest of his party used Russian 2-cylinder aqualungs (presumably with
Russian regulators), which supplied what Blackford described as "neat nerve
gas". As he did not suffer this from the "Siberian" cylinders that he used,
which was presumably refilled by the same compressor as the rest, likely one
of these occurred. He does not go into these details; they are my guesses:-
(a) The compressor was at fault, and Scubapro regulators have good filters
to exclude oil-mist etc;
(b) The Russian regulators used were the sort with two wide rubber hoses;
they had not been used before and had been stored closely shut-in and not
allowed to gas-off the chemical smell that emanates from shut-in new rubber.
(Compare the tendency for someone after his first dive with a new neoprene
dry-suit, to smell like an asteroid miner who has just taken his spacesuit off
for the first time in 3 months.)
About 15 to 20 years ago in a British sport diving magazine I once read that
the Bulgarian government was encouraging "diving", which I thought at the time
meant sport diving; but on later thought it likely meant work scuba diving.
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