Our first post was January 1, so today celebrates three months that The Diving Blog has been active! New readers are arriving everyday, so if you haven’t already, I encourage you to poke around the site’s “older” articles. Here are a few of interest to get you started:

Exposure Suit Guide
What Makes Something Sink or Float? (this article has been pretty popular)
How to Perform a Simple Buoyancy Check
Improve Your Underwater Air Consumption
10 Reasons to Start Diving Now (the blog’s first article)

Updates

I was out of town for a few weeks and have finally gotten caught up on everything, so I can focus on the blog a little more. Besides the regular postings, I want to start working on the blog in other ways:

• Encourage more discussion. Articles are a good starting point for discussion, so I’d like to get the readers more involved and learn their perspective on things.
• Twitter looks like an excellent way to attract attention to the site and encourage discussion outside of The Diving Blog’s domain.
• Newsletter. I also want to start a newsletter to offer unique material that maybe doesn’t warrant its own blog post.
• eBooks. I have some ideas for eBooks I’d like to explore, from short pamphlets to actual book-length material.
• Site design tweaks. There are always changes going on, and I’l continue to tweak the look and feel of the blog.
  

  Where do you fit in?

  As part of the previous, I’d like to get you, the reader, involved. What are you looking for? What kind of articles do you like? Dislike? Want to see more of?

  If you have any feedback or just want to say, “hello”, feel free to leave it in the comments (posting is easy), or even email me.

  Also, subscribe to the site by following the links on the top-right of the page. You can automatically get new articles in your RSS reader or even your email.

  Hope to see you around!

I love hooded vests. They are one of the most versatile pieces of equipment I own, for a few reasons:

1. They keep you extra warm. This one’s obvious. Hooded vests make any wetsuit useful for another 10 degree drop in temperature, so factor that in when choosing a wetsuit. It’s also useful to warm you up at the end of a week of diving.
2. They are easy to pack. Taking all my gear isn’t always an option for trips where diving is not the sole purpose, but I’d like to get a dive in if possible. This means using a rented wetsuit. Shove your perfect-fitting hooded vest into your suitcase and it’ll partially make up for that awkward-fitting rental.
3. Forget the wetsuit completely. Don’t even bother with a wetsuit at all. In warmer climates you can get away with wearing a bathing suit and a hooded vest. Most heat loss comes from the head, with the next largest amount coming from the torso. A hooded vest keeps these two areas well insulated. You can laugh at everyone wrestling to put on their fullsuits.

Add one to your collection and start reaping the benefits. I’ve used the same one by itself in balmy Bonaire¹ and underneath a fullsuit in cold California.

1. I have one additional recommendation: If wearing it alone, wear a rashguard underneath it. My shoulders got severely burned during long surface swims.

I saw this episode while skimming through Netflix’s Watch Instantly selection. It’s from something called “Shark Week” on The Discovery Channel. I was intrigued by the title and decided to watch it.

It’s hosted by Survivorman, who I have never heard of.

In short, this show was lame, and a waste of 45 minutes. From the overdramatic introduction by the host to the bad B-movie soundtrack, there’s not much I could recommend about this program.

The show consists entirely of bad shark stereotypes. The introduction talks about reef sharks being killers and how dangerous it is to be in the water with them. That’s right, reef sharks.

The show is split into three segments: when do sharks feed, how to behave in the water, and how to deter sharks from biting you. Each is filled with loads of bad science. In fairness, he says his experiments are unscientific, but if that’s the case, what’s the point? He ends each segment by making broad claims based on his poorly-conducted experiments.

For the first segment he chums the water at night and during the day to determine the most dangerous time to enter the water. Suprise! Sharks will eat food anytime you feed it to them! He comments on how vicious the sharks are as they devour 500 pounds of frozen chum. Yes, because they eat humans with the same gusto that they consume dead fish parts.

For the second segment he tests whether you should kick or stay still when in the water with a shark, and whether it’s better to be in a group or on your own. To attract a shark’s attention, he chummed the water and put some kind of attractive scent on the test dummy. Anything that happened from this point is irrelevant.

Lastly, he tests out shark foam and an electronic device meant to deter sharks. This is probably the most interesting segment as he just tests the products, leaving little room for him to screw things up. I believe he claims that sharks don’t like having foam sprayed in their eyes, but I was dozing off so I can’t be sure.

I loathe this “survivorman” not just for his annoying voiceovers, but several reasons: he chums water heavily, he spread false shark stereotypes, and he does so under the banner of pseudo-scientific claims.

If you’re really bored, check it out. Otherwise, skip it. Go for a walk, play with your kids, do something else; I watched it so you don’t have to.

Today’s fish is very tropical in terms of appearance as well as location. I see these guys all over the place in the Caribbean.

Physical description

As their name suggests, french angelfish are members of the angelfish family, and so have the familiar large, roundish body that is also flat. They can grow in length up to 16 inches (about 40 centimeters).

Baby and adult french angelfish are different in appearance. Juveniles are black with nearly-vertical yellow stripes across their body, five or so.

As they grow, french angelfish lose their stripes. They retain an overall dark greyish body color, but with their body covered in yellow on the edges of their scales. Their eyes’ irises are also yellow. Their pectoral fins and the tip of their dorsal fins also have a bit of yellow-orange. French angelfish chins are usually a whitish color.

Geography and habitat

French angelfish are common in shallow reefs, typically above 130 ft / 40 m, across the western Atlantic. They can also be found in a few spots of the eastern Atlantic.

They live in the coral and are highly territorial, usually returning to the same coral each night.

French angelfish are monogamous and stay in pairs until separated by death. For this reason, they are often seen roaming the reef in pairs.

Further reading

Wikipedia
Marine Bio
Florida Museum of Natural History

In underwater photography, backscatter is light that reflects off particles in the water resulting in specks of light in the photo. Usually this light comes from an on-camera flash, although any bright light from the direction of the camera can do it. Particularly unclear water can exacerbate the problem.

There are mainly two ways of addressing the problem:

1. Don’t use a flash / strobe from too far away

   “Too far away” is dependent on the visibility of the water, with higher visibility tolerating flash from slightly farther distances. However, anything above 3 ft / 1 m will probably have backscatter.

2. Separate the camera and the strobe

   This can be problematic, since for most point-and-shoot cameras, an on-camera flash is your only option; only mid-range cameras and SLRs support separate strobes.

   
   To correctly light photos without causing backscatter, a strobe pointing at the subject from the right or left of the camera is a huge help. This way, the camera only sees the light that reflects off the subject, and not that which is reflected by particles (since the light is reflected away from the camera lens).

In this photo you can see backscatter caused by my flash going off in somewhat murky water (about 15 ft / 5 m visibility). This picture was taken at Los Coronados Islands near San Diego, California.

I’ve got two links to share today. The first is an underwater hotel in Key Largo, Florida. You can stay in an underwater habitat, with their lagoon diving at your fingertips.

Also, here’s a video of a scuba diver removing a plastic toy from around a nurse shark. I’m amazed he managed to get hold of the shark in the first place.

Have a great Wednesday!

We’ve all heard by now that only 3% of the earth’s oceans have been explored. What treasures lay undiscovered in the remaining 97%? For recreational divers, this trove of wrecks and artifacts will remain outside the boundaries of our skills and training, but for many, the lure of the deep is too much to resist. Deep Descent is the story of those who succumb to this temptation—whether for the promise of unmolested china or the glory of being in an elite group of divers. In particular, the focus is on one such prize: the Andrea Doria.

The SS Andrea Doria is an Italian ocean liner that sank in the North Atlantic in 1956 after colliding with the MS Stockholm. Her topmost point rests at 160 ft, with the bottom at well over 240 ft, making diving an impossibility for the limits of scuba at the time. However, it didn’t take long before a brave few were diving the wreck, often referred to as “The Mount Everest of scuba diving.”

Deep Descent recounts their tales, beginning with the first divers shortly after her sinking all the way up to the early 2000’s. These dives were not without their setbacks, however. The book’s pages are mostly filled with the stories of divers who met their fate diving the Doria. To date, 15 divers have died on the Doria, with the most recent occurring in 2008. Dives continue to the present day, although the increasingly delapidated condition of the wreck makes uncovering artifacts a thing of the past.

The history of the Doria is an interesting one. In retrospect, the stories are frustrating as we watch otherwise capable divers behaving stupidly in the face of 3rd class dinner sets. For many of the stories, divers are still using air, which requires penetrating a dangerous wreck under the heavy influence of nitrogen narcosis. Even with the development of trimix, fatalities have continued at a steady pace, implying there are hidden dangers beyond the depth of the wreck.

I’d recommend this book for anyone interested in technical diving. If for no other reason, it serves as a reminder to respect the ocean and the unknown. The most successful divers encountered in Deep Descent are those with the sense enough to know when not to dive. It is easy to become a bit foolhardy after a lot of training and some successful dives, but this book is a useful reminder to always exercise caution, even for a recreational diver like myself.

Unfortunately, Deep Descent has its faults. For one, it tends to overreach in places. The book’s title and cover tell us what the book is about, yet the author often wanders. For example, one boat, The Seeker, is a common charter out to the famed wreck. After the original owner passes away, the book takes us through a sidetrack about the status of the boat and its new owners. Interesting to some? Maybe, but some judicious editing would’ve made for a snappier read.

Another shortcoming is the lack of a central narrative through the book. We go from story to story, which are often told in a matter-of-fact, history book style that is sometimes cumbersome. The author tries hard to avoid making anyone out to be a villain. While I respect this stance, it makes it harder to get sucked in to any story.

The author, Kevin McMurray, is a tec diver who has dove the Andrea Doria several times. He is at his best when he switches to a first-person description of his dives. My favorite chapter is probably his description of diving the Doria for the first time.

For those interested in wreck diving, technical diving, or the Andrea Doria, Deep Descent is a recommended read. The casual recreational diver may not find the contents as interesting.

Few things ruin a dive as quickly as a poorly-sealed mask. I had this problem the other day, and it disrupted my dive by being distracting and making me run through my air supply by constantly clearing it.

I started playing around with something that I think helps a little. Next time your mask is leaking water, instead of clearing it as usual, exhale a little stream of bubbles out your nose. Sometimes this will keep a small leak cleared by forcing the water out of the mask.

This approach managed to keep my mask clear without costing my air supply. I have to exhale anyway, so I just exhaled at the same usual rate but out of my nose instead of my mouth.

This may not work with all bad seals, but I imagine if the problem is at the bottom of your mask you may find it helps. It’s certainly better than repeatedly stopping to clear your mask.