BEACHCOMBER
They call it the race to the bottom.
Well, the headline writers did when
they were trying to think up
something to say about the new
Omega Seamaster Ultra Deep
Professional wristwatch.
Setting out to beat the previous
record for depth, held by a Rolex at
a mere 10,916m, the new Omega
has extended the depth at which
you can check to see what time it is
to 10,928m by strapping three of its
models to the outside of a
submersible that went to the
bottom of the Mariana Trench in
May 2019.
Omega was quietly confident
pre-dive. It had already tested the
Ultra Deep to 15,000m in the lab.
The watch uses various means to
achieve such phenomenal depths,
including a conical design for the
Liquidmetal bonded sapphire
crystal glass over the face and a
titanium shell, but the watch
movement inside is the same as
that found in any Omega watch.
Brilliant, huh? Except, well, who
needs a watch strapped to the
outside of a submarine? I mean,
what’s the point? It’s not like you’re
going to open the door to pop out
and see what time it is.
And the watch is 52mm in
diameter and 28mm thick, so you
have no chance of actually wearing
one, even if Omega was going to
make them to sell. Which it isn’t.Planning the dive
Seals are my favourite marine
mammal. They’re much more fun to
interact with than the more widely
regarded dolphin, for example, and
now it turns out that they’re into
pre-dive planning, it’s time we divers
promoted them to iconic status.
A team led by Dr Chris McKnight of
the University of St Andrews has
discovered that seals not only
constrict their peripheral blood
vessels to reduce O 2 consumptionand stay under water longer, but they
make the change about 15 seconds
before they dive. Fantastic!
I do wonder, however, if seals, like
divers, occasionally forget things.
I have this mental image of a seal
at 10m suddenly remembering to
constrict its peripheral blood vessels,
and looking around at the other seals
to see if any of them noticed.In, hold it – and out
Holding your breath underwater is a Bad
Idea, which is one of the very first things us
divers are taught. Never, ever hold your
breath. Except for freedivers, obviously.
Anyway, it now turns out that fish have
been taking the mickey all along and the
little beggars can and do actually hold
their breath. Well coffinfish, anyway,
according to NOAA researchers who noticed
that Chaunax endeavourican hold their
breath for up to four minutes, according toa paper in the Journal of Fish Biology.
But, and I note this with sorrow, the
researchers make no mention of trying to
tell the fish how dangerous that can be,
and just left them to get on with it.Ascent offence
You know you use hand signals under
water? Of course you do. And you
know the one you use to signal to
your buddy that you intend to ascend
to the surface? Thumb upward, right?
Right. Well, in Iraq that’s apparently
the foulest of insults, as an otherwise
unrelated item on the Internet
informed me. Which prompts the
obvious question, just how do Iraqi
divers signal that they’re intending to
surface?He’s back
How would you like to be cheered up?
Arnold Schwarzenegger is providing the
narration for a new documentary called
Wonders of the Sea, which he accuratelydescribes as a visual feast and goes on to
say we need to look after the oceans!
Hearing him say “scuba tank”is worth the
price of admission all alone.
Hah! We might have Attenborough, but
now the oceans have the Terminator.Call me fussy
It had to happen. The Ulefone Armour
6E smartphone is sufficiently
waterproof to shoot pictures and
video under water without a housing.
Brilliant. If only the designers had
thought to do something about the
colour balance of the images...Da da da da da...
Did you read about the record-breaking
group of clean-up divers that recovered
54kg of lead fishing weights plus another
couple of thousand pounds of assorted
debris, also largely fishing gear-related,
from the waters off Florida?
Guinness World Records confirmed that
in terms of participants it’s the biggest
clean-up dive ever mounted. But what
caught my eye was the number of divers
officially involved, and one particular
headline, “633 Scuba Divers”.divErNEt.com 17 divEr
Don’t you just love a good
conspiracy theory? You’ve heard
about WW2? And read about how
primitive diving equipment was
then, and how little was
understood about diving
physiology? And you know thatWW1 ended 21 years before WW
started, so diving was even less
well-understood and developed?
Well, some bright spark tells us
that the Baltic Sea Anomaly,
identified by proper researchers
as a lump of rock left behind after
the last Ice Age, but also claimed
by the UFO fraternity as one of a
fleet of sunken UFOs in the Baltic,
is actually – pause for significant
drum roll – a concrete bunker
used during one of the wars!
The reasoning describing why
the lump might be a bunker is
clear, lucid and entirely believable,
right up to the point when you
remember that it’s 60m deep and
there are very few people who
could reach it today, never mind
80 years ago.BEACHCOMBER
DEPTHS
OF TIME
Baltic Sea Anomaly – sorted!
MARIO PENAI haven’t been able to get the theme
tune from the movie 633 Squadronout of
my head ever since...