E
VER SAT WATCHINGthe palm trees bend and
the sky darken through a rain-spattered
window for the third day in a row, running
up the bar bill in your expensive resort as another
precious day’s diving is blown away?
Has it crossed your mind that you could have saved
yourself a boatload of heartache by taking up some
less precarious pastime such as, I don’t know, crafting
model buses out of old wine-boxes?
It happens to all of us. Not all dive-trips go to plan,
as you likely discovered early in your diving career.
The vagaries of travel, from missed connections to
breakdowns, combined with unpredictable weather
and sea conditions, the deplorable unreliability of
marine wildlife and boat-engines, not to mention
human weakness from hangovers to ear infections – it
amounts to an ice-rink covered in banana skins. It’s
amazing that we get so many successful dives in!
Most trips reported in divErare broadly successful,
and we enthuse about them. That’s not because we
quietly file away the disasters. It’s because holiday-
providers who invite us to check out their resorts,
liveaboards and dive-centres tend to be confident of their ability to
deliver the goods. They know the pitfalls and how to avoid them.
Hosts who can’t show us a good time under water tend not to invite us
in the first place. And you get a feel for whether they extend this can-do
level of service to all their paying customers.
BUT A CONSTANT DIETof sunshine, smiles and OK signals in these
pages could become cloying, so when trips don’t work out so well, we
reckon you’ll want to hear about them too.
Will Appleyard and Ana Rancaño enjoy exploring new places to dive
under their own steam, on campervan road trips. The couple’s most
recent, to Croatia, proved quite a test of their patience. We know that
the winds can play a critical part in the Adriatic diving scene, and one
way and another they didn’t blow kindly.
Another trip in this issue was marred not by Nature but by people. Joss
Woolf was living the dream in Indonesia – until an underwater photo
competition got under way. When participants are determined to win
at any cost, it’s no recipe for relaxation on the reef.
Another reporter then returned from a US dive-trip that had proved
less than unalloyed joy, but I decided you could take only so much
frustration for one month (it will however be in a future issue)!
It’s a matter of light and shade, and we bring you big-grin trips in this
issue too – notably from Brandi Mueller and Cath Bates in Pacific
powerhouses Vanuatu and Socorro, while Alex Mustard encounters no
obstacles to diving pleasure in under-rated Cuba.
And if you want a tale of triumph over adversity set entirely in the UK,
it’s the completion of a task that diver Jack Perks set himself, to film
examples of all our freshwater fish species. He has spent six years
travelling thousands of miles in all weathers, becoming
ill from river water, dislocating his shoulder and losing
a fingertip while fixing a camera with a pen-knife.
“I’d often have anxiety attacks at night before the
challenge, but now I sleep like a baby,” he says. That’s
diving – where’s the fun when it’s all plain sailing?
STEVE
WEINMAN,
EDITORFIRST
IN
Rough with
the smooth
3 divEr