SCUBA News 19
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011) Issue 19 - November 2001 www.scubatravel.co.uk ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Welcome to the 19th issue of SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011). This month: - What's new at SCUBA Travel? - Your letters - Presents for Divers - SCUBA News Bookshelf: Interview with Tim Ecott - Diving news from around the world If you have any diving news, or comments on this newsletter, we'd love to hear from you. Just fill in our Contact the Editor form. __________________________________________________________ What's New at the SCUBA Travel Web Site? ======================================== Grand Bahama Island and Elsewhere More destinations are now in our "Elsewhere" section, including Grand Bahama Island. __________________________________________________________ Your Letters ============ Dear Editor, Newsletter is ok! Can you include more news items, and what about printing the occasional excerpts from the experiences of a few diver-archaeologists or adventurers? Regards, John Mount -- Editor's note: If you are an underwater archaeologist or "adventurer" we'd be very pleased to print your experiences. Plus, would you like to see more news items? E-mail me at news@scubatravel.co.uk __________________________________________________________ Presents for Divers =================== With Christmas approaching many of you will be shopping for gifts for your diving friends. If so here are some suggestions. The Blue Planet DVD The Blue Planet DVD is released on the third of December. From the BBC, this spectacular series covers life in the oceans and seas around the world. To order your copy at a discount go to http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/blueplanet.html Also available are the video and book of the series. Or how about a years subscription to a diving magazine? You can currently save up to 75% on the cover price of some diving magazines. Choose from Diver, Sport Diver and SCUBA World shipped from the UK to anywhere in the world, or Skin Diver and Rodale's Scuba Diving shipped from the US. For more details of these see Books and videos are always popular and we've selected some of the best for divers at http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/presents2.html __________________________________________________________ Interview with Tim Ecott Author of Neutral Buoyancy - Adventures in a Liquid World ========================================================= Neutral Buoyancy relates tales of the characters and episodes in the history of diving - sponge divers, the second world war saboteurs, the free divers...all intermingled with the author's own underwater experiences. We asked the author, Tim Ecott, about his writing and diving. What prompted you to write the Neutral Buoyancy? I was living in Seychelles - helping the local radio station train its reporters and producers for two years - and about to return to London to rejoin the BBC when I realised that I'd rather write for myself full-time. My wife supported the idea and encouraged me to resign from my job and write even though I wasn't sure what I wanted to write about. You use quotes from various authors, scientists and divers: which writers influenced you when writing the book? That's hard to say, everything you read has an impact. I've always read a lot of non-fiction and it was a pleasure to sit in the British Library and trawl through any reference to diving I could find. I suppose I was encouraged to find that most of those who'd written about diving before had been concentrating on the factual or historical side of the sport rather than the pure joy of being underwater. Having said that William Beebe and Hans Hass did convey a certain amount of wonderment. Which of the stories did you most enjoy writing? I enjoyed all of the descriptive travelogue sections of Neutral Buoyancy, but it was an honour to meet WWII veteran Dickie Greenland, Hans and Lotte Hass and Dottie Frazier - the USA's first female diving instructor. And best of all they have all said they liked what I wrote about them. I wanted to capture their spirit as much as anything, and they are all very different sorts of people. Which is your favourite dive? Of those in Neutral Buoyancy probably any of the ones in Papua New Guinea, but the climax of the book is a particular dive in Seychelles. Where would you like to dive next? Manado or the Lembeh Straits I suppose, but anywhere in the Pacific would be fine. Tim Ecott's Thoughts About the Book I hope anyone who reads Neutral Buoyancy will enjoy it, and perhaps discover something about diving they didn't know or hadn't come across before. So far, people have reacted very positively to it, and although it is a book you can dip into there is a subtle thread connecting everything together. I suppose I hope people will respond to that and empathise with how I feel about the sea, coral, fish, sea-cucumbers, dolphins, sharks etc etc. You don't have to be a diver to read it, and I just hope it inspires more people to consider taking up diving and acting as advocates for the preservation of our marine environment. Amazon.co.uk are currently offering 20% off Neutral Buoyancy http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140287302/1286 The book is also available from Amazon.com For the interview, and interviews with other diving authors, visit http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/interview.html ::ADVERT__________________________________________________ : : For the inside information on Amazon, join the Amazon : Associates Mailing List. Lively comment on Amazon, : search engines and web site positioning. Visit : http://www.guardian.co.uk/ Deep Sea Bacteria to Produce Super Sunscreen Bacteria from deep-sea vents soon be protecting your skin whilst you relax after dives. A French cosmetics company hopes to use a bacterium gathered from two kilometres down on the bottom of the Pacific's Gulf of California. The product created using the bacteria is hoped to be better than existing methods of protecting the skin from ultraviolet rays. Overture. Their search results reach 75% of all : Internet users and you only pay when someone clicks your : search listing. Earn a special $10 bonus credit when you : become a new Overture advertiser with this link : http://www.overture.com/ ___________________________________________________ADVERT:: Get fit for Diving without Leaving your Armchair Researchers have found that just thinking about exercise increased the strength of a group of volunteers' muscles. So, put on your favourite underwater video on, sit back and think about more powerful fin strokes. http://news.bbc.co.uk Caribbean Coral Reefs Suffer because of lack of Urchins In 1983, in the coral reefs of the Caribbean, populations of the abundant sea urchin, Diadema antillarum, plummeted to less than 3% of their former level. Despite limited recovery in some areas, Diadema numbers have remained low. As the most important herbivore in the system, this has led to increased algal growth at the expense of coral. People have argued that Diadema owed its former abundance to human activities, but scientists have now found that the species has had large population sizes for at least the past 100 millennia. The lack of urchins could be a serious threat to the health of the coral and has important implications for the management of degraded reefs in the Caribbean. Proc. R. Soc. London Ser. B 268, 2347 (2001). ::ADVERT__________________________________________________ : : Log data from GPS and sonar to your spreadsheet, : database or mapping program with the free Windmill : software. For diving, marine archaeology, salvage, coral : reef monitoring and deep-sea research. For your copy see : http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/training/technology.html : ________________________________________________ADVERT:: __________________________________________________________ * Copyright SCUBA Travel Ltd - http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/ * Reprinting welcomed with this footer included. We are happy for you to copy and distribute this newsletter, and even use parts of it on your own website, providing the above copyright notice is included, and a link back to our website is in place. Previous editions of SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011) are archived at http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/news.html SUBSCRIBING AND UNSUBSCRIBING Visit http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/news.html and add or remove your e-mail address. CONTACTING THE EDITOR Please use the Contact the Editor form to send us letters or press releases or write to: The Editor SCUBA News The Cliff Upper Mayfield DE6 2HR UK ADVERTISING Should you wish to advertise in SCUBA News (ISSN 1476-8011), please fill in the form at http://www.scubatravel.co.uk/newsad.html PUBLISHER SCUBA Travel Ltd, 5 Loxford Court, Hulme, Manchester, M15 6AF, UK
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