London International Dive Show

Today’s blog is mainly for divers. I caught the 7:13am train from Arundel yesterday to visit the London International Dive Show at the ExCel exhibition centre in London's docklands. My main interest was the presentations.

Mark Powell kicked off with “Myths about Decompression”, a subject he has written about (he runs a company teaching technical diving). He is a brilliant teacher, putting across difficult concepts (M-values for instance) in a way that I could understand.

I learnt about one excellent bit of research which I would pass on to Open Water students if I was still teaching scuba classes:

The safest dive is one that ends with two safety stops: 6 meters for one minute followed by 3 meters for 4 minutes. This results is zero micro bubbles (no nitrogen coming out) after a surface interval of 45 minutes. Compare that to a dive ending in one safety stop at 3 meters for 2 minutes when after a 2 hour surface interval you still have excess nitrogen in your system. In future I will be stopping for 1 at 6M and 4 at 3M.

Mark has written a well reviewed book on the subject:

Paul Rose then told us about his planned next BBC 2 series about UK waters in which he plans to excite us about the waters that surround us. This starts filming next month and should be on screen from the Autumn.

Monty Halls of the Great Ocean Adventures TV series gave us an account of his new programme set in the Outer Hebrides with his dog Reuben. I bought his book and read much of it in on the train home, very enjoyable:



Finally Teresa Telus and Leigh Bishop gave us Deeper under Truk. They have been travelling to Truk yearly to photograph the deeper, less dived wreck of Truk Lagoon, which is the top rated destination for divers worldwide. They use rebreathers so can spend an hour at depths at which us mortals can manage only a few minutes. Great photos and stories. I advised them that I would like to join them in June 2011 which will be their last Truk expedition. They take open circuit scuba divers who will dive the shallower wrecks using nitrox

I wasn’t interested in buying equipment, but had a comment from one diver I sat next to on the bus: “I won’t attend any more shows, I have been to the past five and this year you can get better deals from websites than from retailers at the show”. Having said that I was at the Canon stand and one diver was signing up for a deal that he said was better than from the website. I looked for one item only and couldn’t find it (a giant emergency sausage that can be inflated from your low pressure hose).

I enjoyed looking at artist Nick Oneill’s stand. If we had wall space I would have been tempted by his Leafy Sea Dragon.