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Diving Officer's Report
Thank you very much to all of you who read
and responded to my October report. It was
good to know that so many of our members
actually do care enough to speak out. I
have had no reply from Sovereign and have
today requested acknowledgement of receipt
of the letter. I will return to this
subject later.
On Sunday, Nov 13th I went to
the Yorkshire region Divers’ Conference at
York.
There were about 50 divers there and the
speakers were excellent. First was Paul
Chapman from the Maritime & Coastguard
Agency. His talk about dive safety was
very interesting and informative. Then we
were treated to a very technical talk from
a man from the Hull Hyperbaric Centre –
sorry, can’t remember his name. His talk
about DCI, bone necrosis and some horrible
condition in which your hands virtually
freeze, was somewhat alarming. Could have
put a sensible person off diving, but
since when were divers sensible?
Jack Ingle gave one of his usual highly
entertaining talks on kit configuration.
Although he was pretty scathing about cave
diving, his desire to streamline kit and
use simple things like snoopy loops was
akin to all Martyn Farr’s teachings. It
was amazing how simple and
un-Christmas-tree-like he could make a
twin set, wings, reels, smbs, torches and
all his other bits and bobs.
Bob Healey who is the only English member
of BSAC council to come from North of
Watford Gap gave a talk on the new Neptune
System that is going to update BSAC’s way
of storing and accessing information for
the members. He also talked about helping
branches to keep in touch with HQ and
sharing resources and instructors etc.
Finally Simon Campbell talked about the
Yorkshire Region Expedition Scheme. He is
keen to set up expeditions making use of
people who want to prepare for First Class
Diver Awards as well as people who just go
for the hell of it. There is an expedition
planned to St Kilda for 2007. It will be
advertised in Dive mag. There was no time
allocated for asking questions but I
managed to catch Paul Chapman and ask him
about our Farnes trip. He had mentioned
the Sovereign incident in his talk. I told
him about our concerns and he was very
definite about what we should do. He wants
me to write to the Tyne Office of the MCA
and set out all our concerns. He said that
they are investigating the incident and it
is our duty to report concerns which are
related to it. If I do not get a
satisfactory reply from Sovereign this
week, I will write next weekend.
Thank you again for sending me your
thoughts. Please continue to do so as I
want to be the spokesman for the opinions
of our membership.
Kate Falkingham, Diving Officer.
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