Earthquake lifts Solomons island meters out of the sea 9 April, 2007
Posted by Dive Advisor in Coral Reefs, Scuba Diving, Solomon Islands.add a comment
Speaking of coral reefs (below), last week’s earthquake in the Solomon Islands (which also spawned a deadly tsunami) has had a catostrophic affect on the islands pristine coral reefs. Remember how the 2004 quake that spawn the Asian tsunami actually moved the indonesian islans 3 meters? Well it seems this quake also moved Solomon island of Ranongga the same distance, but this times UP. The full story is here, but here are some excerpts.
Submerged reefs that once attracted scuba divers from around the globe lie exposed and dying after the quake raised the mountainous landmass, which is 32-kilometer long and 8-kilometer wide.
Corals that used to form an underwater wonderland of iridescent blues, greens and reds now bleach under the sun, transforming into a barren moonscape surrounding the island.
The stench of rotting fish and other marine life stranded on the reefs when the seas receded is overwhelming and the once vibrant coral is dry and crunches underfoot.
As more evidence of how an earthquake can change the entire topography in the blink of an eye, Ranongga now has an underwater cave. running at least 500 meters parallel to the coast.
And on the beach at Niu Barae, the earthquake has revealed a sunken vessel that locals believe is a Japanese patrol boat, a remnant of the fierce fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese in WWII.
Danny Kennedy, a dive operator in the provincial capital Gizo, said the earthquake had damaged coral reefs throughout the Solomon Islands’ western province.
He said dive sites once ranked among the best in the world were dying because the tremors had upset the fragile natural ecosystem.
“Some of the most beautiful corals are the most delicate and those are the ones that have been affected,” he said. “The more robust corals are still there but it’s the ones that people want to photograph, the sea fans and the colorful corals, that are dying.”
Kennedy said the damage to the coral reefs could dry up the region’s major source of overseas money.
“Diving is huge here, it employs so many local people,” he said. “The fear is that people are going to come here and see the reefs are damaged then tell people not to come back for a few years until they recover.”
Two of Thailand’s Best Dive Sites Dying 8 April, 2007
Posted by Dive Advisor in Coral Reefs, Global Warming, Scuba Diving, Thailand.add a comment
If anyone still doubts the planet is suffering the ill effects of global warming, they ought to take a dive in the Andaman Sea off Southern Thailand. The Hin Daeng and Hin Muang regions have long been one two of the best dive sites in the region, but something is very wrong with the soft coral there. It’s all slowly dying.
Whether its a result of a massive tide of red algae that has plagued the region for weeks, higher overall water temperatures or this year’s sharp decrease in water temperatures for much of the season, no one really knows.
What is known is Koh Lanta dive shops have stopped bothering to go there and dive travel agents are advising travelers to give the two sites a pass.
“We can only speculate at this stage what has happened and why the coral is dying,” said a dive instructor who has been in the region for 16 years. “We are no scientists and we haven’t any real proof of what went wrong. ”
Some are speculating that Thais fishermen are illegally using dynamite or cyanide in the area. Others blame it on the red tide.
“Dynamite fishing will kill fish, break hard coral and damage some soft corals but not cause soft coral to slowly rot and die. Cyanide fishing will stun and kill some fish and will kill soft and hard coral where the poison made contact with the reef,” the instructor explained. “But the red tide we’ve been experiencing for quite a while now in the Andaman Sea does not seem to affect the reefs anywhere but has been associated with the dying of soft corals at Hin Daeng and Hin Muang.
The red tide, or bloom of red algae, is the result of strong sunshine and relatively calm sea conditions, coupled with high levels of phosphorus and nitrogen in the water, both the result of “human activities,” basically, us. The red tides also create thermoclines with much lower temperatures in the murky water. The entire region this year has already had marked decreases in water temperature.
Coral reef bleaching, the whitening of diverse invertebrate taxa, results from the loss of symbiotic zooxantheallae and/or a reduction in photosynthetic pigment concentrations in zooxanthellae residing within scleractinian corals.
It has been a growing problem in the area and is most often attributed to rapid or prolonged increases or decreases in temperature, athough it is also blamed on irradiance, sedimentation, xenobiotics, subaerial exposure, inorganic nutrients, freshwater dilution, and epizootics.
“Hin Muang is the worst hit site, with lots of dead marine life, especially morays,” said a Phuket-based instructor. “A team went out recently to Hin Daeng to asses the situation and it seems like Hin Daeng is struggling too.”
“Hin Muang is almost totally destroyed,” said one diver after a trip there a week ago. “Only shallow (not deeper then 15 m) corals left and almost no fish.”
“The reef seem to be devoid of small reef life like shrimps etc. from 30 meters to the surface,” Lanta Divers wrote in a recent online posting “Very variable visibility, from gin clear to a only a few meters. Every now and then red and white ‘clouds’ with bad visibility as a result.”
Hopefully when the red tide lifts, things will return to normal. But it’s hard to say how long it will take for the soft coral to grow back. As for the hard coral, once the bleaching has occurred, there’s no going back. Much, I think, could be said for the planet as a whole.
Dive Stupid and Die in a Wreck 5 April, 2007
Posted by Dive Advisor in Diving Accidents, Scuba Diving, Wreck Diving.add a comment
If you’ve been following the story about the three divers from New Jersey who perished inside the Spiegel Grove wreck off Key Largo, Fla. then you undoubtedly are asking yourself the same thing I’ve been wondering: How can these guys have been so stupid?
To recap, Kevin Coughlin, 51, of Chatham Borough and Jonathan Walsweer, 38, and Scott Stanley of Westfield died while penetrating the retired military vessel, which lies in about 135 feet of water. Two died inside the wreck and a third embollized during an undoubtedly swift ascent and died on the surface. A fourth diver survived. A full account from his hospital bed is here.
The divers were said to all be very experienced, with literally hundreds of dives each. Yet they went beyond recreational dive limits with only 1 12-liter tank each. At the bottom they had maybe 20 minutes of time.
So into this 510-foot vessel they go . . . without a line or reel. Dumb. I remember the first time I dove the USS New York in Subic Bay. The instructor I dove wtih said we were stictly limited to the first deck unless we were tech qualified and laid out a line. Otherwise it’s too easy to get lost.
And that ship is less than half the size of the Spiegel Grove.
The divers had no dive plan either. Just get in and explore. They ended up in the pump room and by this point had kicked up so much silt even their lights were of no use. They couldn’t see daylight and then realzied they were low on air.
“Imagine yourself being down there, 140 feet, 130 feet, and you don’t have no more air and you’re sucking on your regulator and there’s no air and you don’t find you way out. So it’s a very painful situation before you pass out,” a local dive captain was quoted here. “Sometimes it’s better to be a beginner because you are more careful.”
He’s actually right. Inexperienced wreck divers would lay lines and make a plan. Some even would bring extra air.
Discussing this the other day with a couple of experienced techie instructors, they said it just comes down to arrogance. You thinnk you’re experienced enough you don’t need lines and all the other stuff.
You do and these guys died proviing that point.
The Philippines’ Vanashing Shipwrecks 14 March, 2007
Posted by Dive Advisor in Philippines, Wreck Diving.add a comment
I’m off to the Philippines in about a month for more wreck diving. But the wrecks there are in danger. This item, out of the Manilla Bulletin, says it well. (The article has disappeared from their website, so it’s reprinted in full here.)
There are many reasons to go scuba diving. In the Philippines, with its thousands of kilometers of coastline, even if one dives everyday for the next 100 years, it will still be impossible to see everything that the oceans have to offer.
This is true even in smaller areas like the Davao Gulf, where aside from the abundance of underwater flora and fauna, there are also an incredible number of non-organic points of interests for scuba divers ranging from curiously designed artificial reefs to World War II era shipwrecks that are scattered all over the seabed.
It must be remembered that during the last war, the Davao region was used by both the Japanese and American armies as a major staging post for their military campaigns in Mindanao. As a result the sea lanes, bays and harbors of the region became the battleground for Japanese and American ships.
Many vessels were lost on both sides. On record there were several Japanese cargo ships sunk at the mouth of the gulf, particularly near Cape San Agustin (which was a favorite hunting ground for US submarines), also a couple of midget submarines, troop transports, gun boats and submarine tenders.
From the American side, there is the US Coast Guard-manned army ship, FS-255 which was sunk by a Japanese torpedo on the eve of May 10, 1945, 1000 yards from the port in Talomo Bay.
SAD REALITIES
While most of the shipwrecks lie in waters that are too deep to dive, there are a few that rest well within recreational dive limits and are located very close to the shore. Unfortunately their easy accessibility also leaves them open prey to salvage crews that strip the metal from these historic sites to sell for scrap or private owners that arbitrarily deny access to them to general diving public.
Of these two hazards, it is undoubtedly the destruction and theft of these shipwrecks that cause the most concern and must be a priority in the quest for preservation. But the fact is the community’s general lack of interest has allowed these activities to happen, not under the cover of darkness as grave robberies should, but under the safety provided by our apathy.
In the end, it seems that nobody really cares as to the ultimate fate of these relics more than how much a kilo of copper, brass or steel costs in the scrap yards. This sad reality has allowed this unabated large scale rape of our past to continue.
Using surface supplied compressed air, salvage divers would go down to the wrecks to saw, pry, twist or blast whole sections at a time. The detached parts are raised using drums rigged as buoys, loaded unto waiting trucks on the beach, driven to junk shops to be weighed, paid and shipped to steel mills here and abroad.
This cycle continues in several areas, but none more than in the wreck rich bays of Davao del Sur. In Malalag Bay, the once fully-laden remains of a Japanese cargo ship that was sunk from a direct hit on its pilothouse, has now been emptied of the hundreds of steel drums that used to fill its hold.
In another ship in Tubalan, the twisted remains of the bow – the result of a dynamite blast administered by overeager salvagers – is a testimony to the violence that continues to be done to these wrecks long after their service in the war has ended. In both, and in many more of our wrecks, the salvage work goes on and it is only a matter of time before all trace of the sunken vessels are gone. And while there are many reasons to go scuba diving in the Philippines, sadly, soon there may be less.
The Giant Stride 12 March, 2007
Posted by Dive Advisor in About Me, Scuba Diving - General.add a comment
Greetings! My name is Jack, but you can call me The Dive Advisor. I’m new to the world of blogging, but as I travel the world, teaching and enjoying scuba diving, I finally wanted a place to jot down my observations, stories and observations.
Being as it’s my blog, I don’t feel the need to state my qualifications for being a “Dive Advisor.” We swimming in the Blogosphere, as they say, and everyone with an opinion is free to state it. Whether you choose to put any credence into what I write is up to you. I am a PADI instructor who has traveled and taught in both dive center and freelance situations, for a number of years. I am American so, of course, I’m an opinionated bastard. But make no mistake, I’m not one of George II’s flunkies. In fact, I live overseas now and have vowed not to return until he Bush Dynasty has gone the way of the Qin Dynasty… That is to say Dead and Buried.
And while this is my first “blog,” I’m hardly new to the Internet. I remember sitting in a guest house in Japan in 1995 firing up Compuserve on a 28.8 modem line and trying to figure out what all the fuss about this World Wide Web thing was all about. I’m an avid reader, so when I find things that peak my interest, I’ll post them here.
As I write this, I’m also sure no one will read anything i have to say for days, weeks, hell, maybe even months. So I’m not going to break my fingers typing too much now. I’ll wait for Google to get this indexed before going nuts!
My hope is to provide what sound advice about dive travel, traving and industry practices as I can, but also to spark commentary and debate. If that happens, then this site will be of value to someone I hope.
Anyway, that’s it for now. Let me figure out what my first “real” post should be about and get it up in a couple days.
The Dive Advisor 