Issue # 29: Life Changing
DIVE’s Winter 2023 magazine is out now, and this winter we take a look at how the underwater world can bring us completely life-changing experiences. Order your copy now or subscribe for a year from just £9.99
*£9.99 for a digital-only subscription, including all content plus 80+ digital back issues. £22.99 for all digital content plus 4 x art-quality quarterly print magazines for £22.99. Available worldwide (international shipping extra).
In 2016, experienced instructor, Nigel Craig, was teaching a deep speciality course at Stoney Cove in the UK when, tragically, his student became unresponsive during the safety stop and later died. Four years later, Craig was informed he would be prosecuted for Gross Negligence Manslaughter, and for the next two years was put through a hell from which he has yet to recover. Mark ‘Crowley’ Russell explores why he should never have been put on trial, and why – had the scuba diving world been quicker to understand the dangers of Immersion Pulmonary Oedema – perhaps none of this needed to happen.
Like many reefs around the world where development has overtaken the local environment’s ability to self-sustain, the coral around the tiny Caribbean island of Mustique took a battering. In 2015, however, Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams brought coral restoration experts to the island to start a reef regeneration programme. Douglas David Seifert took to the water to explore how life on Mustique’s reefs has started to return, bringing the underwater world to life with more of his stunning photography.
It is the single largest mass migration of life on the planet, and yet almost nobody ever sees it happening. Every day, billions of tiny creatures swim to the surface of the ocean to feed, and then head back down to the depths before the break of dawn, bringing with them a host of predators during the process. In an extract from Planktonia, The Nightly Migration of the World’s Smallest Creatures, Erich Hoyt brings the marvel of this migration to life, with some beautiful blackwater macro photography.
When a teenage Todd Thimios watched a killer whale documentary, it began a lifelong appreciation for the majestic orca. When he was sent to film them by a wealthy, super-yacht-owning employer, his life changed. In the following years, his appreciation grew almost into an obsession with catching the ocean’s apex predator at home in the Arctic waters of Northern Norway. Todd has shared his experience with DIVE, together with some of the most outstanding orca images that have ever been taken.
Reviews of some of the most recent dive-related books you need to add to your collection | The best of our Featured Photographers this winter | Marine Curio 29 – the shame-faced crab | plus an interview with the women behind up-and-coming luxury dive tour operator, Reefscape Travel.
