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Ive been diving in Scotland all year round for the last few years in a pinnacle polar, ive dived off boats and the shore in sun and snow and never had any problems. Lots of my friends dive in 7mm semi-drys of various makes as well.

1. Very cold water 2. Nope 3. Just swam up to the surface, always made sure I had enough air on me to make it, be it leaving a bigger safety margin in the main tank or having some air in a separate system. 4. Training and carrying sufficient air that a free-flow at the worst point in the dive...

I get alternobaric vertigo a fair bit during ascents during the last 5 meters or so, usually i will feel a slight pressure on one ear but not the other and everything will start spinning, generally if I just stop for a few seconds I feel the pressure go away and everything rights its self :D

I find putting an arm through the inside of the hose loop so the hose sits under my arm works well to hold the mouthpiece lower than the level of the 2nd stage when on the surface. (Id get one of those nice plugs but my mouthpiece is the wrong shape!) With practice I can stow it like this and...

So I was out diving with my suunto D6 and the temperature was reading 87 degrees Celsius (This in about 10c water with air temps around 15c) and as I went deeper I was getting an increasing error in the depth reading (depth reading 2 meters too deep at 14m). Today ive given it a soak in warm...

Watching people go over the side of the Rhib into the freezing cold sea with their drysuit zip open is always a laugh.

Another experiment you can try to demonstrate these principles is to run your car for an hour and see how hot it is. Then take a hammer to the waterpump and run it for an hour and see how hot it is. Finally rip off one of the hoses so all the water comes out and run it for an hour then see how...

I blame that on narcosis caused by breathing nitrogen at 0.8 bar :D Just remembered another story about nitrogen narcosis, though im not sure if it will count and I have never been able to verify if its true or not (I suspect its something of a tall tale), but supposedly in the early 60's a...

Given my understanding of physics and my experiences of how loudly I scream when I hit the freezing cold water around here: Assuming the same thickness of neoprene, I would be warmest in a wetsuit with no water in it i.e. a drysuit since the air conducts the heat away from my body much slower...

One of my regular buddies lost one of his friends in a motorcycle accident. The day after his friends funeral he went out diving on a wreck sitting at about 30m. As he saw the wreck emerging out of the gloom, he looked over and saw the friend he had buried the day before standing on the deck of...

I had a couple of hundred dives swimming around with my snorkel attached to my mask and felt a bit silly. Then I rather unexpectedly had to do a rescue on my buddy and spent 45 minutes towing them along the surface into land against a current and choppy seas. After sucking my tank dry I was...

Ive tried deploying a DSMB from the shallows a couple of times but never actually dived with one. Generally I dive in areas without much boat traffic so don't have to worry about that. If I dive off a boat its nearly always with a dive club from a Rhib so they put up an A flag and keep any boats...

On a dive late last year, it took a while for my buddies to realise there was something slightly off about my equipment.....

I remember being taught to do the sweeping the arm back technique but after a few failed attempts at doing it I just reached my hand over my shoulder and grabbed the hose where it connected the the 1st stage and got it that way, that's the technique I still use. I eventually managed to get the...

I started diving in a dry-suit and dived dry for a few years before switching to a wetsuit. Sea temperatures around here vary from 12c to 0c so i get a bit chilly at times but i put up with it for the increased manoeuvrability and allot less weight (Went from needing 28lbs to only needing 8...

I carry a 7 inch hammerhead knife hanging down from my shoulder so can swim through line and such without it catching. There's a few dive sites where i'm guaranteed to have to chop my way through line but mostly it gets used as a shovel, hammer, anchor, probe, reef-hook e.t.c. Must admit if i...

Im up in Scotland and we have been having a few free-flows as well recently, ive found this is about the coldest time of year to be in the water with all the snow beginning to melt and run off into the sea :D

Im afraid not, it was on an area where an entire loch drains through a very narrow opening. We dive it on a rising tide so that we are being pushed inwards instead of being pulled out to sea :) The section we ended up on was a gravel bottom with nothing to cling onto so we just had to fin...

Ive been there a few times :D I remember once snorkelling down a small rapid in a river and losing my fin. The water was a few meters deep and I had an old horse-collar on so I ended up diving down and breathing off the wee suicide bottle swimming a search pattern in the river on one fin while...

"Do you think we can get another few years down here on this mortal plain if we if we stop 3 meters from the pearly gates for 5 minutes during the ascent towards heaven?"