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I always check a regulator before a dive by sucking on its second-stage when it's on a tank and the tank is NOT turned on. It should lock solid and not allow you to get any air. If it does, you've got a leak. (Proviso: If you have an Atomic alternate second stage, because of its design, it will...

Since Force Majeure was invoked by Nautilus to avoid paying booked passengers for canceled trips to Guadalupe, I bet a lot of boat operators will use this in future to avoid refunds.

Hi Tsuyoshi (Jason), Undercurrent would like to hear from you first-hand. Please email me john@undercurrent.org. See if you can get anybody else stuck on board to do the same.

Be cautious of hard and fast statements. A person who is 6'5" and a lifetime non-smoker will have a much greater vital capacity than a 4'8" man who has smoked 40 untipped cigarettes nearly every day of his life.

Hi Iain, a lot of Americans do not understand our sophisticated humour (humor)!

The human body is incompressible. It displaces the same amount of water at any depth. The ABLJ (and BC) was introduced to counteract the changing buoyancy of the wetsuit as it gets compressed at depth, and the mass of air in the tank depletes as it gets used. What a shame so few divers are...

If you raise your corrugated hose and open the manual inflation valve to dump air, as often taught by instructors, water will ingress in the other direction. This happens less with the pull-cord dump valve if you have one. Contrary to popular myth, this does not dump ALL the air from your BC. If...

Looks like an expensive solution to a problem few proficient divers have.

In the final analysis, understanding what causes a downcurrent (or waterfall) will enable you to get free of it.

Raja Ampat, or the "Four Kingdoms," is a group of Indonesian islands off West Papua's Bird's Head Peninsula. It became a hot diving spot in the '90s after Australian ichthyologist Gerry Allen and underwater photographers Denise and Larry Tackett revealed it had the world's richest reefs. More...

Down currents are localized and caused by topography. They do not continue to go down forever. If you always have a reserve of air in your tank and stay calm, you're going to come up again or you might swim horizontally out of it. Down currents are common where you get big tidal flow squeezing...

What I wrote in Undercurrent's mid-month email : Is it Safe to Travel to the Red Sea Nowadays? October 25, 2023 To a North American looking at a map, the Red Sea seems very close to Israel, but in fact, the Red Sea coast of Egypt is a long way from the conflict. From Gaza, it's 250 miles to...

https://www.sail-world.com/Australia/Second-yacht-taken-by-pirates-near-Seychelles/-55414?source=google

The cold wind after long dives.

MY. Indian Ocean Explorer - was hijacked by Somali pirates near Aldabra and never recovered. No passengers on board.

I remember my first trip to the Red Sea one January (1983) - lying in my bunk trying to get warm between dives - and I was using a 7mm semidry! Drysuit in winter from then on for me.

FYI : MY. Hurricane had a steel hull. MY. Royal Emperor had a steel hull. They both burned spectacularly.

I suppose I should have written: "The customer base is to blame, for demanding low prices (in exchange for poor safety standards)."

I worked on a British-owned liveaboard in 1992. Our day rate for pax was $150. When the Egyptians came into the market, they used a day rate of $60. Guess the difference! The foreign operators could not compete and left the Red Sea. Every liveaboard tends to work to the prevailing pax/day rate...

Some typical Undercurrent articles dealing with safety aboard: https://www.undercurrent.org/UCnow/dive_magazine/2020/LiveaboardSafetyPrecautions202002.html https://www.undercurrent.org/members/UCnow/dive_magazine/2023/LiveaboardSafety202305.html