Mark_J:
I think that most divers could have the love of marine life you mention but I think they need to be taught it. I see divers sitting in spawning nests taking pictures of each other while the fish scamper frantically around them trying to preserve their young, I see hand and even face prints in the caves and I see coral kicked to pieces (I even have video of whole groups doing it.
Our own local dive sites two hours after opening on a weekend are so silted out that they aren't worth messing with until wednesday. It's a good thing it isn't coral.
Now, I don't have any more or less right to the underwater environment than those who came before me or those who have and will come after. I do think we have some responsibility and I don't think the agencies or even that manufacturers are doing their part in meeting that responsibility. They are milking it. They are not saving it! The dive industry is not about conservation. it's about profit!
If we're going to do it lets do it well.
99% of what the dive equipment manufacturers sell is pretty colored useless junk designed to appeal to the fashionable divers sense of color coordination or gadgetry as far as I'm concerned. It's probably 1/3 of the reason that divers have so much trouble in the water. I don't care what they charge for it. They should throw most of it away.
You want to hear about manufacturers? You want to hear about them walking into my shop to show me their new junk. I tell them that people are losing the weight pockets because the velcro lets lose and that each of the 400 d-rings are in the wrong place and we don't have the three useable ones that we need and the sales rep who is probably about AOW tells me who owns a dive shop, teaches diving and is a manufacturing engineer during that day that I'm wrong about the velcro and the d-rings and if I don't sell more of that dangerous junk to my students that they will cut me off from my supply of masks and fins!!! They did, BTW. 6 months later they come in with plastic snaps on the weight pockets telling me that they solved the velcro problem after threatening me and telling me over and over that there was no problem. I just about made a career of throwing those non-diving insulting idiots out of my shop.
Sorry about the manufacturer rant but they are not our friends.
I can't even risk the hundred bucks it takes to get my family diving at the local quarry on a weekend because of the mess and you think I'm going to risk my really hard earned vacation time and money on a trip? Where do you think that video I mentioned above came from? These trips, IMO, as it stands now, are part of the problem and a driving force.
Oh, I go on trips but I try to avoid the mess that the agencies and the manufacturers have put together.[/QUOTE]
4) More LDS's competing for your business.[/QUOTE]See What I said about the manufacturers above. The shops are slaves to the manufacturers and the agencies. How rare it would be to find a shop that had anything that I'd ever be interested in at any price.
