I write this missive from the rather-splendid Tebay Hotel. We like our service stations, us divers, as we crisscross the nation celebrating classic old sites and seeking exciting new ones. For us as a family, any journey to Scotland -a decent stint from South Devon -involves a stop here, an island of bucolic calm in the green swells of the Cumbrian hills.
I mention this partly as a top tip (you’re welcome), but also as a decent metaphor for the column this month. Call it what you will – progress, technology, culture, evolution – but our lives as divers are almost unrecognisable from what they were a mere 40 or 50 years ago. In fact, our lives generally are utterly transformed from the 1960s and 1970s, but that’s another conversation entirely. Diving is, in short, benefitting from dazzling developments in technology.
This was bought home to me as I researched underwater metal detectors for the current project (and the reason I’m in Tebay actually). Myself and a small team are heading resolutely north to survey the shallow seas where the original commandos learned the art of amphibious landings. I’ve named the project Celtic Dagger – rather histrionic, but has a ring to it – and you’ll read all about it in this very publication next month.
The basic concept is to step into the shallows off the beach and conduct a series of lateral sweeps of the seabed where the men of the commandos (and indeed the women of the Special Operations Executive) leapt, staggered, stumbled, and sprinted ashore. Surely they dropped stuff, hands numb with cold, made clumsy by darkness and haste. Indeed David Niven – one of the very first commandos -wrote of being ‘fumble fingered with fear’ on D-Day. There’s history beneath the sand.
I was braced for a hefty bill for the underwater metal detectors. Surely, such a specialised piece of kit would cost a couple of grand, maybe more? But as I researched options (using my laptop, and the internet – technology that would have got me burned at the stake in this very location a few hundred years ago) I found that there’s a simple, user-friendly, hand-held version of an underwater metal detector available for just under 200 quid. And so we head to the site with a couple of them in the boot of the car, which will guide us to the exact spot using satellites overhead. There we’ll plan our search using GPS – more satellites – and monitor our gas levels and dive status using wrist-mounted super computers, which will communicate with our cylinders. We’ll take images digitally, then research what we find on our laptops, which have more processing capabilities than an Apollo spacecraft.
In other words, technology has crept into our diving lives and now dictates a great deal of what we do underwater. But, and here’s the rub, has it made us better divers?
“Technological progress has merely provided us with a more-efficient way to go backwards” said Aldous Huxley, and he had a point. Back in the day looking after yourself and your buddy underwater meant constantly monitoring your air, using your compass, writing down your dive duration and depth, calculating your DCS exposure, and a profound, deep relationship with your kit. Have we lost that relationship a tad, now that something else keeps an eye on it all? Have our basic, essential skills degraded in diving the same way they have with so much else in life as Alexa and her pals take care of it all?
I’ll finish with a thought provoking aside if I may. All of the above – computers, GPS, Bluetooth, satellites, etc, etc – would be witchcraft to a diver 50 years ago. But the regulator remains pretty much identical to the simple gas valve modified by Cousteau and his pal Emile Gagnan in 1943. If it ain’t broke, why fix it.
Onwards into the shallows, where mind-blowing new tech will reveal a classic old story.
