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The original proposal for the attempted body recovery that Dave Shaw undertook was to have commercial divers perform the operation. With surface supplied air and such, it would likely have been a much less risky endeavour. If I recall correctly, it wasn't allowed since the site prevented a bell...

Data sets with the sort of detail we'd like just don't exist. The best we can ever do is some educated guesswork based on anecdotes, personal experience and the limited data we do have.

Sorry you've not had a response. I can't think of any local members who might be able to help you. Few of us have been cage diving with the White Sharks, so can't give any advice. Good luck and please let us know if you do find an answer, so perhaps we can help the next guy out.

If I lived in Durban, I'd probably be on Aliwal Shoal pretty much every weekend. The dives I did there were great. And it wasn't a much further drive from Durban than us Capetonians usually do for a dive.

It definitely feels like we've had a bad year here in South Africa. But we have, what, around an average of 4 deaths here each year? So even two more than 'usual' would be a 50% increase.

It's hard to say. I don't think anyone collects worldwide stats, so it's not really possible to get the numbers. There is generally a lot of variance year on year, since the number of fatalities is always low (considering the number of dives done). Broader reporting (and more users picking up...

Hi Chris! Um, off the top of my head, I think you're first member from Durban. The rest of us seem fairly evenly split between cold-water Cape Town and landlocked Jo'burg. Strange, no, when Durban is probably the closest to SA's best diving?

I saw several sources saying they'd not lost a competitive home game since 1975 (against Peru in the Copa America). It was an astonishing result. I couldn't watch it past the third goal, though -- I just felt too bad for the home fans (and there was no contest past that that point anyway). It's...

Yeah, doing it with your certifying instructor and having everyone sign your logbook sounds like a nice idea to me.

Please let me know when you plan on doing this so I can make sure I am nowhere near Long Beach. A-Frame was around 17C on Sunday, so you might get lucky with the water temperature. I'll second the suggestion to just have a good dive. My 100th wasn't particularly memorable: I didn't do anything...

Another article (I'm posting from my phone, so digging up a link is painful) said both sets of equipment were discarded at the surface during the rescue attempt. They would have been diving from an RIB. so their equipment would have been removed to get them back on the boat. It'd make sense to...

I think Brazil are quite likely to go through top of their group, meaning they'd face the loser of the Holland-Chile game in the round of 16. It seems unlikely that they won't win against Cameroon, even though they only need a draw to progress. Mexico will probably beat Croatia, but probably...

I don't think anyone has reliable stats on regulator failure rates. Not all failures lead to accidents, so DAN wouldn't track them. I've wondered about this before myself and settled on the only-vaguely educated guess of somewhere between 1 in 500 and 1 in 2,000 dives. Based on the anecdotal...

I've never been, but hopefully someone else can help you out with a few tips. Enjoy! And please write a trip report when you come back.

I've been staring at this thread on and off since this morning, but can't think of anything to say other than deepest sympathy to their family and friends. There's precious little information to go on and having met both the divers on a fairly recent dive trip, I have no stomach for wildly...

Well, the vis was a bit more than 10 metres (which is very good for these parts), so my girlfriend was happy. The drysuit was still not entirely dry, but closer -- my left forearm was still wet. I did reposition the seals on that wrist at the last minute, though -- I'm hoping that's the cause.

My drysuit is back with a new zip (it was apparently leaking from both ends of the zip) and smaller cuff seals. I'll be trying it out this afternoon, with the dry gloves. Hopefully I'll finally have a completely dry dive. I do, however, have a bit of a PR problem to resolve. A conversation with...

It might not quite have the biodiversity of south-east Asia, but I'm sure the Caribbean is still pretty awesome. Enjoy! It seems we have at least two species of (solitary) cup corals here on the southern tip of Africa. I'm sure I must've seen them before, but I've never actually taken notice of...

I think you'll find a lot of the posters on this forum are using a backplate and wing system with steel backplates. I don't use them myself, but I imagine that adding another 3kg of tank weights would make most divers very top-heavy and overloaded with non-ditchable weight. I'd think the tank...

In South Africa, they're about US$25 for a belt + US$6 per 500g/ ~1.1lb weight. I have no idea how that stacks up to traditional weight belts or what their other products cost. ---------- Post added June 3rd, 2014 at 08:57 PM ---------- I don't think any of their products are particularly...