Why have sport divers not been included in the project? There are at least 30 sport divers in the country who are trained for diving to these depths, and have the equipment.

Several of these divers have modern rebreather sets available to them. At one of the conferences rebreather divers were identified as being the least intrusive method of observation, with submarines being the most intrusive. It seems counter-intuitive that the more costly submarine is being used in preference.

-- Mike Beresford (mikeb@global.co.za), April 10, 2002

Answers

Hi Mike,

The main reason why sport divers have not been included in the Programme is because of Department of Manpower regulations.

It is under the current legislation illegal for any sport diver to participate in research of any kind, which is construed as "work". Furthermore, even if they were to be qualified as "scientific divers" they (and scientists) are limited to 50m and air as a breathing mixture. Any further depths and gas mixtures require very expensive backup - probably more or less on a par with submersible diving. (I don't have the regulations on me, but it would involve for 1 diver several backup divers, full onsite decompression facilities, a life support technician (paramedic) and so on - which would be actually very expensive; they also have to be qualified under the appropriate "class" in the diving at work regulations. (Which sport qualifications are unfortunately not).

Furthermore, a dive in Jago means we can spend 5-6 hours in the water quite easily at virtually no risk to human life, whereas "extreme" technical diving does carry significant risk to human life, and a bottom time of only 15 minutes in a day.

Due to the nature of the work, 15 minutes is simply not enough time.

Perhaps you would argue that a system of teams of divers diving in series could give you that extended time - perhaps, but at what cost? That's a minimum of 24 solo divers (for 6 hours) diving one after the other - which obviously does not include buddies (48 divers) or support divers (?), which would be a logistical nightmare. Can you find at least 60 odd divers willing to give up their time for 3 weeks and dive pretty much every day of that time? Every few days you would have to "take a break" to allow adequate offgassing. The only thing stopping Jago from diving is bad weather.

6 hours isn't even the limit of Jago's endurance. If the weather was conducive (which in hindsight it was not) two such dives could be done in a day. That would be 12 hours of diving in a day. 120 fully qualified divers with rebreathers willing to do such dives for 3 weeks? This seems somewhat unlikely to me; you have already mentioned that there are perhaps 30 people.

That still doesn't address the issue that it is illegal for us to ask people to dive for us in the name of research. I know EKZNW asked sport divers to do research dives with them to 60m and beyond that, but that is illegal and we do not feel it is worth the potential legal problems to undertake.

Also, any researcher can get into Jago and go and study what they need to first hand; a diver is unlikely to know exactly what the researcher needs or the incidental things researchers are likely to notice (i.e. new fish species, as Phil Heemstra found on his dive), which divers would probably overlook. Especially given their limited bottom time.

Whilst we would welcome the opportunity to work with sports divers, the current legal framework regrettably prevents us from doing so.

I hope this answers your question, and should you wish to have further correspondence on this matter, please feel free to contact me.

Yours,

James Stapley.

-- James Stapley (fishwatch@ru.ac.za), May 08, 2002.