“Push it to the Limit” official video from William Rich on Vimeo.
Heather Williams clearly is keen on her adrenalin-powered sports, which fill in some nice spaces in the video (which are otherwise a rather underdressed woman mis-miming!). These include dirt-biking, scuba diving, drag-racing, performance cars and karting! Nice, and beautifully shot!
“What is so enticing about the underwater world? Physical grace: I imagine it’s like dancing for those who can, instead of being, like me, a person shifting gormlessly from foot to foot. But with 15m of water over my head, now we’re talking. You can shimmer, glide and hover with balance while the bubbles rise in slow spirals around you. Another of the paradoxes of diving is the relationship between mass and emptiness. There’s a calming insubstantiality about being at depth, an experience of both heavy materiality (have you ever tried to pick up a scuba tank?) and a very bearable lightness of being. Behind you the awkward fumbling characteristic of shoreline entries when, fully kitted-up in heavy surf, you blunder towards a thin crack in a reef’s edge, banging your knees and elbows on hard, resistant things. Before you is tranquil liberty, as you push through the same water whose eruptive surface moments ago threatened stability, injury and temper. Now it supports your every movement. You are poised. It is the only time I ever feel physically graceful.
Then there’s the light. Though some divers have a fetish for depth, and serious depth does have its attractions, the best stuff for a plodder like me is usually in the first 20m. I’d rather warm water, a wide variety of coral and strong sun above. The most abundant, colourful and zany, if not the most dramatic forms of aquatic life, live in the top 15m. Watching the play of strong sunlight over the breathtaking forms of coral heads or waving vegetation, with fish going through them at all speeds imaginable, and possessing all the colours conceivable, is bliss.”
Read the full story in the Times Higher Education.
In looking for an image to use in a revision session “final checks”, I came across an image hosted within this blog entry, covering the 2009 “Extreme Underwater Backgammon” competition. I’m guessing it’s good practice for buoyancy… but the original rationale was that it was too hot above water, so it was more refreshing to play underneath. If you’re particularly looking to add that twist of adrenalin, try the “extreme rules”:
“Underwater backgammon rules include a single tank per player rule and as a twist for adrenaline junkies (just to make things real interesting), only buddy breathing is allowed, meaning no own air in the final decision-game. Here, it’s “do-or-die”, as one tank is given to both players and a single octopus is shared between moves. The two finalists do not have access to any air until their move is completed. So players must think fast, …and play faster.”
If you get a chance to watch this series of videos (by the BBC, Region 2 only), then take the opportunity. If you have access to the iPlayer, the episode ‘Creatures of the Deep‘ has another 19 days to run! Although the main focus of the programme is upon the creatures who inhabit the deep, the final 10 minutes of the programme demonstrates how some of this amazing footage was captured (and there’s nothing like hovering in the seabed whilst a large ray drifts majestically past) by expert scuba divers! These divers were breaking new ground … literally for one section, as they drilled through 2 metres of ice, and investigated life underneath for an hour at the time (before air/heat started to wear out). Over 100 dives were made under the ice, and the programme makers also created a new reef in the Bahamas. The programme took over 4 years to make!
I love the way that PADI (the Professional Association of Diving Instructors, the biggest global organisation for training in Scuba Diving) describes its pricing structure for learning to scuba dive (within their great FAQs, which also gives information about what’s required). To learn costs about the same as:
They surely know their audience, and the kind of thing they’s be into! Scuba (an acronym for Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, a term developed in the Second World War by the US Military) is a form of underwater diving, breathing compressed air, undertaken for professional or recreational purposes. There are many places in the world to scuba dive, and in later posts we’ll look to mention some of them, with some of the tropical waters giving access to some of the best underwater wildlife, but don’t forget that there’s some great diving to be had in the UK (just wear the right wetsuit!)
And who k new that Britain has BSAC, formed 1953, the largest dive club in the world (well, according to Wikipedia!)
