August 2009    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 24, No. 8   What's this?

Flotsam & Jetsam

from the August, 2009 issue of Undercurrent  

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Want to Dive in India? We have just one reader report about this country’s diving, but The Times of India reports that it’s starting and promoting a dive industry. Bangalore, India’s version of Silicon Valley, just created its first dive club to get people certified in city pools and plan dive trips to places like Goa and the Andaman Islands. PADI’s Project Aware co-sponsored two underwater surveys at Netrani, on India’s west coast, which showed an abundance of tropical reef fish and marine life. Giant clams, humphead wrasse, whale sharks, manta rays and other species were spotted by divers in the area. The surveys also report clear waters and a lack of large-scale trawling.

“We Didn’t Fake It.” We’ve written in depth about Allyson Dalton and Richard Neely, the two divers who spent 19 hours afloat near the Great Barrier Reef after currents swept them away from their liveaboard (see our interview with them in the July 2008 issue). While the Australian government took their side and pressed criminal charges against boat operator OzSail, Dalton and Neely are suing the TV show A Current Affair for defamation. After running an interview with the couple, the show’s producers then gave the perspective of Kylie Irwin, a dive instructor aboard the boat who said OzSail staff had searched for them exhaustively but the two divers didn’t want to be found. He said they must have set the whole thing up because it would have been “physically impossible” for boat crew not to have seen them if they had surfaced within 600 feet of the bat, as they said, and inflated their safety sausages. Dalton and Neely say their reputations have suffered; A Current Affair replies they were just giving both sides of the story....