By Heneage Mitchell & Paul Lees 

Krabi Province in Thailand features some of the most stunning landscape to be found anywhere in the world within the protected boundaries of Noppharat Thara Marine National Park.  

The coast of the mainland and numerous offshore islands feature a mixture of sheer rocky cliffs, elevated jungles and coconut trees which majestically roll down to the water’s edge to meet with glorious sandy beaches. The rusty red and grey cliff faces are scarred with numerous caves and crevices and can be climbed to reach a mountain top lagoon.  

By Cedric Verdier, This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  

What could be the common point between a fish exporter from Norway, a Chief Information Officer and diving instructor living in the Netherlands, a renowned lawyer based in Cyprus, a Project Managerworking in Sweden, and a Technical Diving Instructor far from France? Since summer 2007, Spyros and Cedric have been discussing about the HMS Victoria, the impressive and quite unusual wreck that lies vertical between 140m/460ft and 77m/250ft, her bow deeply stuck in a thick layer of silt, a few miles off Tripoli, Lebanon.

PADI Asia Pacific organised a very successful DSAT Tec Rec Seminar at Suwon World Cup Swimming Pool, on November 11, 2007. Suwon is located approximately 30km south SE of Seoul, Korea.

NAUI is happy to announce the addition of the Inspiration and Evolution Rebreathers manufactured by Ambient Pressure Diving Ltd.

Egypt

A 37-year-old Hungarian diver Gusztav Riczler has set a new world record for the deepest unaided scuba dive. Carrying eight cylinders with different travel and decompression mixes, Riczler reached a depth of 270 metres (886 feet) in the Blue Hole, a notorious dive site near Dahab on the Sinai coast of Egypt in the Red Sea’s Gulf of Aqaba. He descended to the maximum depth in 14-minutes, and then took eight hours for the ascent to the surface, which included several decompression stops. Dahab’s Blue Hole has seen several diving tragedies due to its extreme depths.

By: Steve Burton

One of many WWII wrecks recently identified in Thai waters by Koh Tao wreck research vessel MV Trident.

The Gulf of Siam with Bangkok as its hub, has been an important international seaway stretching back over millennia. Until recent years, trade routes into Thailand overland from all neighbouring countries were tenuous at best. With either mountains, wide, fast-flowing rivers, or impenetrable jungles preventing all shipments by land larger than what could be carried by pack mule.

Thermal Considerations at Great Depth
By: Steve Burton

In the last few articles in this series we have looked at the effects of decompression, oxygen toxicity, narcosis and breathing gases selection, which concerns all divers even at recreational diving depths.

An observation common to all parameters, is that predicting a diver’s physiological response for bounce dives below 50m (165ft) begins to be a bit of a gamble…and beyond 100m (330ft) ‘all bets are off’.