I would usually have something more to say about stuff like this but I have been horrified and very pleased indeed on the same day thanks to the massive amount of feedback generated on Facebook.

I have, in fact, committed Facebook recently, something I said I would never, ever do, however it's a joy to see abhorrent practices such as this going "viral", which I believe is the term, and thanks to the power of social networking, the culprits have been identified and hopefully severe penalties will be imposed.

These people are not divers, they are just SICK.

Dive Briefing:

"Blah blah blah, blah blah blah blah, look out for this coral blahblah and this type of fish and blahblahblah, blah blah, maximum depth 30 metres..."

It is a commonly held misconception - even amongst many dive staff - that the maximum depth for diving in the Red Sea is 30 metres. Actually, it's not. For single-tank recreational diving, the maximum depth is 40m if you have deep-diver training of some sort, or when your nitrox mix (if applicable) reaches 1.4 ata, whichever comes soonest.

The above are two photos that have recently surfaced in Sharm - actually they've been Facebooked to death already but since I am one of the few remaining people on the planet that doesn't have facebook, I missed them at first. They've already been reported to HEPCA and you can find the news article here.

The species are not easy to identify but it looks like a longfin mako and juvenile blacktip reef shark on display. The first is from the New Year banquet at the Oriental Rivoli hotel in Sharm and the second from a local supermarket called Ragab and Sons in Sharm. I didn't know this, but apparently, although shark fishing is illegal here, displaying and selling them is not. Ah yes, the fisherman must have just found it lying carelessly around then the eventual owner of the very clearly freshly caught animals couldn't be held responsible, because actually they just bought it and put it on display.

I haven't had a lot of time - for various reasons - to dedicate to keeping up with my blog, partly because I've been office-based for a while (which I am not complaining about here in wintry Sharm!) and therefore not been in the water at all recently, and also I've spent more of my writing time on my forthcoming "Easy Diving" Article, due out in next month's edition of DIVE Magazine.

Here, instead, is something I wrote a while back for my Scubaboard Blog - so, apologies if you've read it there already...!

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Wreck Diving! Have we had the best of it?

Has old age and poor conservation left us with less and less real wrecks to explore?

This blog is inspired by reports from several members of the Red Sea Wreck Academy who are brave enough to dive in cold waters as well as warm, commenting on the deterioration of the wrecks they are diving on a regular basis. Like many of us they are getting old. Some very old. We need new wrecks !

I often point out to our guests how for example, the Carnatic, made of iron, still stands proud, while those around it seem to be crumbling. The king post of the Giannis D is about to collapse and the bow section of the Marcus (yes, it is still there!) has also lost many of its plates.

Reports from the Breda, the HMS Port Napier, the Hispania and many wrecks on the south coast of the UK and those in Scapa Flow, tell of a rapid collapse of these once sound structures. Some years ago the fore section of the Inverlane was closed off due to its instability. Other divers tell me that some of my old haunts of the North East coast are now reduced to piles of scrap.

If you’ve watched the recent TV show “Game of Thrones” – and possibly read the books – you may have become accustomed to the phrase: “Winter is Coming!”.

We don’t get proper TV here in Sharm, so after a few of my colleagues and I had watched the series, and possibly also read the books, we started to wonder if J.R.R Martin (the author of the books and executive producer of the TV version) had formerly had a career as a dive guide in Sharm.

The coral reef system surrounding the Sinai peninsula are the most northerly in the world, at least as we know them; there are some cold and deep-water species of coral found as far north as the Norwegian Fjords, I believe, but that’s not exactly the sort of “Winter Sun” destination that springs to mind, mostly because large parts of Norway never actually see the sun during the winter months.

Ullo mate! Almost missed you there. Fancy lunch? Fur seal burger?

Nah. I’m off my food at the moment… Not like you.

Yeah. Sore mouth. Got tagged two days ago out near Cocos. There I was doing a spot of spy-hopping when they pulled me out, stuck a hose down my throat and now every bugger in the universe can track me from a satellite.

A Change is as Good as a Rest

Followers of my blog may have noticed that my last missive tended somewhat to the negative - well, when I signed up to write this I signed up to write about my life as a dive professional - the good, the bad, the ugly and the really stinky if necessary, rather than representing myself as an agency poster child (too ugly) and exclaiming every thirty words how wonderful my life is.

It's not always; I woke up this morning and I. Did. Not. Want. To. Go. To. Work. I had a sleepless night, certain things weighing heavily on my mind, thinking I'd rather spend the day in the pub rather than underwater. I had a cold recently and it felt like it was making a bold attempt at resurgency, yaddayaddayadda - like a Monday morning only it wasn't Monday.

With the assistance of my colleague of the day, I prepped the boat, got everybody checked in and we decided on an easy, but very lovely semi-drift from Ras Bob to Ras Nasrani. Lots of new people on the boat, whose dive experience ranged from 1000 and more to - er - 4.

Red letter day

This blog is inspired by a tee shirt sighted at the Birmingham dive show. It read HMS THISTLEGORM!

So my theme is the importance of a single letter (of the alphabet) – and the far reaching implications one wrong letter can have…

Back in the eighties while writing the Divers Guide to the North East Coast I could find no evidence or information on a well dived wreck the EUGINE CHANDRIS.

She had run aground on the remains of the Oslofjord. It took the master of wreck research Richard Larne to point out it was the EVGINE CHANDRIS. Just one letter wrong.

Years later I’m off to Aruba – the tourist board wanted me to bring to the diving worlds’ attention their shipwrecks, just as I had done in Egypt. They had a famous shipwreck-the CALIFORNIA. She had notoriously ignored the distress signals of the Titanic. So I had my story title 'Aruba’s Titanic Connection'.

I think the month-long interval between blogs sums up the story of the last 6 weeks really - it's been nuts! One minute it was September and then whoosh - here we are in the elder half of November!

One of the most significant problems we have faced since the Egyptian Revolution of January 2011 is a shortfall in staff. There has been a mammoth decrease in general tourism overall - but the big dive centres have remained pretty busy, partly because we all have a very loyal and experienced repeat customer base, who know that it's still safe to come to Egypt and dive, but a lot of staff took a big hit because of the lack of work and it's been very difficult to recruit newcomers from outside Egypt.

There is a fair but - convoluted, expensive, really annoying, time-consuming, all of the above - inconvenient work permit application process that goes like this:

The dangers of wreck research

To some, venturing four floors down into the bowels of a shipwreck is fraught with danger. Having survived many such escapades underwater without a scratch, this little tale might amuse.

I started to write a book on the Thistlegorm back in 1996. I shelved it due to lack of the right kind of evidence, in particular the load list – the detailed records of her cargo and which hold they were in. The Holy Grail of the Thistlegorm saga. It would, if found, reveal and refute at the same time.

According to the excellent Thistle Boats By D C E Burrell, Dominic Wames of Bushell, Nicol and Wame (who managed the fleet which included the Thistlegorm) went to Glasgow to oversee the loading of what was to be Thistlegorm's final voyage. Perhaps in the company archives the documents detailing the cargo (manifest or load list) could be found. If so much more information about her cargo would come to light It is not uncommon for companies to keep records dating back beyond the required seven years.

Since we're in a Thistlegormy sort of mode at the moment and I just happened to be there yesterday, I thought I would share this nugget of madness that I witnessed during my first dive. As I was returning to the ascent line, I saw a guide conducting what was very clearly an introductory dive of some sort with a female diver. Clearly she had no prior training, as the guide was holding onto her whilst she was flailing around like a daddy long-legs in a hurricane, holding her nose to get her to equalise, and pushing her mask against her face trying to get her to clear it.

The intro dive is something that often polarises certified divers: get in the water, no training, wearing scuba? You will DIE! Actually, most intro divers don't die, and it's a bread-and-butter part of the tropical resort based dive business. The official PADI program is the "DSD" which is basically confined and (maybe) open water dive 1 of the Open Water course. Many 'try dive" experiences have no standards at all, although my own dive centre follows the standards for confined water dive 1: Maximum depth 6 metres, in swimming pool-like conditions, with certain skills to be performed and whilst I would not like to say that intro divers gain "mastery" of these skills, they mainly don't die, and are otherwise not un-necessarily inconvenienced.

Some of my former "try dive" students are now instructors - I know, because I also taught two of them their IDC - because an intro dive really can get you hooked on the main event. It's half the point of the program - get divers interested, calm their nerves, allay their fears, and sell them an Open Water course! It works - it's a very successful idea. And yes, it's a money thing.

Just who was the first to dive this Red Sea classic?

Apologies to all Cousteau fans. If you are easily offended don’t read on!

Of all the rumours surrounding shipwrecks, none is more prolific than the 'discovery' of the Thistlegorm. Each claim seems to get earlier and earlier. Sitting in Root Camp in Quisir, minding my own business, a larger than life German announced his presence to all in a fanfare. HE had discovered the Thistlegorm! I kept mum, so did those with me. I slipped the copy of Sunderland to Suez, The Story of the Thistlegorm, which I had just signed, under the table.

Crowley's Blog - Things I Don't Want to Hear From Divers - No.1

It's high season here in Sharm so I haven't had a lot of free time but this was something that cropped up in conversation yesterday and I think is to some extent representative of some of the problems inherent in the modern-day, agency-based dive industry - and partly why some divers sneer at the concept - more about those folks later!

I was guiding a group of 9 divers - four of whom are super-repeat customers with lots of experience in the region. I've known them for three years now, and they are safe, conscientious divers that I can pretty much leave to themselves.

The rest of the group were a mixture of experience, with one lady who had 11 dives, had not been in the water for a few years, and had booked a refresher course prior to heading out on the "Local" boat - dive sites that are not especially challenging - and this was my boat yesterday.

Crowley's Blog - Destined to Dive

So in the spirit of getting the ball rolling and all that, I thought I'd respond to Abu Hadida’s blog with my own story as to how I was destined to be a dive guide in Sharm. I do not believe in fate or destiny, generally speaking, however my existence here does rather appear to support the argument for predetermination.

I mentioned in my introduction that a day trip to the wreck of the SS Thistlegorm in 2004 (and then getting very drunk with my former instructor afterwards) was instrumental in my decision to become a dive professional; there will be plenty of blogs to follow about the Thistlegorm because it is the absolute love of my life when it comes to diving – but this story is part of the reason why.

Back in the good old days, before too many dive boats crashed into reefs at night-time, the departure for Thistlegorm trips was 4am or earlier. I was on holiday, had not had much sleep the night before, and so I put a small dent in Egypt’s coffee supply and being unable to sleep thereafter, sat myself down on the wooden prow for a night-time voyage.

Do you believe in fate?

A question often asked. It has for sure played a major part in my diving experiences. Five random dates: 19 April 1993; 3 January 1988; 20 June 1996; 7 November 2005; 1 November 2007; no astronomical or personal connections.

For a wreck fanatic, to be in the right place, at the right time, to see a shipwreck in the making, just once, is a chance in a million, but five times? MV Giannis D, MV Tamara, MV Million Hope, MV Al Kafhain, MV Sarah, and there are others, all met their fate and their demise, captured on my Nikon. So fate and shipwrecks are woven into my life tapestry, but none more than this little fairy story right out of Mills and Boon.

A Day in the Life of Crowley

Following my introduction, and before I get into the really meaty stuff, I thought I would give interested readers an overview of what a typical day is like at a high volume resort-based diving operation in Sharm.

My alarm sounds at 6:20am, mostly because this allows me to hit the snooze button twice, but I’m usually already half-awake because Lyra tends to meep in my ear around 6am and sometimes tries to eat my feet, although a good swing of the right leg tends to put an end to that.

PETER 'Abu Hadida' COLLINGS

I have been a scuba photo journalist since 1983, explorer, publisher, author and maritime historian, founder of the Red Sea Wreck Academy, hosting wreck safaris around the world.

Back in the early ‘80s when I was a very active, very cold, diving officer and area coach in the North East of England, I could not have imagined how a set of coincidences could turn my hobby into a career that would see me travel the world, finding, identifying and photographing shipwrecks. Nor could I envisage the international acclaims and awards that would follow.