Graham Pettett - Graham is BSAC South East regional coach. Graham is a familiar face on the regional training circuit and will be known to many of you. Graham will be compere for the day and will be on hand to meet existing and prospective members of the BSAC to understand what you want from the South East region and how we can help. www.bsac-se.org.uk
Rick Stanton - Rick, a fire fighter from Coventry, in England, has been at the forefront of British cave diving for over twenty years. Initially a dry caver he learnt to dive while at university in 1979 with the primary intention of exploring caves & sumps in the British Isles. During the last 9 years, Rick has been involved in more technical cave diving using rebreathers, (often two at a time) for long penetration and depth. In 2004 when six British soldiers were trapped in a Mexican cave by flood water, Rick Stanton was one of two divers flown out by the British Government to accomplish the rescue. Rick will be telling of some of his exploits which includes dives to depths in excess of 200m, penetrations of longer than 4Km and durations in excess of 17 hours.
This year they extended the project to look for a landing craft - and found a WW2 bomb... there's lots to tell! This is a local, club project by non-archaeologists which has brought the Invasion of Normandy and the events of D Day to their members and beyond.
Simon is a journalist and photographer, covering subjects from the underwater world. Above the waves Simon supplies features for the motorcycle press and finds the best subjects far from tarmac in some of the remote parts of the planet. His work has been published worldwide and translated into ten languages, including Russian and Mandarin. Simon is a member of the National Union of Journalists and is currently campaigning against proposed changes to copyright legislation.
Rich has been diving since 1991. He is a wreck diver and spends much of his time diving the wrecks around the UK coastline. He is fascinated by the wartime wrecks around the Norwegian coast, and tries to dive over there at least once a year. He is also very partial to a bit of cave diving as well, and is actively involved with Karst Odyssey (www.karstodyssey.com/), a cave exploration project exploring and mapping the caves in Bosnia and Herzegovinia.
Rich serves on the Training Council of GUE and is the Director of Technical Training. He also heads up GUE-UK, where he is supported by three other outstanding instructors. He still finds the time to go out and dive with people new to the sport, give talks to dive clubs and to go diving for fun as well!
Rich has also spent a fair amount of time working on conservation projects. The latest one is based in the Philippines, the Thresher Shark Research and Conservation Project (www.threshersharkproject.org). GUE also now has its own platform for conservation projects, Project Baseline (www.projectbaseline.org). This will give a platform and support for any project where regular visits are made to a particular dive site. It will be used to gather photographic records of how these environments change over time. This project is open to all parties, and more details of how it works will be discussed in the presentation.
Find out more about Rich and his work at www.wreckandcave.co.uk
In 2007 Darwen Sub Aqua Club celebrated it's 50th Anniversay. 2007 was also a significant year for another reason - it was the 25th Anniversary of the Falklands Conflict. Darwen SAC wanted to mark both these events in a memorable way, and so the idea of organising an expedition to go and dive the Falklands was born. The concept was to sea container over all the equipment - two RHIBS, compressors, cylinders, diving equipment and clothes - and fly out the people. It was a month long expedition comprising of two parts. Rosemary was part of the second wave of the award winning expedition, and will be speaking about her Falklands experience.
Gareth Lock - Gareth works in aviation safety and recently used the knowledge he has gained of incident analysis in the industry to analyse incidents in the diving environment. Gareth will be talking about "Risk Management and Human Factors within Scuba Diving". He will be looking at how risk can be managed within the scuba diving world, specifically looking at the four layers of human factor failings which lead to a mishap; Latent Failures (organisational influences, unsafe supervision, precondition for unsafe acts) and Active Failures (unsafe acts). He will highlight how they all lead together via the ‘Swiss Cheese’ failure model and what can be done to break the chain.
Jim Standing - Jim is one of the founders of fourth element, market leaders in diver thermal protection. He learned to dive at age 15 in Vivian Quarry in Wales, which is probably what prompted his interest in thermal protection. He is a keen UK diver and has spent the last 10 years developing and testing products for diving in cold water. In 2007 he co-led a successful expedition to look for a lost World War II sea plane in Labrador, Canada, diving in temperatures of minus 2. Jim will be discussing this expedition in the context of tips and techniques on how to stay warmer whilst diving in cold water, focussing mainly on practical suggestions and physiological information.
Maritime & Coastguard Agency - talking about their rescue work