Neutral Buoyancy
"In general, it is not the number of dives that makes a diver good, or bad, but their attitude to diving and the type of diving they have experienced. Warm-water diving is, broadly speaking, less challenging than cool-water diving, and a diver with fifty dives in murky northern european waters is likely to be more technically proficient than someone with twice as many dives in calm clear seas such as the Carribean.""Diving with a keen photographer is not necessarily a good idea. They ignore their fellow dives and fiddle endlessly with their equipment while quite often missing interesting events underwater as they focus on a coral head."
"Sometimes, virtually the only thing divers see of a country is the diving centre from where they take their boar to the dive sites. In a superficial way, the diving operators who take visitors on underwater tours very often embody the local culture: slick and businesslike or laid back and casual, jocular or sullen"
"We know now that water conducts heat away from the human body at least twenty-five times faster than air."
"If you inhale a lungful of fresh air and hold it, you feel an initial tightness in the chest and throat and then a gradual, but quite rapid feeling of unease, an urge to breathe out. If you take several deep rapid breaths prior to a breath hold you will be able to stave off the unpleasant sensations for a little longer because you are loading your bloodstream with oxygen, and reducing the amount of carbon dioxide - the chemical trigger which compels you to breathe."
- Tim Ecott