On Sat 24 January, James Askew from Stockton died after getting into difficulty at Stoney Cove in Leicestershire. On the second dive of the day he apparently had problems with his regulator and became separated from his father. The Stoney Cove Rescue Team quickly found him and gave him first aid. He was airlifted to hospital but was pronounced dead on arrival.
More details from Divernet.
Last May 2 divers (Richard Neely and Allison Dalton) were rescued after a sea and air search. They had gone missing while diving the Whitsundays off Queensland. Yesterday Workplace Health & Safety Queensland (WHSQ) charged the dive operator with breaching the Workplace Health and Safety Act by failing to ensure the safety of the divers. You can read more in the Sydney Morning Herald.
There is also an interesting series of posts on DiveOz, criticising the WH&S approach to managing the dive industry in Queensland. To quote one of the posters: “The fundamental problems here is that recreational adventure sports which are not risk free no matter what you try to do, and do not sit well with the charter of a work place health and safety department, who’s rightful goal is zero workplace deaths/injuries. “. The poster argues that heavy handed legislation is driving people and operators away from Queensland as a diving destination. See what you think of the debate here.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the Australian government has drawn up an agreement that allows Japan to kill more whales in the North Pacific in return for killing less in the waters around Antarctica. The proposal was apparently put together by an International Whaling Commission drafting group consisting of representatives from Australia and Japan and 4 other countries.
According to the BBC, Australia’s environment minister has rejected reports that such a compromise has been reached, claiming that their position has not changed. The foreign minister talks of a range of possible suggestions and proposals being canvassed, but that these that are a long way from a formal proposal or suggestion, or anything that the Australian government has agreed to. So it sounds like there might have been some discussions along the lines of the report in the Sydney Morning Herald but perhaps no formal agreement (yet). We will have to wait and see.
The BBC have got an interesting story which argues that a higher percentage of British passengers died on the Titanic compared with Americans. Researchers suspect that this is because Brits were more “gentlemanly” and queued politely for lifeboats, whereas Americans were more “individualist”. Husbands would put their wives in lifeboats and then go to the back of the boat and have a cigar while the ship sank around them.
So if Hong’s boat sinks with SCDC on board, we now know that the first in the lifeboats will be Rob and Erin. Meanwhile Our Glorious Leaderess will be up on the top deck, surrounded by stiff upper lips, leading a rousing rendition of “Rule Britannia”, while the icy cold waters of the South China Sea lap gently over her flip flops.
On Sunday 18 Januuary, we set off from Admiralty at just after 11am, changed trains at TST to the KCR or whatever MTR are calling it these days. We got off at Tai Po Market and switched to the 275R bus to Bride’s Pool. No brides, but a bunch of chatty girls from the Philippines who were heading for a barbecue. On the way up we got some good views of the hill fire raging up on Pat Sin Leng. There was a helicopter water bombing it, and apparently there were 120 firemen up there battling it at one point. It’s a good job we weren’t doing stage 9 of the Wilson trail this week.
We were walking at 12:30, and after one wrong turning, a bit of down and a bit of up, we made our way to Wu Kau Tang where we turned right towards Sam A Chung. There are a number of abandoned houses close to the path, which have been left pretty much as they were. The odd window is broken and all the contents are covered with a thick layer of dust. Further along were some more abandoned houses, but these looked older, were built of stone and were being reclaimed by nature. Abandoned houses and villages were going to become a bit of a theme of this hike.
From Wu Kau Tang to Sam A Chung the track goes along a fairly level valley with hills on either side. There was some evidence of hill fires along these hillsides so it’s clearly been a dry few months. Sam A Chung has a campsite and some lovely views of Yan Chau Tong (Double Haven), which is a marine park. We used to dive there regularly on the artificial reefs – several ships were sunk there partly as a marine habitat and I suspect partly to try and block the trawlers that used to swing through there at night when no-one was looking. The wrecks do have extensive fishing nets on them, but they used to be extremely good dives. Visibility was never that good, but the fish life was prolific. Sadly there was a toxic algae bloom a few years ago that killed off all the life on the wrecks and led to the fish leaving. It also left them even more silty than they had been before. We do try them occasionally but there is no sign of them improving.
From Sam A Chung we headed north to Sam A Tsuen. We took a slight detour to see a row of half a dozen old houses, which have also been abandoned. Some of them were quite large and one had a large kitchen with a large oven, plus a huge wok and space for another, as if it was some sort of local eatery. One of the places even had what looked like a rice threshing machine in it.
From here we went north-west to Lai Chi Wo, where there are some really nice trees in the coastal area. Recently a boardwalk nature trail has been built there with descriptions of some of the plants and animals you might see. There is a ferry pier here and it is quite a popular place, as it is a very well-preserved, and still inhabited, Hakka village. Sadly we didn’t have time to explore the village this time.
Instead we turned right and before long we were climbing to get over a headland to So Lo Pun. From there it was up a steep, wooded hillside past another abandoned village – this one quite a large village with even the remains of a children’s climbing frame. Above the village we came across and old water tank, and kept going up. Bizzarely, despite having done this walk several times before, Trevor didn’t remember walking up this hill, although he did remember walking down it.
Eventually we came to Yung Shue Au is another large abandoned village along the waterfront. We found a path leading up yet another hill which finally brought us out with a view over Yantian, which has grown into a large container port. Perhaps in a sign of the economic times, there were only 3 ships there.
To the left of Yantian was an unexpected sight – an aircraft carrier! This was the Minsk, which served in the Soviet and Russian navies between 1978 and 1994. In 1995 she was bought by a South Korean businessman and later resold to a Chinese company. She became the centrepiece of a military theme park in Shenzhen.
We turned left along Starling Inlet towards Kuk Po, and finally on to Luk Keng. From there we got a minibus to Fanling KCR station, which took us back for a good meal at the Chili Club in Wanchai.
This is one of my favourite walks in Hong Kong with a huge variety of different things to see. Some good views, some historic villages, and to finish off with – an aircraft carrier!
Distance: Approx 18km. Time: 5 hours. Temperature 21-23C. Humidity: 75%.
No matter how enthusiastic an environmentalist you are, you can’t agree with everyone that the green movement does. And I have to say that I can’t take the latest move from the People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) very seriously. According to their website, people don’t like fish because “They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads – which is weird, to say the least”. Their solution – rename fish as sea kittens!
The campaign is obviously targeted at children (I hope!), but I’m sure there are better ways of promoting fish and marine life without pretending that they are something which they are not.
All in all, I’m not impressed, although I did like this “Sea Kitten Fact”: “A University of Edinburgh study found that sea kittens can retain information that they learned up to 11 months earlier, which makes them cuter and smarter than the president of the United States! “. I wonder if they’ll be tempted to take that off the site nowMr. Bush has ridden off into the sunset.
US and Australian researchers using a remotely operated submarine from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the US were looking at the Tasman Fracture Zone. This is an area which drops from around 2km to 4km deep.
According to Ron Thresher of the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) they were looking for life deeper than any other voyage in Australian waters. He went on to say that “Our sampling documented the deepest known Australian fauna, including a bizarre carnivorous sea squirt, sea spiders and giant sponges, and previously unknown marine communities dominated by gooseneck barnacles and millions of round, purple-spotted sea anemones,”.
They also discovered that some deep sea coral is dying, and they collected data to try and assess the impact of global warming and the increasing acidity of sea water on these deep water corals.
You can read an article from The Australian, and the BBC has a video here.
Recently the Hong Kong Standard have started running cartoons from the popular Chinese cartoon – Old Master Q. Well here’s the one from today’s Standard since it has a certain relevance to divers, even if he’s not flying an ‘A’ Flag.
HMAS Sydney (Australia War Memorial's catalogue)
HMAS Sydney was a light cruiser and was sunk on 19 November 1941 by the Kormoran, a German auxiliary cruiser. Last year both wrecks were found off Western Australia. According to reports from the survivors of the Kormoran, the German ship was disguised and travelling under a false flag. When the Sydney approached the investigate, the armed raider opened fire causing extensive damage and sinking the Sydney. The Kormoran itself was also badly damaged and was subsequently scuttled, but many of the crew survived. The Sydney’s crew wasn’t so fortunate as the ship sank with all hands and no bodies were ever found.
An article in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting into an inquiry into its sinking claims that anyone who got off the ship would not have survived for more than 50 hours. After that their bodies would have lost buoyancy and sunk, but eventually they would have become buoyant again as gases within them expanded. Because the Sydney sank in 2.5km of water, it is apparently unlikely that the bodies would have floated back to the surface until at least 10 days later. The air and sea search was called off after 9 days.
You can read the Sydney Morning Herald article here.
On Friday, the body of a man suspected to be from Port MacDonnell was found off the South-east coast of Australia was found. The man had been reported missing after going diving on Thursday morning.
Apparently the body was found 30 metres offshore with air in his tank.
There is more information here and here.
This weekend’s SCDC dive got moved from Sunday to Saturday, and since I had a prior engagement, I yet again found myself not diving. I got an SMS from Mike describing it as “awful conditions and very low vis, only a couple of us did the 2nd dive“, so maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Anyway after nearly a month Rita and I returned the Wilson Trail. The plan was to walk stages 5, 6 and 7, plus a bit of 8 from Shatin Pass to Tai Wo. Things started to go wrong when we watched the Liverpool game at 1:30am and finally struggled into bed around 3:30. The knock-on effect was that we didn’t get up very early and didn’t leave the flat until 11:30am. We finally started walking at 12:45pm and knew we’d have to walk very quickly to get most of the way in daylight.
Things started well with a really nice trail from Shatin Pass, north towards Shatin. There are a few boarded up tunnels, presumably of WWII vintage. There were some good views through the trees. Eventually the path started to drop down towards a catchwater, above Shatin and Tai Wai. The catchwater gave us chance to speed up considerably and we fairly raced along it towards the Tai Po Road and the end of stage 5. It was along here we came across our first evidence of the monkeys which plague this part of the New Territories. No actual monkeys, but a cage with a label on it to say that it is part of the monkey contraception programme. Coincidentally we’d seen something about this on the news earlier in the week. I had been expecting a fairly traditional approach, of lining up all the males and treating them humanely with the help of 2 large bricks, but apparently this changes their behaviour (and makes them sing in a high voice). So instead they are treating the females with a contraceptive vaccine. It’s early days and could take a long while, as we came across hundreds of them in at least 3 large groups, one on Smuggler’s Ridge (halfway through section 6), one around the barbecue areas near the dam (at the end of section 6), and one near Lead Mine Pass (mid-way through section 7). There were also a number of smaller groups throughout the walk.
After Tai Po Road we climbed Smuggler’s Ridge, which was probably the toughest part of the hike, before dropping down to Shing Mun reservoir. Section 7 starts just over the dam and goes around the reservoir for about 5km, before turning right to the long slog up the road to Lead Mine Pass. From there we headed down towards Yuen Tun Ha, through an area that had obviously had quite a serious and recent fire. Given how dry it is at the moment, it must be a busy time for the fire brigades. Shortly afterwards we hit the road down towards Tai Po.
Normally the start and ends of sections are fairly well marked (unlike the rest of the trail!), but we went sailing past the end of section 7 without noticing it at all. So I’m not actually sure where Yuen Tun Ha is. At around 5:30pm we hit Sheung Wan Yiu and, despite the approaching darkness, we made the decision to press on for 2-3km (we guessed 2, it turned out to be 3km) along section 8 to try and get to Tai Wo. This is near the KCR station, which would make it a lot easier to pick up the trail for the remaining sections in future.
Burnt out hillside above Tai Po
This part of the trail goes up past some ancient kilns, which the authorities have fenced off to make sure no-one sees anything. There is a nice ancient path leading up to the hills, where it becomes a more modern concrete path. this joins a road. Along here we started to see smoke, and could see that some of the hillside had been on fire. This was a cause for concern as we weren’t sure quite how close to it the path went. Since there hadn’t been much smoke and there was hardly any wind, we decided to press on cautiously and before long we bumped into a police van coming the other way. Since they didn’t attempt to stop us we continued a little more confidently. Past the area where we’d seen the smoke and we bumped into another police van and a fire engine. The occupants were busy watching the lights of a large helicopter on the opposite hillside. It was difficult to judge the distances in the dusk, but he was a lot clsoer to a set of power lines than I would want to have been. There didn’t seem to be any fire where he was, so I’m not quite sure what was going on, and we were getting far too hungry and thirsty to stand about watching. We carried on down a very steep road, where a pack of dogs had tried to chase me several years ago. I remember hearing them all running and barking behind me and automatically turned round to see what was going on. By a fortunate coincidence the fact that I was now facing them seemed to make the dogs think twice, and they all came to a halt in an interesting noise of skidding claws – it was like something from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I’m not quite sure what I’d have done if they hadn’t stopped, as there were about 20 0f them in different shapes and sizes, but it was the teeth that got my attention. Finally we made it into Tai Wo and took a taxi to Shalimar in Tai Po Market for some well-deserved beer and curry.
So a grand total of 25 km in 5 hours 40 minutes, but we were pushing it – by our rather sad standards anyway!
Temperature: 14-15C. Humidity: 50%.
An interesting article from the BBC about tagging seahorses, in their “In Pictures” section. Project Hippocampus, based in South-East Spain is injecting a fluorescent polymer under their skin to allow them to identify individuals. The UK’s Seahorse Trust is hoping to get funding to do something similar in southern England. Find out more here.