Emma Farrell on the cathedral she found at the bottom of a Scottish Loch, and Szilvia Gogh on why it's never really Christmas for divers

SPEAKER_04 0:03

Season three of the Deeper Blue Podcast is brought to you by Sunto. Finnish engineering, piloting adventure from mountaintop to ocean floor since 1936. Sunto. Welcome to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Your weekly guide to everything that is happening around the world underwater. My name is Jason, and I'm producer of the Deeper Blue Podcast, the podcast for DeeperBlue.com, the world's most popular diving website. Every week, the Deeper Blue Podcast covers everything that is happening in the scuba, free diving, dive travel, and ocean advocacy world. So join us as we explore the deeper blue. Okay, we're rolling.

SPEAKER_03 1:00

Oh, is that for me to go? Okay. There we go. This is this is uh you can see it's a really slick operation that's going on here. So efficiency is our name. E fishent is what we are. So uh welcome everyone, welcome back to an episode of the Deeper Blue podcast season three.

SPEAKER_04 1:15

This is Stephen Whelan, host and founder of the Deeper Blue Empire, and I'm Jason Elias, small and tiny producer of just one small office way down hall on the 17th floor.

SPEAKER_03 1:27

So at what point do we stop having to introduce ourselves, I wonder?

SPEAKER_04 1:30

You know, is this I mean I we do have over four million listens per episode, so everyone already knows this already, but but I'm just assuming that's your mum and my mum, you know, refreshing every time. We have server farms in China that are just listening to the show over again.

SPEAKER_03 1:46

Absolutely. Right. So should we uh should we get on with the news for the week?

SPEAKER_04 1:50

News of the world underwater, taking us first to where I don't know where this is. Well, the world.

SPEAKER_03 1:55

Let's do the world, let's do some worldwide news. So um, so the Women's Divers Hall of Fame. So these celebrate some of the top women in the diving industry. Every year they induct new ladies into their society. And I'm really proud of this one. So Autumn Blum, founder of Stream2C, only a couple of episodes ago on this podcast. Absolutely. I've known Autumn for a good number of years as uh one of the inductees. So Autumn, I want to say big congratulations to you.

SPEAKER_04 2:22

Yes, congratulations, Autumn. It also includes Pamela Ballish Weber, Autumn Blum, Valerie Langstaff, Stephanie Meal, and Cheryl Thacker. I will say about the Women's Diver Hall of Fame is they're an extremely active organization and they're fighting the right fight. So I just want to say congratulations to them and congratulations to all the women who are in the Hall of Fame. And I suspect that we have two co-hosts on this show that will eventually make it in there as well. That's my guess.

SPEAKER_03 2:48

Megan, I think, is already in there, actually. She's one of the original inductees, if I remember correctly. And Linden, that's terrible. We don't know to begin with. That's the first bit of terrible news. But so Linden, we apologize.

SPEAKER_04 2:58

We're gonna sort of write-in campaign if you're not. Well, congratulations to everyone that was inducted. So that was our first story of today's.

SPEAKER_03 3:05

And then let's travel to the Bahamas to Dean's Blue Hole, which is interesting. So Dean's Blue Hole, for those of you that don't know, is where the vertical blue freediving competition that was recently held is held there. William Truebridge runs that competition. And up until relatively recently, it was always regarded as the world's deepest blue hole. But then there was a news story that came out of China. Controversy. Can't believe it, right? A bit of controversy. And apparently there was a blue hole in the South China Sea, which is called the Dragonhole. I mean, you know, it's got the cooler name, so better name. You know, what can you do? And it thought that, you know, it was generally regarded as potentially a deeper blue hole than Dean's blue hole. They've now done a study, and scientists have gone and got their big tape measures out and worked out what's going on. And apparently the dragon hole isn't actually a vertical shaft, but it's one that's more shaped like a comma, apparently. Based on all this, it might actually be the deepest point that can be measured from the surface might be less than the 203 meters of Dean's blue hole. So there you go. Interesting. William Truebri just posted on on Facebook about this.

SPEAKER_04 4:15

Very interesting story. This is a story, of course, it came off of the world's largest website for dive ocean-related news, deeperblue.com.

SPEAKER_03 4:22

Uh, how much do I pay you each time you talk about deeper blue? I can't remember.

SPEAKER_04 4:25

Millions. Well, that's why that's that's why there's always stories about super yachts, because I'm always looking about I'm always trying to find where to park my super yacht.

SPEAKER_03 4:32

It's millions of rupees, though, I'm afraid. You need to just double check the currency.

SPEAKER_04 4:36

Hundred in pesos, which are about four million to the dollar. Another story we want to highlight from deeperblue.com is we want to give a shout-out to season two of the Patty Dive Stories podcast. We want to say congratulations to you guys for doing that. We know how much work and energy and passion goes into making a podcast, and we just want to say congratulations on season two going.

SPEAKER_03 4:56

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 4:56

And then that takes us to Aqaba Jordan.

SPEAKER_03 4:59

Yeah, we're doing some jet setting here. So we really are. So dive operators actually in Jordan have been open for a little while now, although tourists aren't allowed into the country. So the local tour operators have been taking a look at how they can sort of keep themselves busy and do something to improve things locally, and they've been getting involved in the cleanup operation. So this is a significant amount of time was spent cleaning up their local dive sites and house reefs, which had really suffered from a lot of debris being blown in from nearby beaches and so on. They got volunteers to come, they didn't charge anyone, Gomendobo volunteers, and local divers got involved, and they cleared up between December the 15th, 2020 and June the 29th, 2021. They cleaned up a staggering 1230 kilograms, which is 2,711 pounds of debris, which is just a phenomenal amount of debris. So huge props to them.

SPEAKER_04 5:49

COVID lockdown has been something that has, for the most part, had a lot of detriment impact on the entire world. There's been all kinds of disease and death, a lot of economic damage, but there has it also, in a way, kind of allowed the world to kind of take a breath in certain ways, a forced breath, but a breath nonetheless. And it's really nice to see people that have used that time to do something of value. I think this reminds me a little bit of the story we told last week, which is in Thailand, that they saw an opportunity because there was far less tourists to bring in new laws that would ban the use of sunscreens that were damaging to the reef, and they were able to do this simply because they just didn't have the tourists at the time. Even this podcast for us was born of the pandemic in a certain way, wasn't it? Didn't we start it in the pandemic? I think we did, right?

SPEAKER_03 6:33

We did, we did. You nagged me for a significant amount of time beforehand, but yes, see, we we actually it was born out of a desire to bring this community together, right? In a time where we couldn't get together in the water. God did we not know how much work it was gonna be involved.

SPEAKER_04 6:43

So uh I'm glad we did it. But it is, I completely agree. I'm glad we do it because it actually helps it has helped me maintain a connection to the ocean when for a long time I wasn't able to actually get in the ocean.

SPEAKER_03 6:53

Okay. Plus, you get to speak to me almost every week, so which is like a dream come true.

SPEAKER_04 6:58

For all you listeners out there speaking to Stephen, every week is like a dream come true. Okay. Absolutely. So we don't have any specific travel-related news this week because there is very little that we could find, but we still do have a little bit of COVID-related news relevant for divers. I think the lockdown we've all noticed has all these kind of cascading effects that you would never anticipate. And this we just thought was very interesting because they're specifically related to the dive community. There is a shortage of hyperbaric treatment chambers simply because the chambers have been starting to be used for treating COVID patients. We were reading an article that was talking about the fact that some of the dive locations around the world that only have a few hyperbaric chambers have now co-opted them into helping treat people suffering from COVID. One of the things that the article recommended, and the reason we kind of brought it up, is because you should actually do a little bit of research before you travel someplace because there's a possibility that the hyperbaric chambers that you are, the areas you're going to might be in use for something else. Might not be available.

SPEAKER_03 7:57

You know, the thing is that a lot of people don't think about this sort of stuff as they go traveling, even locally and nationally, right? It doesn't, you don't never plan for the worst case scenario necessarily as a recreational diver. So I'm just bear in mind is that you know, all over the world, hyperbaric chambers are being used to treat COVID patients. The other thing is this was highlighted by a guy called Dan Orr, and Dan is the former president of Divers Alert Network for many, many years. Great guy, highlighted this. And I will give one other shout out, actually, on this one. Just so it was we found it on Dive Newswire. And Dive Newswire is run by a chap called Scott Jones, a good friend of mine. Dive Newswire is the professionals' news website. All the industry professional news goes on there. So uh definitely worth going and have a look and signing up. So big props to Scott.

SPEAKER_04 8:39

We check that site every week before we decide to do the news. There's a whole number of sources that we use. So one of the things that we were talking about as well is that the way you can prepare before you travel is to go, Dan, Divers Alert Network is a great resource to find out if there's any kind of lack of hyperbaric chambers in the region. There's also another place called the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society, uh.org, that also has listings for what's kind of going on. So this is just kind of news you can use, and just in case you're gonna go diving, just to make sure that before you go, in case there's any kind of accident, you'll understand what kind of situation you're putting yourself in. Okay, moving on. I feel like I do this every week now. I'm trying to put I've I maybe I'm looking for Atlantis. Anytime you can go look diving in ancient cities, I put that story in just because I think it's so cool. But this is a new one about diving amongst ancient ruins where Romans used to party. It's a town called Bai. It was a spot for holidaying Romans to drink and party, and then it began to sink. And there's some amazing photos from this place. Is it now dive park? So it's a protected park, but you can dive amongst there's actual like Roman statues and Roman floor tile mosaics that you can just swim right up to. It's incredible.

SPEAKER_03 9:52

Oh, it's amazing. And the best bit is this is where, you know, this is what drew me to the story, is it's where they used to party and drink the Romans. That was uh that was a good part of kind of the sourcing the story. But I think it's amazing. And the thing is, you look at these pictures and these statues are incredibly well preserved.

SPEAKER_04 10:09

The Museum of Bae, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, representing Dionysus with an ivy crown of the nymphion. The complex is near, is in Pozuoli, near Naples. So if you're ever interested in looking this up, that's kind of a great place. This is where you can find it. But again, it's incredible to see. I mean, these statues are not like this is not like buried in the muck. These statues are comp I it's probably been excavated to a certain point, but they're standing statues in the places they were, probably at the same place that someone like Stephen was passed out at the foot of that about 2,000 years ago. Uh having grapes popped into his mouth by the deeper blue staff. This is the place. It's just an incredible place to go. So I hopefully I can get there someday.

SPEAKER_03 10:52

So uh and protected protected marine area since 2002. So that's that's good as well. Maybe we should hold the next deeper blue party there. Next Greffan Brew party. That would be a good idea.

SPEAKER_04 11:02

That's a great idea. Oh my god, that's a great idea. I mean, we really do have a surplus of income on this show, so I think that we're just we're just looking for ways to spend our money.

SPEAKER_03 11:11

So Yeah, totally.

SPEAKER_04 11:12

Speaking of partying underwater, this takes us to another story from a actually a much more respected news source, Marketplace, which is a offshoot of NPR here in the United States. Earlier this season, or actually, I think about even last season, we told a story about Argentinian beer makers, brewers, who were sinking their casks down into the ocean because they felt that it actually gave some sort of quality to the beer. Now that story ended with someone stealing that beer, which is of course the reason I like that story. But here is a story that is actually a little more sophisticated. So maybe someone with a really sophisticated accent could kind of talk us through that. That's you.

SPEAKER_03 11:49

So it did so we forgot to invite anyone with a sophisticated fence themselves. Uh so yeah, so this was uh a winemaker in southwest France. So he's invented and pasted this new process. He's got nearly 50 barrels now underwater, and they've got these lines 15 meters down, which scuba dives go down and take, and it helps ferment the wine in very unusual conditions. And it's the constant pressure and movement and stability of temperature, which all helps to. I I don't profess to know very much about making a wine. I I profess to know a lot about drinking wine. Apparently, this is something that has is helps the process and gives it a very different aroma, an ocean aroma. I'm not entirely sure what it is. Does it smell fishy?

SPEAKER_05 12:28

Does it smell fishy?

SPEAKER_03 12:30

Is this the uh the thing? Uh a very lemony taste. So citrus type thing, which is you know, when you're when you're eating seafoods and fish and those sorts of things, a citrusy type wine is something that you should enjoy. So yeah, very interesting. I I've never heard of anything like this before. Me either. Apart from beer being stolen from uh underwater.

SPEAKER_04 12:47

Well, apparently, so the bottles are going for the pure underwater bottles are going for 50 bucks a bottle, which it must have some sort of cachet to it. There must be some sort of vintage that makes it feel that makes it that good, or maybe people are just buying it because it's from underwater. And they said it doesn't have terroir, it has marrowir. They're selling 200,000 bottles of this a year, which is incredible. So that's 10 million dollars. Yeah, we're in the wrong business. We are totally in the wrong business, Jason.

SPEAKER_03 13:16

Anyway, uh, folks, if we're not back next week, we've set up an underwater uh underwater fermenting wine technique. Episode 10. It doesn't come out. I'm really sorry, but we made our millions in fermenting underwater wine. Our next team meeting, Jason, we need to talk about this. This seems very serious stuff. I agree. Terrible.

SPEAKER_04 13:33

Yeah, I agree. Well, I did have a story. Steven really Steven's always trying to sneak in these kind of stories about super yachts, and I kind of killed that strike, but I said, Stephen, that's just not hard-eating news. So we did not, I we can't include that. So that takes us to our last our last story. Now, remember, we're telling you the story. This is two white dudes telling you a story, so just remember that. But UC Davis, University of California Davis, which is well known in the UC system as being kind of the agricultural school of all the UC schools, has come out with a report recently saying that a number of the fish names that North Americans have given to species that they typically fish for are pejorative and actually have racial indigenous biases built into them, which I just thought was absolutely fascinating. Now, usually we like to end the news section with something that we can kind of like some idiot in the world tripping over himself doing something stupid, but we actually kind of thought this was an interesting story because the story really comes out the the research said that a number of fish that are thought of as bycatch or not as desirable have ended up getting names that were based on indigenous pejorative terms, including ruffy.

SPEAKER_03 14:54

Well, it's crazy, and also you know, reading this, so um, what they're saying is that it also ends up having a bit of a bias because of it. So we end up overfishing and overeating those species, which leads to a decline in less population weight, which is fascinating. You never think about that sort of stuff. You know, if you call call a fish the wrong thing, you're gonna end up people gonna fish more of it.

SPEAKER_04 15:13

The flip side of it is the story that we've all kind of heard, which is like the South American toothfish was renamed as Chilean sea bass, and all of a sudden the name shot through the roof, right? Which is an interesting story talking about all the internal biases that are passed down from historical things that we're not even cognizant of that can lead to decline in modern fish populations right now. Just really interesting story. So uh sorry, there's no $40 million house with uh underwater tunnels or a dungeon in it or something this week.

SPEAKER_03 15:44

Or some poop story of some sort. Linden, that's when Lyndon's on. We save those stories when Linden's on.

SPEAKER_04 15:52

I always tell Stephen we can't include those stories, but he always puts them in. Definitely me. All right. Well, that takes us to the end of the news. Thank you, Steven, and I guess on with the show.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Yeah, thanks, Jason.

SPEAKER_02 16:09

My name is Luke Hinman. I'm an instructor trainer for Scuba, a writer, a filmmaker, a dog walker. And you're listening to the best 30 minutes about diving, the Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_04 16:27

Today, Deeper Blue co-host Lyndon Woolbert speaks with Emma Farrell, British free diving instructor, author of the book One Breath, A Reflection on Free Diving, and founder of her own free diving training company, Go Free Diving.

SPEAKER_08 16:40

This is Emma's interview, Jason, and we are so excited to do this. Aren't we?

SPEAKER_05 16:44

Hello, Jason! She's very hi!

SPEAKER_08 16:48

Emma, I am delighted to be speaking with you today. And here on the deeper blue podcast. We love speaking with people like you who are so passionate about our oceans. And your passion is freediving. This I know. We met years and years ago at a Dema show, which is the world's biggest scuba convention, and now I feel the scuba and free diving convention. And I knew you originally from being the author of One Breath, this beautiful photographic and written word publication. So I'm curious, Emma. Tell me when and how you learned about the sport of freediving.

SPEAKER_06 17:32

I learned about freediving so many, many years ago, and it was a combination. The three really pertinent things were the film The Big Blue, Megan Heaney Greer appearing on British television, and an article in National Geographic about Deborah Andolo. So Deborah Andolo, there was this incredible picture of her freediving on this wall, and I just thought, oh my God, that's so deep, and that's just her. And wow. And then I saw Megan on, I think it was called TFI Friday, and she held her breath in this pool live on television for three minutes, and I was just staring at her, thinking, oh my God, that's crazy, that's insane, that's amazing. And then, of course, the big blue, which is just so utterly captivating in so many ways. And so that kind of sparked this thing inside my mind where I just kept thinking about free diving, but it never at any point did I think that I could ever do it, because it was something you did in Cuba, you did it in the Cayman Islands, you did it somewhere else, you did it in the Mediterranean, you didn't do it in the UK. And so I just carried on with my life. And free diving was just kind of like this dream in the back of my mind. Then it was New Year's Eve, and I was on holiday in the Canary Islands with a friend, and we went out for dinner on New Year's Eve, and we had one of these kind of heart-to-heart conversations, and she said, What would you do if you had another life? And I said, I'd be a free diver. And she said, What's a freediver? And so I launched into this big speech, which was utterly and completely inaccurate about kind of what freediving was, because I hadn't got a clue. And she said, Yeah, and and she said she wanted to be a wind surfer. And so I said, Okay, right, well, we want to do sports. And then we thought, okay, well, that's it. So we then went out to a bar and there was a British guy there. And so we just got chatting to him and he said, Oh, I live here. And I said, Well, what do you do? And he said, Oh, I'm a free diver. And I was just like, Oh. And it was it was, yes, it was the most insane thing. It was like the universe had the moment I'd actually vocalized, I if I had another life, I'd be a free diver. Half an hour later, a free diver. I walk into a bar and there's a freediver. And I remember it was raining. And I just obviously had this look of mania in my eyes. And I dragged, because I couldn't really hear him in the bar, I dragged him outside into the rain to talk to him about freediving. And he was like, Look, love, it's New Year's Eve. I don't really want to be standing in the rain talking about freediving. But he told me where to go when I was back in the UK, and that kind of was it, really. And then this dream became an obsession, which then became my life.

SPEAKER_08 20:20

You have involved yourself in so many facets of this sport, from judging to competing, publishing a book, being part of the Ada Education Commission, which is one of the governing bodies of the sport of free diving. You have founded GoFree Diving UK. You just have so much involvement through yogic breathing, through different types of coursework that help different people for different types of breath hold. It's just incredible.

SPEAKER_06 20:49

I never ever thought my life would turn out the way it did. It has just been the most incredible experience. What free diving has brought to me is more than a career. It's brought me all of my friends. I mean, obviously I have friends before, but you know, I often say that teaching free diving is just an excuse to make more friends because people are so lovely. And like, for example, my friendship with you. Free diving has brought so much to my life and it's enabled me to bring so much to other people's lives, which is just the most rewarding thing.

SPEAKER_08 21:22

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And seeing how you connect dots from different parts of your life and different passions that may seem on the surface, and then pulling them together and really intertwining those passions into things that are tangible experiences and things that can enhance people's appreciation really of the water and the ocean. That to me is a true skill and something very admirable I see in you.

SPEAKER_06 21:47

Oh, bless you, love. My passion is always to bring free diving to as many people as possible. And by bringing free diving to as many people as possible, you're essentially bringing I well, you're bringing lots of things, but to me, It's two really important things. One is a knowledge of themselves, so a trust in their own body's ability to do incredible things. A one-minute breath hold seems incredible to most people. So the first thing is to just unlock this potential within them and show them just what they're capable of. And the second is about having a deeper connection with the world and the oceans and understanding it, seeing us as a part of the world, not a part, if you get what I mean. So you're not separate, you are as one.

SPEAKER_08 22:30

Emma, I know that you have traveled all around the world. You have dived in icy, frigid, cold UK waters and beyond, and you've also been in the tropics in beautiful destinations around the globe. What was the most riveting or memorable experience that you have felt in connection with the ocean?

SPEAKER_06 22:51

I mean, I have dived in the most incredible locations, and of course, diving with dolphins is always going to be up there. But in terms of, for me, something that was really personal and pivotal in my freediving journey, it was a long time ago now. So we're talking back in probably around 2001-2002. I had travelled up to Scotland with two of my freediving friends to dive this wreck. And only one of us had dived it before. So we travelled a very, very long way up to the wilds of Scotland to the Isle of Skye. And there was this amazing wreck called the Port Napier. And it had started out as a cargo steamer, and in 1940, it was converted into a mine layer. And so it was filled with mines and bombs and all sorts. But on the eve of its maiden voyage, a fire broke out. So they were like, oh my god, because it was in the town, kind of the centre of Sky. And so they set it on a course up the coast, everyone leapt off, and it went chug chuk-chuk chuk chuk chuk-chuk for a mile, and then it ran aground and it exploded. So luckily, nobody died, but it's this incredible ref that's been there since 1940. So we went up to Sky to dive this. And at the time I had just qualified as a free diving instructor. But it was the time back in the Dark Ages where we were just, as party Ada Education Commission, we were writing the first courses. So we were the right first kind of official ADA courses. And I was about to teach free diving for the first time. And it felt really daunting. I thought, am I good enough? Do I know enough? And then I was also going somewhere that was the water was really, really dark. It was dark, there were fish, there were seals, there was darkless, there was kelp, there was mussels, there was just all of this stuff that it's not tropical. So we were already in our wetsuits and this little, little rubber dinghy, and it was kept filling with water, we kept having to bail out. So that was scary enough. And then we get there, and there's this kind of twisted, rusty metal sticking out, and I'm thinking, oh my god, what am I doing? This is really scary. But the guys I was diving with, John and Duncan, they were just so cool. I mean, because they do so much spearfishing up there as well. So Duncan was showing John this dive, and he said, Okay, what you need to do is kind of follow me down, I'll do it with you, and then we'll take Emma through. So it was the sense of trust I had to have because the dive was you duckdive down, you basically went down about 12 meters through this tiny hole in the red. You didn't know where you were going, then round a dog leg, round, and then you came out into the cavern of the ship. And it was the most beautiful thing ever. Because the spars of the ship, these metal spars, were running vertically down, and they were covered with the most beautiful white seaweedy kelp. And there were fish everywhere, and the sunlight was coming through. I liken it to some kind of underwater cathedral. And I remember just thinking, it was so staggeringly beautiful. And the whole trip was about giving me the confidence to go off and then start teaching free diving. The confidence to get into very cold, very dark water where I wasn't really sure what was there. And the confidence to dive down into this really, really scary wreck. The kind of dive I would never, ever, ever take a student ever. But I trusted my buddies and and I trusted myself. And that to me was one of the most pivotal dives of my life.

SPEAKER_05 26:57

Oh yeah, I I actually forgot. Okay, uh, let's see. Uh hi, I'm Aaron Arngrim, prolific rack junkie that can talk to you about all things war wrecks, and you're listening to the best 30 minutes about diving. The Deeper Blue Podcast.

SPEAKER_03 27:24

Hi, everyone. The Deeper Blue Podcast is brought to you by Sunto, the uh makers of those fabulous, fabulous dive computers. I think I so ha ha ha Sunto. I have to say, you know, Jason, you know, I've been watching some of the adverts for uh for Cunto and I just cannot nail the Finnish accent because they're a Finnish company. They have a really it sounds really cool when it's finished.

SPEAKER_04 27:48

I would try that people would be like, I think that's more Danish. So I'm so I have another. Wow.

SPEAKER_03 27:54

So you ever dive with a Cinto before, Jason?

SPEAKER_04 27:57

It was actually one of my first dive computers for my for my wrist, which was fantastic. And I remember being kind of into it in a huge dial, which is fantastic.

SPEAKER_03 28:05

Was it a big bright yellow one?

SPEAKER_04 28:07

No, I don't get anything that's not black. So this one was black. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 28:12

Well, that's true. Like most divers, right?

SPEAKER_04 28:14

That's right. Well, I just dress in black all the time, anyways. But so we're talking here about the Cunto Heritage, which is the so this is the first, not only was it my first dive computer, but they were the first to introduce dive computers profile memory, ascent rate, monitoring, scrollable user menus, backlights, watch sizes, and a compass.

SPEAKER_03 28:31

Well, you know, the compass thing is really interesting because I'm not sure you know that I didn't actually know this until I I spoke to some of my friends over in Cinto, but they pioneered some of the compass, nothing to do with diving. The guy behind Cunto actually created this, you know, the the compass that floats around in in Liquid. He he pioneered that, and that's where Cinto came from. And um they said Mr.

SPEAKER_04 28:53

Cinto? Uh Jerry Cinto, was that Jerry Cunto?

SPEAKER_03 28:57

It might have been. I'd have to look up his name. That's really terrible about uh not remembering his name, but um it's very it's a very fit very finished name. And that's what he created, and and that's where the the whole company came from. And they they then went beyond that to create all sorts of outdoor activity stuff. And I'll be honest, I've been a Cunto diver for pretty much my whole diving career. I've always had a Cento uh dive computer attached to my wrist store. I did have some air integrated stuff on my regs and stuff before that. But I I you know you probably cut me in half and it'll probably read Cunto.

SPEAKER_04 29:28

Right, sure. Well, I gotta say that um uh all all of these things we're talking about, Cento the Heritage, that's actually pretty cool. Obviously, I'm a huge fan of history. So the idea of like these were the first people I believe. Although I gotta say the compass part for me underwater, I know this is this is sacrilege to say, but I don't need the compass. I just follow the dive master. I'm just looking around at the what's going on around me. I know that's terrible to say because I'm a recreational diver. I'm not like uh super hardcore like a lot of the people we talk to on this podcast. Uh so as long as the dive master's compass is working, I'm okay. But everything else, um I but everything else, that's actually really cool. I really I love heritage. I love the idea of the fact that they started this kind of stuff. That's very cool.

SPEAKER_03 30:10

It is very cool. So listen, I think everyone should go and check out the uh Cinto Heritage stuff on deeper blue.com and you know read a bit more about Cinto because they have very cool backgrounds. Cinto. Sunto.

SPEAKER_04 30:32

Today's top tip comes from Women Divers, Hall of Fame member Sylvia Goh, scuba diver, stunt woman, and photojournalist.

SPEAKER_08 30:39

This is Sylvia Goh's top tip.

SPEAKER_00 30:41

My top tip for scuba diving is don't look like a Christmas tree. I I believe in less is more, and I don't like to take a lot of dingly dangly accessories with me. I take my mask fin, snorkel, regulator, wetsuit, and that's it. I don't take notebooks, I don't take shakers or pointers or anything that can be caught on stuff or take my attentions away from what I'm there to do. If I'm doing stunt work, I need to be focused on the action. If I'm teaching people, I need to focus on the people. And if I'm there to just take pictures and memories and have fun, that's all I want. I really believe that spending time clipping all this stuff on your gear is just really a hazard for getting caught on the reef or on the rack or on the boat.

SPEAKER_07 31:35

That's an excellent top tip. I I don't ever want to look like a Christmas tree.

SPEAKER_00 31:39

I just need so many people with like two flashlights and pointers and shakers and camera and and the iPhone and the little camera and the head camera and GoPros, everything but the kitchen sink.

SPEAKER_07 31:55

Well, thank you so much for that, Sylvia.

SPEAKER_03 32:09

Finally, every episode we share a story from you, the dive community, where we ask you to tell us about your best dive ever.

SPEAKER_01 32:17

This is Ted Cole from around the Cincinnati area. Took the kids to snorkel off a Grand Cayman. This was the youngest one's first time, and when he got finished, he realized that he had lost his tooth during the dive. He was extremely upset and crying, thinking that now the tooth fairy wouldn't know about this. So I told him that the ocean fairies would talk to the tooth fairies and let them know what had happened. This helped, and he settled down some, but he's even more thrilled the next day to find that the tooth fairy had left him some money and also a note thanking the ocean fairies for letting them know. I told him also that now that since he had lost his first tooth there, this is a special spot, and he was forever a favorite with the ocean fairies.

SPEAKER_03 33:02

We'd love to hear your story about diving. So at the end of the show, you'll find out all the info you need to submit your best dive ever.

SPEAKER_04 33:13

Thanks for listening to the Deeper Blue Podcast. Find out more about all the stories you've heard, plus connect with the world's largest dive community at deeperblue.com. If you like what you heard, please share, like, and read our show wherever you get your podcasts, as those shares and likes really make a difference. Thanks so much, and see you next week.