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Its just £20 and as well as enjoying the below unique & exclusive set of Magic Snorkel benefits - Plus you will more than recoup the cost of the Pass plus much more after receiving the discount on your 1st dive trip*

What you Get:
  • You'll receive preferential rates at dive centers worldwide, only as a Magic Snorkel Platinum Pass Holder. For example:
    Dive Santorini    , Greece offers 15% Off...
    Dive Tech,     Grand Cayman offer 10% off all dive packages.
    Barbados Blue, 10% off all dive packages*
  • You'll Also Enjoy Exclusive rates on dive insurance:
    Westfield Sub Aqua and Marine Insurance now offer 10% off their listed prices.
  • You'll be part of a growing comunity of like minded divers that actively care! 
  • Your annual pass provides offers & benefits like no other & 100% of all our profits are donated to shark and marine conservation campaigns worldwide!
 
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JK Blog

The Bail-out Of Last Resort

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Written by john kean | 16 September 2009


John Kean on the Thistlegorm: Breathing direct from a cylinder
in a way you won't often find described in the manuals.
For emergencies only!

You're trapped on a wreck in low visibility with entangled equipment, separated from your buddy with multiple first-stage blow-outs and 15 minutes' deco remaining - get out of that! John Kean takes us through the moves. Photography by Yann Vautrin.

FRED DIBNAH, THE LEGENDARY LANCASHIRE STEEPLEJACK, once said: 'I never fell off a big chimney. You'd only fall off once, like.'
As a teenager in the early '80s, I learnt a lot from listening to Fred's TV philosophising, which included such gems as 'If you make one mistake, it's half a day out with the undertaker'.

He didn't mince his words. Years later, I wonder how my aquatic education might have proceeded had it been Fred Dibnah writing the manual instead of a more politically correct global giant. He might have replaced such statements as 'you have five available options in the unlikely event of you running out of air' with 'if you sit under an elephant's backside, it'll...'
Beneath the flat cap and amiable persona was perhaps the greatest technical diver that never was. Fred's chosen passion was attaching himself to tall chimneys. Nonetheless, he made as much of the preparation and planning in going several hundred feet above sea level as those who went several hundred feet beneath it.

Our relationship with water is a unique and often personal one. Non-swimmers may reach their comfort zone waist-high in the sea, while babies without a sense of their own mortality will happily swim under water at a few weeks old.
Most adults can scrape a length under water in their local swimming pool but few can emulate a champion freediver and cover 100m on a single breath.

Scuba divers, of course, interact with water at many different levels of depth and experience, where the environment that is one man's comfort level could prove fatal to another.

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The Bomb Collector

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Written by john kean | 16 September 2009

A crate of shells aboard Thistlegorm.


Continuing our occasional series on aspects of the Red Sea's most popular wreck, Sharm-based instructor and Thistlegorm chronicler John Kean takes an armaments expert on a bit of a busman's holiday

I ALWAYS LIKE TO ASK my students what they do for a living. It might indicate how they will fare on the diving course. 
Pilots are often the best, because of their nice mix of practical and academic training. The armed services are pretty good too, and they always do what they're told! 
The police take lots of notes, and the clergy just pray that the Almighty is watching over them, and probably me.
'I'm a bomb disposal specialist,' says Peter. 'I decommission ammunition dumps and clear unexploded ordnance. You could say I'm the one who clears up the mess after the wars are over.'
Peter Le Sueur had signed up for a decompression-diving course. The 'mess' means unexploded bombs, and hundreds of rounds of live shells or landmines, sweating dangerously in the heat of foreign deserts.
Peter started in ordnance clearance as a technician in 1972, and has been nose to nose with thousands of the world's deadliest explosives for more than 35 years. He has worked in all the hotspots - Afghanistan, Kuwait during the first Gulf War, Iraq, Cambodia, Mozambique, Sudan and Nepal, and is now in the Balkans, ecommissioning munitions dumps in Montenegro.


In many professions the consequences of error are the missing of a deadline, loss of a sale or damage to a product. Even in technical diving there are often multiple safety procedures in place before things go terribly wrong. 
In Peter's job, error means instant death, not just your own but possibly that of many others in surrounding acres. He showed me a recent photograph of an Albanian arms dump that ignited prematurely, leaving a 178m-long crater. 'There used to be buildings on that spot. Anybody even close to that explosion would have been completely vaporised.'
I asked him what type of bombs he had dealt with. Grenades, mortars, artillery shells and aircraft bombs weighing up to 2000 pounds, he told me.
And what interested him about decompression diving? 'I'm very happy to look at reefs and marine life, but my real interest is in shipwrecks.

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30 ways in which Tech diving can boost your fun!

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Written by john kean | 16 September 2009

John Kean gets to grips with some basic buoyancy work.
John Kean gets to grips with some basic buoyancy work.

John Kean is passionate about technical diving, and wants more of us to enjoy its benefits. Trouble is, he says, the Technical Prevention Officers are putting us off

John Kean is a technical and recreational diving instructor based in Sharm el Sheikh, where he has certified more than 1000 students over the past 10 years. He is also the author of SS Thistlegorm, The True Story of the Red Sea's Greatest Shipwreck, and sits on the board of the South Sinai Diving & Marine Association.

HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A PUB and noticed an unusual breed of dog sitting by its owner and attracting the attention of customers? One by one, people walk up and say: 'What is it?'
Over the past few years, I've been running decompression diving courses in the Red Sea, often on recreational dive-boats. My gear and that of my students is usually in close proximity to the recreational divers, so it has attracted comments both positive, negative and just plain inquisitive.
My 'dog' is nothing more than theirs, insomuch as we all have BCs, tanks and regulators, and a couple of buttons to inflate and deflate. Yet people steer around my twin-set as if it's a foreign landmine or sleeping Rottweiler that might go off or attack at any minute.
Some just watch, inching closer to show that they're not afraid, a bit like standing next to the yellow line on a platform as the train whistles by.

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