Breaking the 2nd Rule Of Scuba Diving

hmm. Open water diver manual, chapter 1, page 18. Scuba diving is a spectator sport, avoid touching fish, coral and other aquatic life. So why then are we still having these problems? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Divers Ready!, my name's James and this is Mouthpiece Monday, where we take three minutes to share our thoughts and opinions on the latest scuba trends. It doesn't matter which agency you did your open water training with. I guarantee you somewhere in the training material was written the words do not touch the fishies. Get your fins off the coral. Do not interfere with the marine environment. Social media has a lot to answer for and I know like saying that as a youtuber is kind of hypocritical but I really feel that there are people out there that are trying to go viral or get you know get the maximum amount of clicks by doing crazy things that are negatively impacting the marine environment and at the same time setting a bad example for people that are following them. If hundreds of thousands of followers see a self-proclaimed conservationist riding a mammoth great white shark around Hawaii like it's Seabiscuit. What's to stop them thinking that it's acceptable on their next snorkel trip to ride a green sea turtle or slap a manta ray or you know try and ride a shark of their own. End up getting bit and perpetuating the cycle of thinking that sharks are bad for people. I get the point that she who does not need to be named was trying to show that humans aren't a great white shark natural prey but I feel that if she'd had just swam peacefully alongside the shark without actually having to physically touch, it grab hold of its dorsal fin ride, along with it. The point would have been equally valid. My open water instructor when I was going through the open water class, in the days before a social media, was a guy called Steve Puli, he sat me down in the classroom day one lesson one rule number one never hold your breath rule number two don't touch the fishies. It was a very simple lesson it stuck with me. I've gone on and become an instructor in my own right and every single person that I've instructed has received those same two rules. So there's a role model behavior there that I learnt from Steve that I've been able to pass on to my students and it's not a very difficult lesson or understand. Two reasons, in case you've forgotten, why we don't touch marine animals. Number one is we can hurt them. Reason number two that you don't touch marine life is that they can hurt you. They have teeth, they have stingers, some have venom. If you go out there and provoke a marine animal into defending itself in a way that thousands of years of evolution have taught it to do and you end up getting hurt I really don't give a bleep. Let me give you an example of the trend that I'm talking about close your eyes for a minute and imagine that instead of being one bipedal animal you are actually a tiny micro organism or better yet a colony of microorganisms the over 600 years has perfectly grown into these artistic patterns that ideally cling to the rocks while sucking microscopic nutrients out of the vast ocean. Have you got that, have you got that image? Okay, then I want you to imagine that one day some absolute douche and I mean God's perfect idiot decides to come along. You know I'll make my Instagram really lit bro if I carved my name into this coral head. Scleractinian coral is a thing now? I'm not cool with that and neither should you be. Here in Florida recently there's been two very high-profile cases of marine animal abuse. I want to preface these examples with number one I don't know if any of them would divers they could have been they could not have been. And number two, we're talking about a very small minded subset of the population. I still believe that most divers are conservationists at heart, that people that enjoy the marine world want to see it preserved. The first video involved these three idiots who decided to drag a shark behind their boat at high speed until the poor creature died. These idiots have also been profiled in the past filtering beer through a groupers gills and also pouring beer into the mouth of a hammerhead shark. So you kind of get an idea of the level of idiocy that we're dealing with here. I mean real Neanderthals. So why did they film this? What was their motivation? Well their motivation came out in the court trial. It was very two dimensional they thought that they would impress a local shark expert with their antics. Turned out the shark expert that they sent the video to was the one that turned them in. Then you have this idiot , who down in Key West decided to be fun to jump off a pier and make a fake, Im drowning a pelican video. When asked why he did it, and I quote, "so I could brag about it on Facebook". Now in both of these instances the perpetrators went to jail. In my opinion not for long enough. Now I'm using the word idiot a lot in this video and I apologize for that I'm sure these four individuals have mothers and their mothers probably loved them. But you've got to be a special kind of stupid to film yourself committing a crime, yes abusing animals is a crime, and then post it to social media. You know that magical land that has all of your personal information. So how do we, the 99% , the good divers actually prevent these things from happening in the future? It's very simple, take their fame away. Do not use our social media outlets to share their foolish acts and I'm guilty of it too don't get me wrong I get angry I hit that share button, I'm like look what these idiots did. We need to take the moral high ground here and demonstrate some kind of self-control and stop making these morons famous. Because that's what they're actually after. They want that fame, they want to be the Bonnie and Clyde of the shark dragging world. Instead, let's just share photos of their sad little faces as they're on the way to pick up the soap from the jail shower floor. Last thing before I leave you on this Mouthpiece Monday, I want you to take a look at this photo right here. Yes, that shows a diver petting a whale shark I'm gonna give you five seconds in the comments below I want you to guess where I found that photo. You ready? 5 4 3 2 1 Did you guess, I found it on the GoPro website. When you go to the go for a website the new hero black 7 and you look for the dive housing for that camera, that is the lead photo. GoPro really? You can do better. So let me know in the comments below if, A) you've seen in years behavior firsthand and B) did you do anything about it. Please click that subscribe button and the little bell icon and that'll notify you every time we drop a new video. Ladies and gentlemen thank you so much for joining me that your Mouthpiece Monday for this week. Im James. This is Divers Ready! Dive safe. Dive often.

Channel: Divers Ready

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Keywords: james blackman, scuba diver, diving, dive gear, dive equipment, padi, scuba, diver, open water, deep diver, scubadive, scuba love, scubalover, diver advice, new diver, scuba certified, scuba certification, scuba cert, girls that scuba, guys that scuba, scuba gear, scuba review, diver training, diving hints & tips, dive instructor, dive master, gopro, underwater conservation, marine biology, do fish feel pain, starfish pictures, diving signs, scuba diving

Id: KOEHWDe1h4E

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Wed May 01 2019