For any diver, Jacques Cousteau is a hero. He perfected the open circuit breathing apparatus we all learned to dive with, and he brought the oceans and sea life into our living rooms in glorious colour.

But you may not know that:

1/ His Christian name was actually Jacques-Yves. He dropped the second part to make life easier for English speaking audiences.

2/ His famous boat Calypso was rammed and sunk in a Singapore harbour, but was eventually refloated is now being restored as a museum.

3/ He starred in 120 television documentaries and wrote 50 books during his lifetime.

4/ Despite France being occupied by Germany during the second world war, Cousteau, as a naval officer, constantly sought to help the French navy join with the allies, and he lead a commando operation against Italian spies which resulted in him receiving several decorations.

Crazy Scuba has been part of the Gordonisimo site since we launched, and I was surprised to receive an email from the team there the other day to tell me the website is up for sale.

Owner Britt Ross emailed us to let us know that after 25 years as President of the company, he’s decided to sell up and go and work on the family cattle ranch in Texas.

Many divers go through a whole career without experiencing a night dive. And if you’re anything like I was, it may be a case of deliberately avoiding them!

Night diving was something I never planned to do. If I’m honest, the thought of being submerged and having no idea what might be swimming towards me held no appeal at all.

And then one day a buddy arranged a night dive for me and uttered the immortal challenge “You’re not scared, are you?” Of course I wasn’t!

We’d made the decision to go ahead with the dive, knowing our exit was going to be tough, but manageable. What we hadn’t accounted for was that conditions would worsen while we were diving…….

Charco del Palo is a fabulous dive site, with plenty of options, caves, deep reefs and life. We dive there a lot. Entry is a giant stride from some rocks, and exit is via one of two stainless steel bathing ladders, which drop right down to the sea bed. The technique is to hold the bottom of the ladder, remove your fins, secure them, and climb back to the surface.

On this particular day, we enjoyed a reasonable dive, although visibility wasn’t great due to the rough weather. As we returned to the bay, we could see how rough it now was at the surface. I tried to make my usual 3 meter safety stop, but I was being churned all over the place.

We’ve all faced the problem of changing one aspect of our kit and then finding our weight and trim is all wrong. It happened to me recently when I switched to a semi dry suit.

The other problem more experienced divers face is that they can easily compensate for being over or under weighted, but this can lead to excess air consumption, fatigue and less enjoyment on a dive.

So it seemed like a good time to re examine the correct way to set your weights up. The essence is to find the correct weight and then trim it so that you can move around underwater effortlessly.

Weight

PADI teaches that for correct buoyancy, you should be able to sit at the surface at eye level with no air in your BCD.

The mistake is that most people check this at the start of the dive, and it should be at the finish.

At the start, with a full cylinder, you should very slowly sink with no air in your BCD, and remembering to breathe through your regulator.

I recently took possession of a Greenforce dive lamp for the first time and I’ve been delighted with it!

The Greenforce comes in a strong and durable briefcase, which looks something like a laptop case, and immediately became the storage space for my dive computer and log books, as well as the lamp.

The model I have is the 12 volt, 30 watt halogen lamp, and I prefer conventional lighting to LED as the light seems more natural underwater.

The Greenforce system uses a cylindrical battery pack, and the bulb head can be either attached directly to it, or via an umbilical cable, with both components coming as part of the kit.

I’ve tried both, and prefer the umbilical set up, with the battery pack attached to the cylinder – it means the lightweight head clips to my jacket and I can use it without even unclipping, as it’s exactly where I need it to be. It also puts the heaviest part of the unit onto my back which seems more stable.

In terms of lighting performance, the Greenforce is good, but not the best. My old Kowalski seemed to give a broader, brighter light – the Greenforce is a little too focused for me. It’s exceptional when looking at a specific object, but for scanning a cave or a wreck, not as good.

We had good fun diving with Darren and Leona while they were on the island for a week. Darren took some amazing photos, and I’ve attached a few for you. They were all taken either at Playa Chica or Charco del Palo.

After more than 200 dives, my trusty wetsuit finally gave up on me. This happened on what I would describe as the “posterior” seam and caused much amusement from my buddies!

I had decided it was time to convert to a semi-dry. Although I generally dive in water that’s never cooler than about 18 degrees, my blood has been thinned by living for years in the tropics.

After some research I went for the Mares Isotherm, which comes in a 6.5MM thickness, and having completed a dozen dives I can now report my findings.

An amazing story just popped up in the local Sunday Newspaper relating to a monster shark lurking off the main coast area around Brisbane. Yesterday a 3.5mtr White Pointer (Great White) was almost bitten in half by an unseen predator, the general opinion is that it was another White Pointer but with the bite marks that it left on the smaller version the monster must be in the region of 5/6mtrs. Just to put things in perspective the picture shown with this article is about the size of the one almost bitten in half. The body was found just off Stradbroke Island caught in shark nets there to protect swimmer on the local beach.

One great thing has come to light with the publishing of this story the amount of public opinion that is in favour to leave the sharks alone, I was very surprised at the feeling of the majority of people mainly saying that ‘they are king of the food chain in the sea, leave the poor buggers alone’

This is an international site. But most of the writing on it comes from Medical Mick and myself, and we’re based in Lanzarote. We don’t offer any kind of diving courses, instruction or anything like that – we simply dive and enjoy the almost prefect waters around this island – we have great sea life, nothing too scary, amazing visibility and a good variety of diving.

If you do want to come and dive in Lanzarote, you should do so with one of the dive centres over here. You can get details of them via a web search, but here are the schools I’ve used and would recommend from personal experience:

Costa Teguise

Aquatis Dive Center