Do you believe in ghosts and spooks? No, me neither, or rather I didn’t, but now I am not so sure. I am going to tell you two occurrences that have made me think twice, one non diving, one diving.

The non diving is just to get you into the “spirit” of things.

About 5 years ago I was on a TV reality show, 8 blokes and 8 girls dumped on a remote deserted island in the South China Sea. We were divided into two camps of 4 blokes and 4 girls and the mechanics of what happened over the next 2 months are not important to this story.

Most of us probably haven’t really studied narcosis since we were rooky divers, aside from the usual “narked” jokes we all make about mermaids and dolphins. So it seems like a good time to cover the subject in an easy to understand format.

I’ve recently carried out a little informal survey with many divers, and there seems to be no obvious indicator as to when or why it should occur. It just sometimes happens, but most often doesn’t.

Let’s answer some basic questions about Nitrogen Narcosis:

What is it?

Simply Scuba send us a newsletter every month with their current special offers, and we pass on details of the best ones for you.

This months they have a special running on the Suunto D4, which is now available in 4 different colours. SS are offering it this month at 250 Pounds with free UK shipping. Remember if you’re in Europe or the US, you can take advantage of the current weak pound and get a real bargain!

It’s no surprise that the Aladin Prime has become a staple computer of dive schools. It’s robust, fairly easy to use and keenly priced at the budget end of the spectrum.

You know what its like, the phone rings and someone says fancy diving, but today I said no thanks not in the mood.

What a week, the weather has been the number one topic in Australia and probably most of you European based people have seen the news coming out of South Australia with the massive fires that are raging across the state, what has been a little overshadowed is the flooding in North Queensland which in its way has been as devastating as the fires but luckily without the loss of life.

But a story that has struck me deeply this week is the death of a 5 year old boy.

This was the big day - the day we were to dive the world renowned Thistlegorm, but first we headed for another wreck, The Kingston. She was an 80 meter long steamer which went down in 1881 on the delightfully named Shag Rock.

We dive pretty much every weekend, and this weekend we headed out to do a dive that we may have done 100 times before - swimming out along the coral "finger" that runs due East of Charco del Palo.

The usual suspects were along for the trip, Crisis Chris, Medical Mick, Bilious Brian, Shivering Steve, Mark the accountant and yours truly. We'd decided to follow the finger at 15 Meters depth, so that when we reached the big drop off, we could get maximum time as we went deep.

I tested one of these lamps over the weekend, and I surfaced impressed. The C Lite 8 is a good value for money lamp - here in Europe it's priced at €99 and most US sites seem to sell it for around $100. That's the price of the lamp itself, although you can buy it with a nifty little backup lamp, which is much smaller, for another €30.

The first dive that morning was to be on the Rosalie Moller. This was to be a deep dive, so we switched to a lean 28% nitrox mix, to avoid any oxygen toxicity. I sensed at the briefing that something was wrong - we were told to stay with the guides at all times and not to enter deco. Some of us were a little annoyed about this - at the time I was one of the less experienced divers, and I had over 200 dives to my credit, with well over half of those at 30 meters or more! Deco diving is something I do most weeks, so we knew already that this was going to be a short dive.

.......I did most of my diving with my friend Brian, an old hand, who has been diving for ever, and has forgotten more skills than I've learned.

Now Brian is a great collector when he’s diving and regularly brings up stuff from the sea bed, and his house is a treasure trove of cannon balls and the like.