Diving Archives - Page 25 of 34 - Books by Eric Douglas

A new story about sharks…for kids!

May 16, 2012 By Eric Douglas

My new children’s chapter book, Swimming with Sharks, is now available as a Kindle Ebook. This book is written for young readers, from 5-to 9-years-old, as a beginning chapter book. You can download a copy today and begin reading it with your kids tonight. Click on the book title link and it will take you to the page on Amazon.

Swimming with Sharks features two young girls living on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with their parents who work at a marine science center. The girls love the ocean and are learning about its creatures. The story opens with the girls snorkeling in the ocean while their parents dive below them conducting research. Back at the aquarium, they overhear students talking about sharks and spreading their own misunderstanding. After a confrontation with the other students, the girls help their parents nurse a sick sandtiger shark back to health. The story is fun and entertaining, but is also loaded with information about sharks and why they are something to be respected and admired, but not feared.

As my own girls were growing up, they were huge fans of the Magic Treehouse books that included information on science, art, history and geography while being carefully disguised as a fun adventure. I decided to write stories for them focusing on the ocean. Swimming with Sharks is the same approximate length as the Magic Treehouse books and other beginning chapter books. There are eight chapters, each about 1000 words long.

Swimming with Sharks is the second book to follow Jayne and Marie on the Outer Banks. The first was called “The Sea Turtle Rescue” and was originally published by the international environmental organization Oceana and used as part of their sea turtle outreach program. The Sea Turtle Rescue is now available for newspapers to publish as part of the Newspapers in Education program. Contact your local newspaper and tell them you want to see The Sea Turtle Rescue in your local newspaper.

One topic in the Swimming with Sharks is a thing called “finning” where sharks are caught, have their fins cut off for soup and then the animal is thrown back into the water to drown. If you want to learn more about this barbaric practice, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago.

Sharks are amazing creatures to see in the water and I am lucky to have made dives with sharks several times. I hope we learn that sharks are important to the health of the oceans before we are too late. A great way to do that is teach our children so they understand..

Diving needs heroes

May 15, 2012 By Eric Douglas

A few years ago, I gave a presentation about the state of diving as a sport. My basic point was that diving was more accessible than it has ever been, and there should be droves of people learning to dive, yet diving is flat…at best.

The people who started the sport in the 50s were their own heroes. And the sport grew. From 1958 to 1961, (and for years afterward in syndication) we had Sea Hunt’s Mike Nelson to get people excited about diving. And the sport grew. From 1968 to 1975, we had The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau to get us excited about diving. I remember watching that show as a kid. I have no doubt it inspired my desire to travel, explore the world and to dive. And the sport grew.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a hero like that today. There is no modern diving hero.

In 2005, I wrote my first novel with that problem in mind. I wanted to make the diving real enough that my fellow divers would go, “Yep, I can do that!” but I also wanted to make it exciting for non-divers so they would think about diving. One of the best compliments I ever got on a novel was when a non-diver told me that she could feel herself underwater while reading one of my books. For the record, the most amusing negative review I got for my first novel was “The prose is tepid.” I doubt it would be possible to be more cliché than that. Still, I learned from writing that book and the stories that have come after it.

I know several people who are doing amazing things diving. They are traveling the world and exploring new destinations. I have good friends who run fantastic businesses teaching divers to dive. Rich Synowiec and Darcy Kieran come to mind. Rich teaches diving in Michigan and Darcy in Montreal. In spite of their locations, they both have large followings and lots of divers. There are many, many others. They all know how to make diving fun and cool. Another good friend, Greg Holt, has built a tremendous life for himself with the syndicated radio show—Scuba Radio. (You can check him out at Scubaradio.com.) There are also people doing incredible scientific work in the ocean.

I’ve just released a new diving adventure as a Kindle novella called “Sea Monster”. It is set in the Florida Keys. Tomorrow, I plan to release a new children’s book called “Swimming with Sharks” for 5-9 year old wanna-be divers and kids who love the ocean. Next month, I plan to release a new novel as well. Stay tuned and share these stories with your diving friends and the non-divers as well. Get them thinking about diving and then find a way to get them underwater.

So, while I’ll never be diving’s hero, I plan to keep writing stories that help divers think about diving when they’re forced to stay dry and help non-divers think to themselves “I want to do that!” I’m hopeful someday soon we will find a new hero that inspires the next generation of divers as well.

Maybe one of you out there should step up to be the next diving hero….

CFD Diving in the Kanawha River

May 8, 2012 By Eric Douglas

My friend Bob Sharp is the assistant chief of the Charleston, WV Fire Department. As a diver, one of his greatest passions is the dive team. He ran the team until his latest promotion when he had to step aside and turn the daily activities over to Jeff Showalter. He is still closely involved, though.

All too often, the dive team is called into service around town. They recover cars, evidence and occasionally bodies from the Kanawha River. While they train for rescue missions, anyone who knows anything about Public Safety Diving knows that isn’t a very likely scenario.

Not long ago, Bob asked me to look over the dive team’s SOGs, or standard operating guidelines. At DAN, I had been asked to do that sort of thing from time to time or to offer safety guidance for dive operations. I even got a chance to do that once at Disney’s Living Seas exhibit. That was one of the best dive operations I’ve seen. They take visiting 100s of divers into the main exhibit each week without a mishap. I ended up suggesting a couple things they could change and they were very happy with my advice. I’m only bringing that story up to say that after going through the Charleston Fire Department Dive Team’s SOGs, I didn’t find anything that I would change. I could have nit-picked this or that, but it was an impressive document. These guys know their stuff.

Earlier today, Bob asked me to come and see a collaborative training session they were putting on with other dive teams in the area. The Saint Albans Fire Department Dive Team came up as did the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Department. The event was sponsored by Divers Training and Supply. The equipment manufacturer Interspiro brought in their surface supplied dive gear for the divers to try out. Pete Corbett from Divers Training and Supply also had DUI Dry Suits and Fisher Metal Detectors on hand for the divers to see. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to dive with them because I’m not part of the dive team.

Seeing different dive groups like this working together, of their own initiative, was great. From time to time different dive teams have to work together and it is extremely important that these divers are on the same page. There is nothing about Public Safety Diving that is easy. These divers are in a current with zero visibility struggling to find something missing on the bottom. It is physically taxing and mentally stressful.

My hat is definitely off to Bob Sharp, Jeff Showalter, Pete Corbett and the Charleston Fire Department Dive Team for putting on an event like this. They train monthly on their own, but said they planned to work together at least once a year. I’m impressed. And hopefully, one day, I’ll figure out a way to get in the water with them.

That’s all folks!

The real Mike Scott

April 25, 2012 By Eric Douglas

Twenty three years ago today, April 25, 1989, Michael Scott Burnsworth lost his battle with cancer. I was at Marshall, working at my work-study job when I heard. It was tough news to swallow although we all knew it was coming. Mike was a year older than I was and one of my closest friends. We’d been through a lot together. Way too many late nights running the roads, cruising in the Trans Am with the t-tops out, washing and detailing Mike’s car before going cruising at Ritter Park in Huntington or Coonskin in Charleston, chasing women and generally being delinquents.

Mike was 22 years old when he died. He was taken much too soon. A few days later, I was a pall bearer at his funeral. I’ll never forget my brother Stuart calling the radio station as we left Charleston, headed to Fairmont for the funeral and requesting Elton John’s Funeral for a Friend. Music was always a big part of our lives and it always helps.

For a long time after that I looked around for a way to deal with that loss. I promised him I would never forget him. In 2004, when I began writing my first novel, there was no question in my mind what my hero’s name would be–Mike Scott. I’ve published five more novels since then; all with Mike Scott as the central character. He even showed up in the short story Queen Conch and the free short story Land Sharks. It makes me smile to think of Mike when I write his name. The physical description for the character is how I remember Mike and how I believe he would have grown up. Would he have been a diver and traveled the world like the character in the books? No clue. But he would have had fun wherever he went. I’m sure of that. He always did. That’s what I remember most about Mike, his sense of humor and his laugh.

There is never anything good about someone dying of cancer and even less positive from someone dying just as his life was about to start. But the lesson I learned from it was to not settle for anything, not to give up and to always keep pushing. It’s sort of ironic that just yesterday I was having a bit of a crisis of confidence—nothing terribly uncommon for a writer. I was questioning if I was heading in the right direction and doing what I should be doing. I had thought about writing this blog, but then decided not to. (It was probably about the same time that the crisis of confidence began.) Last night, Mike’s brother Mark posted a comment about Mike’s passing and added a few pictures of Mike as well. And then I remembered what I’m supposed to be doing and why. I’ll take that as Mike’s way of kicking me in the butt, telling me to quit whining and get to work.

I hope I’ve made Mike proud. There’s no doubt in my mind he is watching over all of us down here who knew him; his family and his friends.

Rest in Peace, Mike..

CCTV on Lobster Divers in Honduras

April 16, 2012 By Eric Douglas

A few weeks ago, I posted a blog about being “made up” for international television. I had been invited to Washington DC for an interview on China Central Television (CCTV). They were doing a story on the lobster divers of Honduras for their broadcast on an English-language show Americas Now. The network broadcasts all over the world to English and Asian audiences.

The story aired last night on the network. Technically, it aired at 9:30 am Beijing time on Monday the 16th, but with the International Dateline, that made it Sunday night at 9:30 pm.

The network and the reporter, Michelle Begue, did a great job with the story. From the looks of it, they weren’t able to go out on one of the lobster boats to dive with the divers, mainly relying on stock footage and live footage and interviews with the divers who have suffered the results of diving for lobster.

As I have written about this issue and given interviews about what I’ve seen there, many people understand the issue, but others have questioned why we should care. I find it somewhat ironic that China television is telling a story about people laboring under terrible conditions when just a few weeks ago, stories broke about Chinese workers laboring under unfair conditions in China at an Apple factory building iPads and iPhones.

I see no difference in the lobster divers and men and women toiling in sweat shops. Groups have attempted to teach the divers safer diving techniques, but they get paid piecework. If you cut their diving in half, they can only make half as much money on a dive trip. They very quickly realize they can’t feed their families and their only option is to sacrifice their bodies. Apple is changing their work rules, hiring more people and still paying the men and women in the factory the same amount of money. Until that sort of thing happens for the lobster divers, there won’t be a significant change.

The story is called “Dangerous Prize” from the April 16, 2012 show. It is the first segment in the broadcast. My interview comes in around 14:09. All of the video clips and still images that show during my segment are mine.

If you want to see other stories on this subject, visit the page on my website for more links and images. You can also scan back through this blog. There are many posts from four trips to Honduras and trips to Brazil and Isla Natividad Mexico where divers harvest the sea and sacrifice their bodies..