Recent news releases from IANTD drew our attention to yet another in depth book from Tom Mount. The news release said.

“Tom Mount, D. Sc., Ph.D., N.D. is a diving pioneer in cave diving, deep diving, mixed gas diving, rebreather diving and wreck diving. His career also includes saturation diving, supervision of saturation diving, scientific diving and 50 years of diving leadership. While reviewing accidents in adventure sports, Tom became interested in why some survive difficult challenges while others perish in more simple predicaments, which led him to research survival mechanisms. It is apparent that the psychological and mental outlook as well as the physiological and physical demands contributes to who lives and who dies in critical situations. EXPLORATION & MIXED GAS DIVING ENCYCLOPEDIA, THE TAO OF SURVIVAL UNDERWATER addresses these issues. Joseph Dituri, M.S., is an avid rebreather, wreck and undersea explorer who pushes the technical edge of diving. A Navy Diving and Salvage Officer by trade, he continually seeks to improve his knowledge of deep diving and share his discoveries with others. Joe’s initiative has spurred changes in the way that conventional and military diving is being accomplished. He is the CEO of the Association for Marine Exploration, which conducts and facilitates innovative scientific exploration of undersea environments often in the twilight zone. While being responsible for the safety of others, Joseph developed an understanding of the physical and mental skills it takes to survive as a diver. His objective to share this knowledge is fulfilled in the pages of EXPLORATION & MIXED GAS DIVING ENCYCLOPEDIA, THE TAO OF SURVIVAL UNDERWATER. Tom Mount and Joseph Dituri are widely published and have written or contributed to numerous books, papers and many of the IANTD training materials. IANTD materials are located at www.IANTD.com and are available in your local IANTD Dive Shop. Tom & Joseph thank the expert contributors in their individual and collective areas for making this the definitive reference for How To Survive in Exploration Diving.”

So we thought it would be worth the hundred dollars (plus shipping) to order the manual for all the eager readers here at Big Blue Tech .

Our early attempts to get it shipped from America to Thailand were futile, so we had a third party order it from Canada and later ship it to us.

A few weeks later a large box arrived in the office looking in surprisingly good condition considering the distance traveled.

The sheer weight of the book is impressive. At almost 400 A4 glossy color pages the book rivaled every other book on our shelves taking first place in “the big book category” previously held by DAN ‘Deeper into diving’ on our bookcase..

First impressions when looking on the cover reveal that Tom Mount (the author) has a lot of friends who have been through a fair bit of education with several abbreviations at the end of their name. Our last most impressive book, the DAN Deeper Into Diving had the name “Richard E. Moon MD, FRCPC, FACP, FCCP” and that was a good read.

As we flipped through the pages we found over saturated reds and purples, with photo’s of 1980’s technical divers in pink and orange wetsuits proving a bit unsettling. If you had read any of Tom Mounts previous books like “Technical Diver Student Workbook for the Technical Diver & Normoxic Trimix Diver” you would be used to this style of presentation. Despite having read his previous work we thought twice about showing it to people as a representation of the new and emerging community of technical divers who prefer things simple, streamlined and certainly not pink.

Despite the books unique layout and color the content is amazingly rich in theory covering all theoretical aspects from physiology in great length, psychological aspects, decompression models and decompression sickness. I’ve stressed the word theoretical because beyond theory there’s nothing necessarily practical about the book, failing to expand or explain the technical function of things. At one point, the book begins to describe fins and other general equipment which climaxes with a one paragraph mention of a CCR and then moves on to Daltons Law (theory). When I gave this to someone who was thinking of getting into technical diving it simply confused them and overwhelmed them. I realize this book is designed for the more advanced technical diver but it could of been toned down a bit to appeal to a broader audience.

We continued to read through the content to see what was added further, instead of the essential ground works education and we found a lovely little section on meditation where the author demonstrates how he’s a Grand Master and uses Qi Gong to build energy. At that point we were lost…completely lost. The chapter that held this obscure section was referred to as physical fitness which would lead someone to think there would be practical (opposite of theoretical) examples of building physical strength for technical diving. There were examples like “eat right, exercise and get good sleep” but there were also the more disturbing “Chase, Age 8, Ha(s) received special energy training exercises from grand master mount in order to - force tom backwards when pressing against a knife”, so basically Tom is putting knives to the throat of 8 year old and having them push him away using only their Qi Gong’ness, maybe his next book should read “how to repel old men with sticks and knives with your throat” and put only theoretical information about scuba diving in it, image below.

Now I’m not knocking the power of the spiritual world, i beleive there’s a lot there to be discovered but I think there should be books then. The practical guide to surviving technical diving and one which is more theoretical.

The one saving grace about this book is you can always pick it up and learn something you had forgotten or simply overlooked. Additionally, the expedition chapter is a very good section with some helpful planning tips for people wanting to do their own expeditions in the future.

Looking at the back of the book is quite revealing when reading about the contributors and realizing that the authors of this book also wrote many “bibles” used in the technical diving community today. These other books may be black and white and very old but a lot of the methods used 30 years ago are still taught today.

I think the book should be labeled clearer for future people who can’t read it first or see a preview of it’s content because this book is not essential nor should be considered an encyclopedia for everyone. Additionally those who would consider this book a great source of information and a rich resource probably already know much of what’s being said inside. Those who don’t already know the things inside would probably get confused quite early on.

This leaves us to still refer to the DAN Deeper into Diving as the true encyclopedia of technical diving as a reference and resource for true survival.

Exploration and Mixed Gas Diving Encyclopedia; The Tao of Survival Underwater can be bought at http://www.iantd.com/

By JAY R. MURRAY
Guest commentary

I am a Professional Association of Dive Instructors dive master. I worked in Monterey at Aquarius Dive Shops during the mid-1990s. I used to take people on dive tours of our area. I’m still a registered divemaster, but on Aug. 25, 1994, while on a dive off Point Lobos with friends, I was exposed to a new, very unusual sound.It sounded like a low frequency “boom box.” The sounds were short pulses about one second long, repeated every five to 10 seconds. I could actually feel my lungs vibrating from each pulse. I immediately surfaced to see if any vessels might be in the area. I saw none.

Within a few days, a friend and I made an underwater videotape that our Naval Postgraduate School analyzed. They said I had captured the sound but they didn’t know the source. They said they called Washington and were told officials there said they didn’t know what was going on.

NPS said the sound could be coming from either oil and gas exploration, Navy fleet operations beyond the horizon, or oceanographic research. Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary officials also suggested they had no idea of the source.

Then, one person at the Washington office of the National Marine Fisheries Service said that what we had been exposed to was a “classified government test.” We laughed at that point. How could it be classified if scuba divers were exiting the water complaining of weird sounds that made our lungs vibrate?

Many divers reported the sounds. These events were broadcast
over all the local and major national TV newscasts. About a month into the experiment, I went on a dive trip with the owners of Aquarius and several friends to Fiji, 5,000 miles away. Sure enough, the same sounds, only fainter. I recorded them.When this data was presented to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, I was finally told what was going on. The name of the experiment was the Magellan 2 Sea Trials. It was being conducted northwest of the Farallon Islands about 150 to 300 miles to the north. It was called Magellan because it’s the “sound heard around the world.”

The surface vessel Cory Chouest lowers an array of 18 car-sized transducers into the depths and transmits sounds as loud as a Saturn 5 moon rocket all the way across ocean basins. When the Cory Chouest first tested the system, it went to the southern Indian Ocean and conducted the Heard Island Feasibility Test.

Here in Monterey Bay, scientists lowered listening devices to see if they could detect the 57 Hz sounds. Sure enough, they had traversed the Indian Ocean and then traveled across the entire Pacific Ocean to be received here. The same transmissions were received in Bermuda.

The technology has been developed to hunt for quiet diesel electric submarines that some rogue states like North Korea and Iran possess. Basically, the louder the blasts of sounds, the further their sonar system will detect threat vessels. And, like a boom box in a car, the lower the frequency/tone, the further the transmissions go.

Our Navy has conducted an environmental impact report on the sonar system. It’s called Low Frequency Active Sonar (LFAS). It steadfastly refuses to acknowledge it was responsible for the diver disruption issues in the Pacific Ocean during Magellan 2. They say the recordings I possess must be some problem with my breathing apparatus.

In the years between then and now, it has been found that “standard” Navy sonar, which has been used for decades on the bows of our warships, causes acoustic trauma in marine mammals, causing them to strand and die.

The impact of the sonar blasts on marine life ruptures ear cavities and other air spaces. It also has been postulated that the animals are being scared into surfacing too fast and they suffer a malady similar to the bends in divers. There have been many instances when Navy sonar operations are directly linked to these stranding events.

As it turns out, I and a boatload of paying customers went on a dive off Hawaii in 1997, where we were exposed to this type of midfrequency (3,000 Hz) sonar. All the divers heard it. That was my last recreational dive.

There are other military systems operations that use sound to send communications to submerged vessels.

The Supreme Court has now sanctioned the testing as critical for national security. While I am not opposed to a strong military, I am against use of technology that disregards the other inhabitants of earth. We have no right to expose all living things in our oceans to these signals, which are known to harm and kill.

I feel the court has made a serious mistake in allowing humans to degrade the oceanic environment. If the justices hopped in the water with the technology at full power, they would change their minds. If they survived.

Jay Murray lives in Carmel Valley. He may be reached at JayMurray2@aol.com