Soundings
Phil and Jean-Michel Cousteau with the Nuytco Research EXOSUIT
Phil Nuytten Publisher and Senior Editor M
an, it looks as though winter has arrived with a vengeance outside DIVER’s office! It’s warm and cosy in here, but every street corner seems to
have a dog stuck to a hydrant, government officials walking around with their hands in their own pockets and, everywhere, hardy Canadians looking south and saying, “Where in the hell is that global warming??” Perhaps a slight exaggeration, but you get the picture – it’s cold!
Probably the only Canuck mammals who can completely ignore the current cold snap are the Beluga whales that Shoshanah Jacobs writes about in Serenading Belugas (see page 42). DIVER editor Virginia Cowell could also tell you some great stories about Belugas, since she once worked as a guide in a Canadian Arctic camp called ‘Arctic Watch’, located on the shore of Cunningham Inlet. The highlight of the season there was the annual migration of the Belugas into the inlet to socialize, mate, do the hokey pokey, calf, hang with their homies – or whatever Belugas do. We are talking about lots and lots of Belugas! My wife, Mary, and I flew up to visit Virginia, landing first at the hamlet of Resolute, Nunavut, where we arranged the charter of a small aircraft to take us to Cunningham Inlet. As we flew up the narrow inlet, we were stunned to see that it was literally choked with white whales! I would have loved to have my dive gear with me and my trusty underwater video camera – but I never dreamed it would be that spectacular! As you will see from the pics in Shoshanah’s piece, it would have been an incredible opportunity. Oh,
well...could’ve, should’ve, and so on.
Moving on… Doctor Dave’s column in this issue should, in my opinion, be required reading for anyone contemplating a switch from open circuit scuba to a closed circuit rebreather. This discussion of what can go
wrong is a logical follow-up to his last piece on the mechanics of CCR diving, but it’s also a sobering reminder that it’s most often the mechanism on the mouthpiece end of those corrugated hoses that fails. Let’s
see....Be sure to pick up a copy of the January 2014 issue of WIRED magazine at your local newsstand, if you are not already a subscriber. It’s a great mag and each issue features all sorts of cutting edge technology – both hard and soft. A piece of ‘hard’ technology that features in that January issue is the one-atmosphere EXOSUIT from Nuytco Research Ltd., DIVER mag’s parent company. Faithful DIVER readers have seen the ‘EXO’ on our pages before, but now the ‘EXO’ is in full production
was a potential game-changer – possibly a paradigm shift. I watched him on You- tube, describing the deep ocean research that an ADS would make possible to a group of students in American Samoa (see
oceanfutures.com). A short time later, I caught him on the popular ‘Late, Late Show’ with host Craig Ferguson. The topic under discussion? The ‘EXOSUIT’, of course. Jean-Michel’s column in this magazine most often addresses, head on, the ocean-related challenges that face us and are always food for thought. Jean-Michel’s personal EXOSUIT is now under construction at Nuytco and I, for one, look forward to reading of his deep- ocean observations in his DIVER ‘Future Oceans’ column.
Cousteau…has completed a training program in the EXOSUIT, the ‘submarine that you wear’
and has generated all sorts of interest. One convert to atmospheric diving suit (ADS) technology is none other than DIVER columnist Jean-Michel Cousteau. Perhaps it will come as a bit of a surprise to some, since his famous father was the co-inventor of the ‘Aqua-lung’ – the exact opposite of the ADS. If you think about it, though, Jacques Cousteau wanted the Aqua-lung to allow him and his team to better explore the undersea world, but when it came to going deeper and staying longer ‘Jeek’ opted for a one- atmosphere submersible, the ‘Diving Saucer’. Now his son has extended his father’s dream by completing a training program in the use of the ‘EXOSUIT’ (see DIVER Volume 38 Number 6), which is sometimes called ‘the submarine that you wear’! Jean-Michel quickly realized that the ability to go to a thousand feet, stay virtually all day, and come back to the surface in about 10 minutes without the need for any decompression,
All the usual suspects are in the pages ahead with their usual columns and, as always, they are the basic framework on which this magazine hangs. Thank you, guys, for your ‘support’.
Finally, our main event feature is appropriate for this last issue of the year – and that is the annual gear/gadget round up and guide. We intend to make this multi-page feature an annual event that will get bigger and better with each year’s presentation.
About now you might expect me to tell you to get out and get wet . . . are you nuts? Light the fireplace, pull on warm fuzzy socks, watch T.V. and drink hot bevvies and wait for the warm breath of spring to drift over the land!
Well, of course, if you have all the cold water gear that you spent all that money on it would be a shame not to use it – cold water is usually the clearest! But no matter what you do, have a great holiday and go safely in your travels!
Regards Phil
www.divermag.com 9
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