Sunday, April 23, 2006
My Love
Nowadays, its more fashionable falling in love with something that's not alive. For one, it doesn't bite to love a non-living thing. With the my recent dives and a visit to ADEX (and very nearly made myself 1K poorer). I speak, eat, breathe and live diving.
It is extremely difficult for a non-diver to understand why people "risk their life" to dive. At the top of their minds, they think about how dangerous diving is. I suspect, they watched too much JAWS as a kid. Mostly I get this question (from non divers), do you see sharks? Yes I do. But what many do not know is that the majority of the ~370 shark species are found in Australian waters. And ~165 species are harmless and less than 2m long, many species are less than 1m long. The largest shark, the whale & basking shark are plankton feeders.
Then they say, but diving is very dangerous right? So is crossing the road. In fact is, driving is far more dangerous than diving is. I'm very sure more people drive. The fact is, more people die from motor vehicle accidents than scuba diving, or shark attacks. It's pretty alarming to see how the figures jump from one category to the next. These may be old figures, but there are more motor vehicles on the road today than 10 years ago and due to human threat, there are lesser sharks in the oceans today. Go figure.
From http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/sharks.htm
In Australia (where almost half of the world's sharks reside) between 1980-1990, these are the statistics:
- Crocodile Attacks - 8 / 0.7 per year
- Shark Attacks - 11 / 1 per year
- Lightning Strikes - 19 / 1.7 per year
- Bee Stings - 20 / 1.8 per year
- Scuba Diving Accidents - 88 / 8 per year
- Drownings/Submersions - 3367 / 306 per year
- Motor Vehicle Accidents - 32772 / 2979 per year
Do your math. Use your own judgement. Everything is a matter of perception.
Posted by LiTTle-FooT at 2:11 AM with 2
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