So What Happened With That Then?

Have you ever been sat down the pub with your mates and started wondering what happened to Bob or Ben or Dave? You know, that bloke who used to be part of the group but no one sees much of him now. Did he ever make it in the world of IT or did he go back to being a Landscape Gardener in Hull? Did he ever get to trek across the Andes or Andorra or wherever it was he was going to trek across? God he went on and on about that didn't he? And of course did the antibiotics ever clear up that embarrassing little itch he had? You know, the thing that made Debbie leave him.... Or was she called Diane?

Anyway today we are going to do a blog version of wondering about whatever happened to Bob and have a look back on some or our posts from the last year or so and ask, did anything ever come of that?

Bethany Farrell

We start on a very serious and very disturbing note. Back in 2015 we wrote a piece about diving safety called Who's Really Looking After You. You can read the original piece here. In that post we discussed three separate incidents where people had died whilst diving. All of the incidents were depressingly sad and should never have happened but one of them stands out for one very good reason. Bethany Farrell had never dived before, ever! She was travelling in Australia and was undertaking an “Introductory Dive” with Wings Diving Adventures. This was supposed to be a chance for her and others like her to experience what SCUBA diving was all about in a safe and controlled way. Bethany didn't get to experience the wonders of SCUBA diving though. Somehow she became separated from the instructor and despite the fact that there were many other divers in the area and observers on boats, Bethany vanished. She was later found on the sea bed and died from drowning. At the time a number of people took to the TripAdvisor website to criticise the way Wings Diving Adventures staff acted during and after the incident. Now, over a year later a UK coroners inquest into that tragedy has recorded a narrative verdict that highlights significant failings in the way the company conducted itself and legal proceedings by the Australian authorities are ongoing. 

Interestingly the instructor at the centre of the incident, Fiona McTavish, has been expelled by PADI however the company itself hasn't. Which begs the question was Fiona McTavish thrown to the wolves as PADI has done before (check this link out if you doubt us) or can we expect that PADI will soon be expelling the company as well? The last few years have not been good for the reputation of the recreational diving industry with deaths, accidents, divers being left in the ocean, sea life being harassed etc and things don't look like they are going to get better anytime soon. PADI for example, has launched its own freediving courses, where people who know nothing about freediving are taught to hold their breath for many, many minutes by people who didn't know anything about freediving themselves a few months ago. Then there is PADI's “Zero to Hero” program, which, apparently, is an accelerated training program which turns complete novices into diving instructors in a matter of months. Oh dear, you really can hear the papers being shuffled in coroners courts everywhere can't you? Is it just us, but does no one in the diving certification business learn lessons at all? 

Now as we said there are still legal proceedings against Wings Diving Adventures (who are still claiming to keep you safe and smiling on their website) underway in Australia so this sad saga still hasn't been concluded and it is worth noting that a coroners court cannot attribute blame to any individual and cannot imply a criminal or civil liability. The Coroner must use the evidence heard to decide who the deceased person was, where they died, when they died, and what the cause of their death was. By expelling Fiona Mctavish from their organisation however, PADI does seem to have made it clear where they think blame lies, but in the end when the legal channels have finally been exhausted, we don't think PADI or the company itself will come out of this looking very good either. In general, Bethany Farrell's death should be more than a wake up call. It should be a bloody great Klaxon sounding in the offices of every diving certification company headquarters everywhere. Every PADI member, every diving centre and company staff member should remember her name. Bethany Farrell was on an “introductory dive” for gods sake. Her death should never have happened and we hope and pray that for once the “lessons learned” will be heeded because this must never happen again.

Riz Smith and those short things

On a lighter note, does anyone remember Riz Smith? Oh come on, Riz Smith (cool name, cool dude), he's the guy who was going to save the oceans by making boardshorts out of plastic. Well, we are pleased to announce that despite our serious doubts (read them here and here) Riz really does seem to have cracked it. At least we think he has, it's difficult to tell. We know Riz is making baordshorts out of plastic but we can't tell if it's the nice clean sort of plastic you get from the bottled water trade or that nasty, dirty plastic you get from the bottled water trade when those bottles have been plucked from the ocean. Confused? Yeah, so are we. Anyway here's what Ali Murrell, who is one of the co-founders of Riz Smith's boardshorty enterprise says:

Our current fabric has been carefully sourced to give us exactly what we need; great feel; quick drying and, importantly, made from 100% recycled polyester, rPET as it is known. rPET is essentially a re-composition of the same plastic (PET) that you find in most clear drinking bottles. Every day, tonnes of bottles are recycled and shipped to Taiwan where our factory then creates the rPET yarn and finally our fabric specification. Whilst it is great that you can recycle bottles into fabric there are still very high percentages of bottles that never make it into recycling programmes, either finding their way to landfill or entering the litter stream, into waterways and ultimately the seas, oceans and beaches. Our aim is to divert and collect these bottles to create our fabric in a fully traceable and circular process and ideally do this closer to home.

Err... Okay Ali, but are you making shorts out of plastic plucked from the sea?

We have always supported the Marine Conservation Society and known for a while that plastic bottles are finding their way to the sea and landing on our beaches in ever increasing numbers, but it dawned on me when I realised that the actual cause of the problem was literally sitting on our doorsteps. Seeing all the plastic litter in and around my neighbourhood in London, knowing where this is likely to end up, made me think that there must be something positive that can be done to reduce and ultimately prevent this situation from getting any worse.

Yes that's great Ali, but are you making shorts out of plastic plucked from the sea?

Initially I thought that it would be the condition of the bottles. It turns out though that this is the least of our issues!  Unfortunately the sea and the tides are fickle things and it is very hard to predict where or when a given beach will be heavily littered or not. We know that the bottles are out there based on the great work of organisations such as the Marine Conservation Society and their litter surveys, but being in the right place at the right time is a real challenge. We have relied on the amazing scores of volunteer groups around the country to help get the project off the ground and they have been so supportive; this does leave us with the challenge of co-ordinating all their efforts into one seamless process. Ultimately we want to design a system that can work on a commercial scale!

Oh for gods sake Ali, please just tell us if you're actually making boardshorts out of plastic plucked from the ocean or is this just a gimmick?

To be fair we have jumbled up Ali's answers and taken them out of context for a bit of fun. However, if anyone can read Ali's Q and A on his websites journal and figure out if Ali, Riz and the other cool surfer dudes are actually making boardshorts out of ocean plastic, can you let us know because we haven't a clue if he is or not....

Sharkwater the sequel

Finally, did anyone read our piece on Sharkwater Extinction?

Sharkwater Extinction is a new project by filmmaker Rob Stewart and is described as “a quest to find 80 million missing sharks, revealing a multi billion-dollar scandal that implicates us all in the greatest wildlife massacre ever known.”

Rob Stewart was funding the project through Kickstarter and we are pleased to say he not only reached his target of $150,000 but surpassed it. You can still support the film by donating via Rob's Kickstarter page. We went for the $175 “thank you” in the credits and we look forward to seeing our clubs name in the film credits next year.

Now then, does anyone remember Bob? Bald bloke, buck teeth! Oh come on, you must remember Bob? He had that embarrassing thing on his wossiname......

Want To Save The Oceans? Then Go And Buy A Bikini

Not that long ago Fourth Element launched their Ocean Positive range of swimwear. The idea behind the range was to give people a purchasing choice. You can either buy a bikini or a pair of budgie smugglers that has a direct impact on ocean welfare or you could buy something else and live with the guilt. What impact can buying a bloody bikini have on ocean welfare you might well ask. Well for a start the Ocean Positive range are made from recycled fishing nets. These “ghost nets” are abandoned by fisherman after snagging on reefs and wrecks and pose a significant threat to marine life. In short they continue to fish even though abandoned, trapping a staggering variety of marine life and resulting in the loss of thousands upon thousand of creatures each year. They also destroy coral as currents drag them across reefs, literally scrubbing the reef clean. But thanks to a recycling process created by the Italian company Aquafil and the Ghost Fishing Project which enlists teams of divers to recover the nets in the first place, this scourge of the ocean suddenly becomes a high quality nylon yarn capable of being turned into a bikini. 

Anyone who has read about ghost nets and their sickening impact on the marine environment would be hard pressed to argue that their removal is a bad thing. And, if you watch the video messages from such people as Amanda Cotton, Dave Schott and others which are on the Ocean Positive website, you would have to have a heart of stone not to be moved by the images of fish, sharks, seals and turtles that have died after being trapped in the nets. So the concept of Ocean Positive is a noble one and unlike some other noble concepts that often turn out to be nothing more than hot air, the team at Fourth Element have turned the concept into a tangible product that you can buy.

The oceans are cleared of ghost nets by heroic divers around the world so saving marine life. The Italians recycle the nets into nylon yarn which apparently means that twelve thousand tons of waste has been eliminated, seventy thousand barrels of oil have not had to be used, forty-two thousand tons of CO2 hasn’t been released into the atmosphere and enough energy has been saved to power a small town for a year or the city of Rome for ten days and to square the circle in all this, all we as consumers have to do, is buy a bikini. What is there not to like about all this? Without wanting to sound like cheerleaders for Fourth Element – whose advertising is pretty dam slick anyway - we can't find much wrong with any of this. It all looks and sounds like a true environmental business success story. There is just one thing though, something that could be a real deal breaker. What if those bikinis aren't any good? You see no matter how noble the idea is, if the resulting product is, shall we say, a bit crap. Then the whole concept falls flat on its noble nose. So there was nothing else to do then but buy some Ocean Positive swimwear and compare them with a brand leader in swimwear to see if the noble idea held water so to speak. The brand we choose was Speedo. The reason is simple. We all own a pair of Speedos already and didn't have to buy anything else to do the comparison. We want to give you a honest review here but we don't want it to cost us too much, we've got beer money to think about after all. Now, we have no idea about how Speedos are manufactured or whether they are recycled or not but that's not the point. Speedo is the leading player in the market and they make very, very good swimwear.

Anyway we bought some Ocean Positive bikini's and swims shorts and put them to the test in the cold waters of Britain. The first thing to note is that Ocean Positive uses some very attractive and very athletic looking models in its advertising. Such people would look good even after running a marathon dressed in nothing more than a refuse bag. We, on the other hand, and we suspect a great many of you are not these people. Though we like to think of ourselves as relatively fit and toned individuals, we do tend to sag a bit in places. The second thing to note is that Ocean Positive swimwear is designed to be worn under a wetsuit and the third thing to note, as we have pointed out before in our review of the Fourth Element Pro Dive Amphibious shorts, is that Fourth Element have a bit of a sizing issue. Now either everyone in the Fourth Element sizing department is an attractive, athletic model who has never met the average diver and his belly or they are confusing the metric and imperial systems of measurement. The result of all this is that the swimwear is pretty snug. So snug in fact that, if you're a man your voice is going to go up a few octaves and if you are a woman you might find you bulge in places you rather wish you didn't. So we recommend that you err on the side of caution and go for a larger size than normal. Interestingly we found no problem with the Speedo sizing, all fitted perfectly. Once the size issue was sorted both sets of swimwear were equally comfortable. Both Ocean Positive and Speedo bikinis' were easy to get in and out of, having no “annoying” ties and clasps that you find on fashion bikinis. We did find that the Ocean Positive fitted more easily under our wetsuits and didn't bunch up in those awkward uncomfortable places like the Speedos did. However we suspect that had we bothered to purchase a more expensive style of Speedo this would not have been a problem either.

The Malaku Bikini won't look this good on everyone!

The Ocean Positive range is rather limited at the moment, but the designs that are available were generally well received, the bikini wearers among us preferred the black Malaku design to any of the others. Black, apparently gentlemen, is more slimming. The deeper voiced among us had even less choice having to settle for either a black or blue pair of budgie smugglers or a pair of black or blue Cayman swim shorts. The swim shorts won the vote as only “twats wear trunks” or something like that. Speedo, as can be expected, has a massive range and Ocean Positive can't really compete on that front. It can however compete on price. Speedo's vast range means that there are decent swimsuits available from around £16 to well over £70 whilst the Ocean Positive range is priced at around £40 for women and £23 for men which is hardly expensive. Then again neither price nor limited range means much when you consider the benefits of the underlying concept. This then is the crux of the matter. In general we found no real difference between the brands. Both performed well, both looked stylish and both were relatively inexpensive. So what it all boils down to, is the concept of how Ocean Positive are made. Take that into consideration and there really is no contest. Ocean Positive then, doesn't fall flat on its noble nose and is, in our opinion, pretty damn good.

In fact we think they are so good that every diver, snorkeller, water enthusiast or beach lover should go out and buy a rash vest, a bikini or even a pair of twat trunks. Yes, the range is a little limited at the moment and yes they might feel a little snug in places and yes, you might sometimes be a little creeped out by the fact that the piece of material cradling your crotch was once full of dead fish but none of that matters because you will feel good about yourself. You have done something positive about ocean welfare. And all you had to do to get this euphoric sense of doing something noble and worthwhile was to buy a piece of swimwear. So go and buy some Ocean Positive stuff and feel good about yourself.

Ocean Clean Up - Divers Do While Surfer Dudes Don't

The people at Fourth Element have recently launched their Ocean Positive swimwear range. So what you might ask? Well the thing about this particular range is that it is made from recycled fishing nets. These “ghost nets” are abandoned by fisherman after snagging on reefs and wrecks and pose a significant threat to marine life. In short they continue to fish even though abandoned, trapping a staggering variety of marine life and resulting in the loss of thousands upon thousand of creatures each year. They also destroy coral as currents drag them across reefs, literally scrubbing the reef clean. Now however, working with divers around the world, Fourth Element are collecting up these nets and putting them to good use by turning them into snazzy swimwear. The whole range is a bit limited at the moment (the men’s swimwear also looks a little snug for those of us who are more generously sized in the waistline department) but they are surprisingly low priced and the company will soon be releasing rash vests made in the same way. The whole process of turning nets into bikinis is demonstrated below.

Reading about all this recycling, our minds turned to Riz Smith. Do you remember Riz Smith? We do. Riz Smith makes boardshorts and sometime ago he had an aspiration that by 2016 he would be making boardshorts out of ocean plastic. When we first heard about Riz’s desire to create surfers apparel from the plastic garbage that pollutes our oceans we were rather dismissive, in fact we said that Riz’s idea was nothing more than fashion world tokenism that generates sales by playing on middle class guilt. You can read that post here and our follow up post here. Now spurred on by Fourth Element's successful recycling of “ghost nets” we thought it would only be fair if we had a look to see how Riz and his “bottles to boardshorts Journey” was getting on. Back in June someone at Riz’s company called Lou released an update on their website. Yes we know it’s October and the statement was released in June, but to be honest we really haven’t been paying much attention. Anyway before we get started let’s just remind you of those original problems we had with Riz’s plan when we first heard of it. We had concerns over the whole feasibility of making boardshorts out of ocean plastic. How would Riz collect the ocean plastic, who would do the collecting, would they be paid and would that collection have an impact on the mass of plastic floating in the ocean gyres? So let’s see if any of those concerns have been addressed. Here’s the statement:

While it's hard to know exact figures, it is reported up to 8m tonnes of plastics enter the oceans each year. In the UK, we use 15 million plastic bottles per day of which only 50% are recycled. We launched our bottles to boardshorts campaign because we want to encourage customers to recycle but also to show that plastic bottles littering our beaches and oceans can be put to good use. We’ve always talked about the Bottles to Boardshorts project as fitting together pieces of a jigsaw –getting the bottles on beaches to a recycling plant and then linking up the plant with a fabric manufacturer who can then send that fabric to our factory. 

Through our partnership with the Marine Conservation Society, we now know that about 10% of the litter found through beach cleans are plastic bottles.  We need close to 5,000 bottles to make 250 pairs of shorts so we are going to need to collect bottles at more than one beach clean! That’s why we’ve been in discussion with a number of beach cleaning charities and organisations who(sic) work with fishermen to find ways of sorting out plastic bottles and then amalgamating them to send to our recycling plant. Logistics are going to be challenging, as we don’t want to use loads of fuel transporting the bottles from beach to plant. And we’re going to need somewhere to store all those bottles in the short term! 

The reassuring thing we’ve learnt is that it doesn’t seem to matter how dirty or water logged the bottles found on the beaches are – they can still be recycled.  But we do now know we can only use clear Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles to make our shorts which further increases the need to work with a number of beach cleaning organisations to source these.

It’s also been great to start to talk to recycling partners in the UK who can take our beach bottles and transform them into PET pellets or flakes. The bit of the jigsaw we now need to fit together is working out whether the company that currently make our fabric from recycled bottles can use PET flakes made from beach bottles instead. If so, we also need to test whether it can be made from 100% beach bottles or, for quality and durability’s sake, it needs to be made from a combination of beach bottles and standard recycled bottles (i.e the ones you put in your bag at home). 

So, as you can see there are still a lot of questions for us to work on but we feel we are making great progress and learning loads on the way. 

A lot of questions Lou? A lot of questions? Are you serious? Are you telling us that you have only just found out that most of the litter on the beaches is not actually clear PET plastic bottles? Are you also telling us that you still haven’t figured out how to effectively collect, transport and store the plastic bottles. And, and this is really fundamental Lou, are you telling us that you still haven’t figured out whether you can make the fabric from ocean plastic in the first place? There’s another thing Lou, something that has got us confused. Your statement seems to suggest that you are already making fabric from standard recycled bottles, (i.e the ones you put in your bag at home), but as of yet not from ocean plastic. Which begs another question Lou, are you really just planning to make the fabric from standard recycled bottles and using the ocean plastic thing as nothing more than a marketing plan? Are you Lou…? Then there’s another problem. In our original post on the subject we pointed out that beach clean-ups are a good idea but most of the plastic polluting the oceans are not on beaches they’re in the ocean gyres – the ocean gyres Lou! Those great big whirlpools out in the middle of the oceans, and even if the plastic does wash up on the beach Lou we think you’re being a bit optimistic if you think it’s going to be on the single beach you’re planning to clean up.

Now we know that there are people out there in the big wide world who aren’t as cynical as us and will say that although Riz’s journey has, so far, been a little disappointing but at least he is trying to do something. To those people we would say, you probably aren’t one of the many people who gave Riz over £16,000 via crowdfunding in order to get the journey off and running in the first place. If you are one of those crowdfunders we would say, what are you doing? Why are you donating money to an established commercial company in order for that company to research the commercial viability of bringing a product to market? Still you probably got a t-shirt for the effort. Okay, maybe we are being a bit hard here. Maybe Riz and Lou just need more time. After all if they can make ocean plastic into boardshorts, even very expensive ones, that would be a good idea right? And maybe this isn’t just fashion world tokenism or a cynical marketing ploy. Maybe Riz needs to stop telling us about his aspiration and actually get busy turning that aspiration into reality. In which case we have a suggestion for Riz and Lou. Go and have a chat with the chaps at Fourth Element because they seem to have got this “waste material to commercial product” idea well and truly nailed. If you do that Riz, if you have a chat Lou, we think you might find out that it is better to make the product first and then market it. Rather than market it, and then try to work out if you can actually make it. In short Riz it’s the difference between simply aspiring and actually doing!