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ISSUE 23 ARCHIVE - QUIZ: DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BE AN INLAND DIVER?

Rob Hunt

1: You've saved up for three years in order to join your dive club on an expedition to Scapa Flow. Upon arrival you discover you are buddied with Bear Grylls who decides he cannot dive in salt water because it might make his hair go a bit funny and insists that you immediately return to London and spend a week diving in Wraysbury mapping the submerged taxi. How do you react?

A – Tell Grylls you can protect his hair by coating it with sodium. Laugh when he hits the water and his head explodes, then draw a face on a plum, insert a stick and buddy with that instead. Bite the head off your buddy at the end of the trip.

B – Suggest you do all the driving on the way back to London as well as paying for all the petrol and food. This will of course require massive detours off the motorway in order to find the most exclusive restaurants in Britain because Grylls cannot be expected to eat service station food and in these fantastically expensive establishments he gets drunk off the bottom of the wine list and tells you about all the animals he's bitten the head off of and says that it "tastes like chicken" every time and you laugh along and pretend you hadn't heard that joke before when you were four years-old and then when you get to Wraysbury he says he doesn't want to dive because it looks a bit cold.

2: What kind of surface conditions are you prepared to dive in?

A – No more than 45 minutes swimming through crashing waves populated by box jellyfish.

B – Some kid just threw a pebble into the water so we'd better give it ten minutes to calm down a bit.

3: You've spent the last 200 years manipulating all scientific data collected everywhere on the planet in order to make it look like climate change is happening. Why?

A – To fool pretty tropical fishies into visiting Whitby.

B – To get a healthy population of crocodiles going in the UK so that you can show everyone how tough you are by wresting them in your pants in winter.

4: What is your ideal route to a dive site?

A – Three days on a boat ploughing through ten-metre swells in a hurricane.

B – Three days stuck in traffic on the M25, followed by a gearing-up session in two feet of mud and horizontal hail and nearly getting into the water before an angry man screams at you because you've parked your van in the wrong place.

5: You're mid-surface interval and require a massive infusion of calories in order to replace all the energy you've burned from finning occasionally on the last dive. What will you eat?

A – Anything. As long as it's seafood and caught within the last 30 minutes.

B – Anything. As long as it's a bacon sarnie with brown or tomato sauce.

6: What are you hoping to see underwater?

A – Anything. Any dive is a good dive, it really doesn't matter what's down there. After the dive, get to the surface, discover everyone else saw a manta whilst you were getting the white balance on your camera right for a picture of a dead nudibranch, climb back onto the boat, gather as much stuff as you can that isn't yours from the dry area, and set fire to it before repatriating it with its rightful owners.

B – Nothing. That there are things in the world is a concept you find terrifying.

7: You've been a bit bad and deaded your dive buddy over an obscure doctrinal dispute involving the correct deployment of SMBs. How will you dispose of the bastard's body?

A – Lob him into the briny and let the sharks take care of the rest.

B – Hold him in a seated position with arms out front until rigor mortis sets in, encase the body in concrete, chip away at the concrete for six years until you have a perfect, slightly bigger than life-size statue of someone driving, dig a massive hole, fill the hole with water, buy an old car, drive the car into your new lake, dive down with the statue and position the statue behind the wheel of the car, charge people £15 to dive in your underwater statue park, start arguments with visiting divers over obscure doctrinal disputes such as correct cylinder placement and minimum alternate air source hose length as the first step in increasing the number of statues in your park and thereby boosting revenue.

8: Why did you Brexit?

A – To stop foreigners coming over here and looking at our tropical fishies.

B – To stop foreigners coming over here and wrestling our crocodiles.

9: The man whose job it is to shout at you for parking your van in the wrong place at your local inland dive site is shouting at you for trying to pass a Scottish £5 note to him because he doesn't understand the concept of Scotland. How do you react?

A – Run away in full dive gear for 150 miles until you hit the ocean and dive there instead.

B – Go to Scotland. Have them stop producing Scottish £5 notes and instead produce proper English £5 notes then return to your local inland site and park your van in the wrong place.

10: The sea is encroaching upon your underwater park to teach you a lesson for inventing climate change, drastically reducing your population of crocodiles and corroding some of your best statues so that you can see bits of the people inside. What will you do to rescue your business?

A – Charge people to use the sea.

B – Shout at people for parking their vans in the wrong place.

So how did you do?

As in all matters, we will allow Donald Trump to decide what the truth is.

All As: Bad!

All Bs. You're good people.

A mixture of As and Bs: You're fake news.

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