This was my 20th or so Boot Show. I never quite loved it, but I was always irresistibly drawn to it. This cognitive dissonance was beginning to grow into an itch for me to explain, not least to myself, and finally, the penny dropped. What I find is that the show is clinically effective. It is a top-trimmed apparatus. Every detail is taken care of, and the organisation runs a very tight ship. It is a showcase of German effectiveness, a well-oiled, finely tuned machine.
Climate change, ocean warming, impacts on marine biodiversity and the importance of marine protected areas (MPAs) prompted Greenpeace Italy to embark on an expedition to Liguria in late June 2024. Valentina Di Miccoli, a marine biologist on the expedition, tells the story.
“An agreement is being finalized with France, Spain and Cyprus for a large protected area in the extra-territorial waters of the Mediterranean, which is a great contribution to the 30×30 goal,” said Gilberto Pichetto Fratin, the Italian environment and energy security minister at the Valore Natura conference in January 2023.
To help promote dive tourism in the Baltic Sea, the European Union’s Project Baltacar, a collaboration between Sweden, Finland and Estonia, has developed underwater heritage trails for visiting a selection of unique wreck sites in the three countries. In Finland, the project has established buoys and created dive site maps for a group of five wrecks from the 17th to the 19th centuries, located just outside Hanko. Susanne Lundvall reports.
In the far corner of Europe, in the Levant and almost wedged in-between Asia Minor, the Middle East and Northern Africa and at the crossroads of the same, Cyprus offers a nourishing mix of varied diving, culture and cuisine. Lelle Malmström and Peter Symes went to check it out.
Scapa Flow, located in the Orkney Islands of Scotland, is the site of the scuttling of the High Seas Fleet of the Imperial German Navy in June 1919 at the end of World War I. While many of the wrecks were salvaged following the war, the remaining wrecks have become popular dive sites. In recent times, efforts to learn more about these wrecks through multibeam sonar surveys and 3D photogrammetry have taken place. Rosemary E.
A new photo competition has taken root on the western coast of Sweden, where local and international participants enjoy an exciting week of shooting underwater in Smögen, competing for attractive prizes. One of the contest’s organisers, Annika Malmberg, shares the story of the event, from the initial idea to the final result, as well as plans for its future.
For a cave diver, it is always an exciting moment to be the first to dive a location that has not been visited by other divers before. The Laplet slate mine in the Belgian Ardennes was such a location for our small group of explorers.
Nowadays, digital publications are common, but back in 2003, when Peter Symes had the vision to establish and produce X-Ray Mag—the first digital dive publication—this was not the case. “Peter has created a publication that the whole world reads, because it covers the many aspects of our sport in depth: destinations, science, media, safety, research, equipment, people, places, etc,” stated the EUF in a press release.
This is the incredible story of the French trawler that was turned into the German submarine fighter UJ-2208 during WWII and sunk by a British submarine off the coast of Genoa in 1944. Nowadays, the UJ-2208 lies on the seabed at a depth of 108m, covered in Mediterranean mud, fishing nets, shrimp and oysters.
