Close Calls: If they made mistakes, you will too. Hardcover – 2020 by Stratis S Kas

Description

A collection of life changing stories from the industry’s greatest,

If they made mistakes you will too.

In diving, like any other activity, people who excel exist. Driven and known for their passion, talent and dedication. People who inspire, who act as examples and eventually become idols. They are the reason why we travel to another country or continent just to hear them speak. The ones we think about when trying to justify the hours and money we spend in diving.

They are our inspiration and our motivation.

In contrast to football or other popular sports, diving is a private activity. It takes place in remote locations, underwater with rare cases of reporting. It is a sensation activity more than a performance one. Because of this secrecy, we the normal divers, rarely find out about the mishaps of our perfect, never failing, idols. But just like famous soccer players get badly hurt or miss a penalty, diving superstars are human too.

They may seem infallible at times but they are not.

In this collection of short stories we open up the pandora box of diving. Stories of miscalculated or overly confident decompression plans, boredom or complacency driven cut corners, fundamental errors and plain human emotions like fear that were never expected to be part of these great divers storytelling.

By doing so, we give faces to these close calls. We bridge the gap between us, who we accept as normal that we could have done better in any given scenario and them who we thought they were always perfect.

Don’t take me wrong. They almost always are. And most of them have been 100% perfect since the story they chose to share. They open up to motivate us to do the same. To stop hiding in fear of judgement and help our wonderful submerged world improve its safety record.

Report problems, define the error, adjust attitude, learn and eventually we can all together try to reach the utopia of 100% safe diving, even if just almost.