Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I visited Dubrovnik, Croatia about 20 years ago. When I got into the taxi, the driver was very excited to tell me about how locals would throw dynamite into the water to blow up the fish, though I never verified the truth of that. It made me pause because I wanted to go diving there.

I ended up going diving, and it was quite an experience (https://web.archive.org/web/20020505185554/http://www.bytrav...). The owner of the dive company didn't seem to know about decompression stops, generally. We went to about 30 meters for a short moment, saw a few hollowed out German WWII mines at the bottom, then ascended into a cave at sea level, nary a decompression stop on the way.

Climbing up and down the rocky stairs of Dubrovnik later that day I had the worst headache. I had a flight the next day and wondered if it was a good idea to go up to 30,000 feet. I'm still alive, so it must have been the right decision.

I'm saddened to think people using dive computers will never get to experience the richness of my dive experiences because the algorithm will tell them not to go into that cave with Anton from Dubrovnik.

>the driver was very excited to tell me about how locals would throw dynamite into the water to blow up the fish

Wait, seriously?! I though that was some South Park/Borat humour.

It's very much a thing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_fishing

Can confirm - I did that as a child (with my uncles) in another soviet country. That, and electrofishing by tasing those poor Nemos. To this day I don’t know why we used those methods, but it was mad fun. Maybe literally.

Did you stuff the dynamite into the fish? That is what Borin told me these guys did. Then, you throw the fish into the water? At that point, their fishy friends come up and say "Jeez Svetlana, you looked bloated!" And, then BOOM, the fish all fly out of the water given the large blast zone.

Yikes. No, we'd look for a shoal of fish, then throw a homemade explosive in the middle. Still horrible.

I think Crocodile Dundee did this on the Hudson river, too.

It was really funny to be driving in the dark from the Dubrovnik airport and hearing this cab driver in very limited English describe what he was seeing.

As a non-diver, why would someone with a dive computer not be able to go to the cave with Anton? Wouldn't they just have to make a decompression stop on the way (which is the healthy/safe thing to do anyways)?

I just meant that a dive computer would not recommend I do the things Anton had me do, which was descend to deep water (30 meters) and stay for a significant period of time (five minutes) and then ascend quickly. We wouldn't have been able to see all the caves and stalactites he wanted to show me if a nanny-state dive computer had been there, because that route would not have been safe.

I'm getting downvoted presumably because of my nanny-state joke. Fine, I still think it is funny to assert that a dive computer is actively participating in the nanny state. I'll never back down from that joke.

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