African Diver is a freely available South African diving magazine, that appears only in electronic format. You can subscribe to their newsletter which alerts you to new editions, which come out six times a year. The magazine has been running for about two and a half years.
The magazine covers a wide range of diving and ocean-related topics, from dive sites and dive travel, to conservation, safety (they have a close association with DAN), wrecks, photography and free diving. The focus is on diving in Africa. The photos are gorgeous and plentiful. Because it’s digital format, large photo spreads don’t cost the publishers anything extra, which makes for a fantastic full-screen experience.
That said, I don’t find the format of the magazine particularly user-friendly – you have to download a pdf file which can be up to 15MB in size, so it involves commitment – and I do struggle to commit to reading anything on a computer screen for a significant length of time (rich coming from a blogger who hopes you WILL commit to reading THIS on a computer screen!).
But the format enables the magazine to be free and it does mean you can change the font size to super ginormous if that’s what your eyes need. Also, you can zoom into those stunning photos to your heart’s content. There is also an option that enables you to read the magazine online, without downloading the whole thing.
There is an interesting blog on the African Diver site, that is updated more frequently than the magazine.
Latest issue (Issue 14)
Georgina Jones of SURG writes an article about local dive site Star Walls (in the Atlantic). There’s a final installment from a couple who drove cross-country from Betty’s Bay in the Western Cape to Japan, in order to highlight what humans are doing to our oceans. There’s an article on shark finning in Mozambique (by the same author who wrote an article on the identical topic for the latest issue of The Dive Site).
There’s a very interesting article about deep diving, and the independent attitude that is required by divers when they reach the Advanced qualification stage. The author, Debbie Smith, lists the aspects that an Advanced diver should be able to manage: their own kit, their buoyancy, tucking in their gear, getting down, safety stops, helping themselves on the boat, and so on. It’s a very salutary reminder that even though you can theoretically be qualified as an Advanced diver after doing only nine dives ever, there’s a lot more to it than that.
There’s a very inspiring article about disabled scuba divers, and a safety review from DAN of 2010.
