Transcript

0:00:06 Matt Waters: Hello, mate. How you doing?

0:00:07 Mark Evans: Yeah, not too bad, not too bad.

0:00:09 Matt Waters: Have you done podcasts before?

0:00:12 Mark Evans: Yeah. Well, when. During COVID when we were. We never stopped printing the magazine fully. There was a couple of times when we stopped for a couple of months when it was full lockdowns and nobody could get out, but otherwise we pretty much kept going. But as a way of trying to be still in. Involved with the readership in our audience, we started doing some live broadcasts. So what we did was we’d record them and people could actually watch it live when we were doing interviews, but then we’d record them at the same time and then we put them on YouTube.

0:00:43 Mark Evans: So, yeah, they were quite good fun. So it was like, usually we did them on a night and everybody was sat there with beers and wines and rums and everything. Outside of people like Mesley and stuff like that. It was trying to keep. Trying to keep it clean. It was quite amusing. It was like I had to keep it back. Everyone remember, this is live. So we did some really good ones, actually, with that. We did one on ones like this and we had somewhere it was me talking to, like, there might have been two of them. I think one time we did it when there was three of them and that really got out of hand.

0:01:16 Mark Evans: But, yeah, it was good fun, though.

0:01:20 Matt Waters: Yeah, I love it. I’ve had a fair few now where it’s been evening time and having a few beers and. Yeah, Mesley. Surprise, surprise. We had a good couple of hours talking and I think one in Australia, one in New Zealand. We both got three parts pissed. It was great fun.

0:01:35 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, he’s a good lad. I’m really excited about having him at the show. He’s proper stoked about being there, so.

0:01:41 Matt Waters: Yeah, no, it’d be good. I keep having to think about it, to be honest. I haven’t got a fucking clue what I would talk about for you on stage or anything like that, but I’ll keep thinking about it. Yeah.

0:01:52 Mark Evans: Like I said, there was no pressure. If you’re not, we’ll just have you in a corner and we’ll just, you know, podcast central books. Yeah, if you. If you. If you have a. I mean, we got time anyway. If you suddenly have a bright spark moment and you’re like, oh, I’ve got a great idea, actually. It would be then we’ll find somewhere for you, but otherwise we’ll just aim to have a corner for you and then we can just do interviews. And all sorts of stuff with different people over the weekend. That’d be really good, I reckon.

0:02:17 Matt Waters: Yeah. Be good fun. I really did. I enjoyed it when we did it down at TDEX. It was. It was a cracking laugh. Okay, right, well, first off, mate, I think what we should do is just let everybody know who you are and what you’re about and where you come from.

0:02:30 Mark Evans: It feels like I’m in an alcoholics anonymous meeting. Really then, doesn’t it?

0:02:33 Matt Waters: Yeah. You’ll get a token at the end of the show.

0:02:36 Mark Evans: Yeah, exactly. Right, yeah. So I’m Mark Evans. I am one half of Rorke Media Limited and we do various things in the diving world. So we do the Scuba Diver magazines, which we’ve got one in the UK, we’ve got one in Australia, New Zealand, and we’ve got one in North America, and we also do an annual called the Ultimate Divers Guide. And then we branched out and we launched the Go diving show in the UK and we’re now doing the Go Diving show in Sydney and Australia in September. And we also have the scuba diving YouTube channel and we also have two websites. So we’ve got the Scuba diver website and we’ve also got the Divanet website, which has been around since 1996, so that’s one of the longest standing websites. So, yeah, so we have lots of different things, but basically, dive media is all encompassing.

0:03:28 Mark Evans: We’ve been in business since February 2017, but before that, I was the editor of Sport Diver UK for nearly 18 years.

0:03:39 Matt Waters: Oh, wow.

0:03:40 Mark Evans: Quite a long time in the diving industry. I think I’m coming up about 26 years. 25. 26 years now as a dive magazine editor, editorial director. But actual diving, I’ve been diving for 40 years because I started when I was ten. Wow.

0:03:55 Matt Waters: Yeah. So. Damn. Sat longer than me, mate.

0:03:57 Mark Evans: That’s why I’ve got no hair. See, he’s wearing all them hoods. Diving in cold water.

0:04:03 Matt Waters: Yeah, I was going to say a stoney cove. A local favorite, is it?

0:04:07 Mark Evans: Yeah. I have done quite a few dives in Stony Cove. Tend to go to Cape and Ray. Now is my, my closer one, but it’s cool for a quarry. They’ve got giant mutant trout in there because there’s no fishing allowed. These trout are ancient, so they’ve all got, like, twisted backs, cataracts. They’re just gigantic. There’s huge sturgeon in there and everything, so they all come looming out of the gloom at you. So it’s.

0:04:31 Mark Evans: It makes a bit of a change.

0:04:33 Matt Waters: A fair one. I’ve never done that one to be honest. Obviously, I started in the UK, but it wasn’t long after training that I buggered off overseas and never came back.

0:04:43 Mark Evans: You see, trying to escape cold water is one thing, but, you know, just moving to another country, that’s going a bit over the top.

0:04:49 Matt Waters: Well, I really couldn’t get much further away, could I? No, no. Yeah. Happy days. So how did it all start with warp media, then? What drew you to doing the editorial bit?

0:05:01 Mark Evans: Right, so where we ended up doing that was, like I said, I was the editor for Scuba Diver magazine, but that was working for a publishing company. And then that title ended up getting closed down through no fault of its own. It was kind of collateral damage to other things that were happening out there. And so suddenly that was it. January 2017, found myself, without any warning, out of a job. So it was a little bit like, oh, what do you do?

0:05:28 Mark Evans: Massive shock. And then Ross Arnold, who’s my business partner in raw Media, he was my ad manager. So we’d worked together on sport Diver for, I think, 1011 years and we pretty much ran it like our own magazine. We were under a publishing director and everything, but they kind of left us to it. And all the time people have been saying to me, you should do your own magazine. You’re the face of the magazine. And this, that, the other. But we never wanted to launch against sport Diver because we brought sport diver up from where it was to being like, you know, one of the major players in the UK diving market.

0:06:03 Mark Evans: But now it had gone, there was a gaping hole there and we were like, well, now, if we’re ever going to do it, now’s the time to do it. So we basically set up and we didn’t miss a month. So the last issue of Sport Diver came out in February and the first issue of scuba Diver came out in March. And we were very lucky. Vast majority of the people who we worked with for years through sport Diver, they just came over to us.

0:06:33 Mark Evans: So we pretty much kicked straight off with a lot of the same advertisers in. I kept the same sort of content, but the one thing that we did do was that sport diver was the official Paddy diving society magazine. So what I did was, we still work with Padi, but I made the decision that we were keeping it very much, like, non denominational, it’s just for divers. So that means we do work with Bezac, I do stuff with raid, SSI, you know, Paddy, everybody, TDI, all sorts.

0:07:02 Mark Evans: And I just think it makes a. It makes a far more rounded product that it’s not just with one or the other. At the end of the day, it’s about divers. And I try and put the content in there for any diver. So there’s stuff in there for people who’ve just qualified. There’s stuff in there for people who are, you know, your advanced open water rescue diver level. We have a regular tech section, we’ve got an underwater photography section, we have a big kit section, because everyone likes shiny toys.

0:07:27 Mark Evans: So, you know, whatever level of dive you’re at, there should be something in there that you’ll find interesting to read.

0:07:32 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. And I think that’s very important as well. You’ve got to remain neutral. You know, it’s one thing that I found doing this for a couple of years now. If you’re not careful, you can go down to the slippery route of just being too biased, and that way you’re not assisting the industry as a whole, let alone your customers that are listening or reading.

0:07:53 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, and I think, as well, I think it’s. You haven’t got people, they’re not necessarily brand loyal, if that makes sense, with training anymore. You know, maybe somebody started with Padi, but then they might see a course at SSI you’re doing that, Paddy, don’t offer, and they’ll go, that looks an interesting course. Or like SDI, solo diver course. They might go, oh, fancy that, they’ll do that. They might do a raid course.

0:08:13 Mark Evans: You know, then when they got a bit higher level up, they might do a padi tech course, for instance, but they might do a TDI course or I might do an INTd one. So I think you can bounce around. I mean, I’ve got qualifications with. I think I’ve got six different, you know, brands I’ve done qualifications with over the years. In the end of the day, you’re learning to dive. They’ve all got the differences, but the basic core element is very much the same.

0:08:37 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. And you can. You can afford to cherry pick on you. I mean, the. The idea of getting your basic training done with a standard agency and then some, and then doing something like the gue fundees course, you know, that’s probably something that any of the other agencies don’t really compare to.

0:08:53 Mark Evans: No, I mean, that John Kendall, gue supremo, does a lot of work with us. He described it best where he said, fund is in a very, very simplistic way. It’s described. It’s like doing like a peak performance buoyancy course on steroids. That was his way of doing it is. He said, it’s far more than that, but he said, in the simplistic terms, it is very much about that. And then he said, if you never do another gue course and you just remain being a recreational diver or you go in another direction, what you learn in that course will serve you well for everything else.

0:09:25 Matt Waters: Yeah. Excuse me. So we’ve got rock media looking after the three mags. And at what point did you decide to drop the bomb and give it a go at going live and creating the dive show?

0:09:42 Mark Evans: Well, what we decided to do was we launched the UK magazine first. So that had been going for about a year, and then we launched into Australia and we got the Australia magazine going. And then at that point, the show that was existing in the UK, the numbers were like going down of exhibits, a number of visitors was going down. There was a lot of disgruntled people in the industry who wanted change, and it wasn’t happening for one reason or another.

0:10:13 Mark Evans: So we were like, well, maybe we should look at doing a show. There used to be two shows. The one that used to be at the beginning of the year had ended, and there was only the show at the end of the year. And the beginning of the year, to me, is when you should have a show. If you’re trying to get people enthused, particularly in the UK, if you’re getting enthused about diving and you want people to then feel like they could go and start diving, it makes far more sense that they could come out of the show and literally within a month or so, they could be in the water into the season properly. So that’s why we picked the end of February, beginning of March, as a prime time for doing it. We had a meeting with probably 40 key players in the dive industry, kind of got all their ideas laid out. What we plan to do that we wanted it to be an all encompassing show. So the same kind of mix as I described for the magazine, you know, whether you’re a novice, just interested in diving right up to eye level techie and everyone in between.

0:11:05 Mark Evans: We wanted it to be interactive, so we wanted elements there. So if you came with a family, there was stuff to keep the kids occupied, stuff that even non divers would enjoy, so that we wanted that interactive element. We want it to be educational, but we also want it to be inspirational. So that was why we had multiple stages with really cool speakers on, lots of exhibitors, and then the interactive elements all mixed in. So there was lots to keep people walking around all the time.

0:11:32 Mark Evans: And it was just that was our aim, to try and create something like that. And yeah, it went down really well. You know, it was well received. We got a couple done and there was nice moderate growth. And then COVID happened literally three weeks after. Our second show was the first time the world stopped and there was all the little startings of COVID when we were doing a show and we had a few people with no shows from the Far east, but at that point everyone was kind of putting it down as being another bird flu.

0:12:05 Mark Evans: Oh, it’s just something that’s going to happen in Southeast Asia, it’s not going to affect anywhere else. And then, like I said, three weeks later we’re in the first lockdown. So we then ended up missing a year because obviously we’ve all lockdowns and this down the other and no big groups were allowed. So our third show in a new venue actually happened ten days after all the COVID restrictions were removed.

0:12:31 Mark Evans: So it was literally like first one out of the doors, but we still ended up nearly having 6000 people came. So it wasn’t a bad start and it went well, but then it grew and in 2023, the numbers had grown and we went into another hall and then the show we’ve just had now, in March, we extended into another hall, so we’re up to 10,000. We had about 10,000 attendees over the weekend. So it was like the british dive show was back with a bang.

0:12:58 Mark Evans: So it’s taken five years, but like I said, there was that year gap with COVID but if we take the three years we’ve done, it’s grown exponentially year on year. So, yeah, so I think that it’s a good thing for the british dive industry, but I think it’s good for the global market as well. We’ve got a solid dive shown now back in the UK, and the UK market is an important market, especially if you’re more of the experienced technical end of it.

0:13:24 Mark Evans: There seems to be a lot of them in the UK to say we’re a small country, we’ve got a lot of higher end diversity. And, I mean, I think partially some of that might be down to the conditions because it’s just, you know, even if you’re recreational diving, you’re in a dry suit. The vis isn’t great. It can have currents. It’s a bit more challenging than being able to jump in somewhere where it’s 29 degrees, 40 meters viz, you know, in your trunnies and a t shirt sort of thing. So I don’t know if that maybe has helped foster, you know, the more experienced divers.

0:13:53 Matt Waters: I think you’re right nail on the head there and it’s much of a big surprise to me when I came down to Sydney for the first time. It’s much the same here because, yeah, we do have, you know, Balmier waters compared to the UK, but it’s still. It generally tops out around 23, 24 and then through the winter time can drop down to 1617. So if you want to spend any amount of time underwater, then, you know, you are looking at a five mil or a dry suit.

0:14:19 Mark Evans: I would definitely be in a dry suit. If it goes below 2020 degrees, I’m in a dry suit, I’m not going to be freezing. It’s not so much the water, it’s when you come out and that wind, it’s like there’s nothing better than just locking off the shoulder, sticking a bit of air in and looking smug while people in five mils are sat there shivering.

0:14:36 Matt Waters: I had it with the. With the missus last. Was that last year? Maybe two years ago now. I’ve always been diving in wetties, you know, I’ve done the dry suit a little bit sometimes, but I much prefer a wetty just because I like to take a leak when I’m diving. But, yeah, we get back after the first dive and we’re on the boat and there’s no protection from the wind on this boat we were on. And the misses, bless her, gave me a rather smug look because she sat there with a heated vest cranked up to three and I was shaking like a shitting dog.

0:15:04 Matt Waters: Terrible.

0:15:06 Mark Evans: Yeah, I tell you, it’s actually. I have to say though, those heated vests that can be used wet and dry are just mega because, I mean, heated vests under a dry suit are great. Don’t get me wrong. I’ve even had heated gloves under dry gloves and they’re amazing. But yeah, I’ve used a couple of the wet, use heated vests and they were a revelation. I was like in a five mil in winter in the Red Sea and I didn’t really need it on in the water, but, yeah, getting out, it was just cranking that on. So your torso was warm night?

0:15:37 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. And she, she’s a massive advocate for them, so much so that Christmas time she got me one. As the temperatures dropped and low and bill, the temperatures came back up because we’re cracking into summer, so I’ve not even used it yet. I’m kind of excited for winter, though, just to.

0:15:51 Mark Evans: I was going to say, though, you’re going to be. I used it for in the morning when I was walking a dog. It was cold.

0:15:58 Matt Waters: Oh, yeah.

0:15:59 Mark Evans: I use it mountain biking because it was like getting there. It was cold. Put it on to warm my car up, turned it off while I was riding. And then at the end, when you have that rapid cool down, crank it back on again. So, yeah, multi use. They are. They’re great.

0:16:13 Matt Waters: Which one were. Do you try out or have you got one?

0:16:16 Mark Evans: Well, the first one I had was the thermolution one.

0:16:19 Matt Waters: Yeah.

0:16:19 Mark Evans: And then when thermolution has stopped, they’ve gone out. It’s venture heat then bought the thermolution technology and have upped it, because the thermolution only had the heating element on the back. And then the venture heat added the heating element on the front as well and a few other extras, which are definitely an upgrade. Yeah, yeah. Night and day, that thing. It was amazing.

0:16:38 Matt Waters: Yeah, that’s the one that I’ve got still sat in the box. It’ll come out to play soon enough. Hey, give me a second, I’m just going to turn the fan on. Bloody roasted over here. We’re going. We’re doing the change of seasons. We’ve just gone into autumn effectively. So it’s starting to cool down, but it’s still. What is it now? 08:20 in the morning. It’s starting to crank up already. Yeah.

0:16:58 Mark Evans: No, we ain’t got any of that at the moment. It’s raining. I think it topped out about 13 degrees here.

0:17:03 Matt Waters: Yeah. I don’t miss the UK weather whatsoever.

0:17:05 Mark Evans: Well, you’d be all right now. You could weigh your heated vest.

0:17:07 Matt Waters: I think I’d be wearing it 24/7 over there nowadays. But I think the longest I’ve been back for now is about three weeks, and that’s the longest since. Well, I left in 2012, so it’s a bit of a shock to the system when it gets below 1516 degrees. That’s it, I’m all in. I’m just staying in the house. That’s it. No going out. Can you divulge who we’ve got attending the show this year?

0:17:32 Mark Evans: Yeah, so far, we’ve got a few big names lined up for our inaugural show in September, which I’m very excited about. So we’ve got Anthony Gordon roped in to be our MC extraordinaire on the main stage, because we would do quite a lot of work with Gordo in the magazine, in the australian magazine, because I used to do a section in the UK mag called the Next Generation, which was basically aimed to showcase children in diving and youngsters in diving and teenagers in diving.

0:18:01 Mark Evans: Because we need to get more younger people into diving, without a doubt, because you only have to walk around some of the dive shows in certain countries. And I mean, I turned 50 in December and I still feel like I’m 30 years younger than everyone. It’s scary. So we need to get more younger people in. But I always think that the best person to speak to young people are other young people. So you and me can wax lyrical all we like and say how awesome diving is. And they’re going to be like, why are the old bowl people telling me to go and do something?

0:18:29 Mark Evans: But if you’ve got like a twelve year old or a 14 year old or a 16 year old saying why they love diving, then there’s more chance that other teenagers will take notice of that and want to do it. So I wanted to give them a voice. So we started doing that and at the same time Gordo was doing that with his Aquilum series that he started doing on YouTube and everything. So we’ve kind of joined the two together now. So he’s still doing his videos, but then we have a section in the magazine which is like Aquilum next generation and it’s what I did.

0:18:56 Mark Evans: So it’s got the, you know, ability for little snippets from kids talking about why they love diving. Yeah, so he’s, so we do a lot with him and he’s very, very passionate like me. So we thought actually he’s gonna be a, he’ll be a good one to mc the main stage. And then so far announced we’ve got Richard Harris, which I’m very excited about because I’ve never actually met him in person. I’ve seen him on stage at Eurotech when he come over to the UK with all of the thai cave rescue people, which was just amazing. They were on stage for 2 hours and then it took them about an hour to finish the Q and A’s before they were. Literally had to leave the stage because I think they’d still be there now.

0:19:37 Mark Evans: It was like there’s so many people. So, yeah, so he’s going to be awesome on the main stage and I’m looking forward to him talking about his dive that he did a couple of years back. Where he went to. Was it 240 meters? Breathing hydrogen, like just. Yeah, mind blowing. So yeah, that’s gonna be cool. We’ve got Jill Hyneuth, which I’m very excited about. Because she was one of our main stage speakers at our very first UK show.

0:20:06 Mark Evans: So it’s nice that our first Australia show, she’s back. Plus she’s just done a diving into darkness documentary, much of that, which was filmed down around that area. So again, double that. And she’s going to be showing some of the footage from that, so that’s going to be very cool as well. Then we’ve got the legend that is Pete Mesley coming in from New Zealand. So that’s just going to be awesome because his stories are just fantastic.

0:20:34 Mark Evans: He’s got that ability when he’s on stage. You feel like it’s just a bunch of people sat in a pub having a chat with a friend when he’s doing his talk, so he’s going to be awesome. And then we’ve got Liz Parkinson coming over from Lamb. Now, I’ve known Liz for about 25 years and she was one of our speakers at the show last year and she had one of the biggest crowds. She’s mega. When I met her, she was mainly scuba instructor and free diving, but then she’s got into doing stunt performing in Hollywood and she’s like now the go to person. She was involved with the latest avatar movie, she’s done things with Hugh Jackman, she’s done all sorts of stuff. And, yeah, she’s an amazing presenter as well, so got a really strong lineup on the main stage so far. And we’re going to have a mega screen as well. So in the UK, we’ve got a big screen. I think it’s 5 meters by 4 meters.

0:21:25 Mark Evans: So we’re going to aim to have something similar like that on the Australia screen, so that when people are showing their video clips or their stills, it’s a mega video wall behind them. So it’s really impressive. And all of their stuff’s going to look amazing on that.

0:21:39 Matt Waters: Yeah, that’s outstanding. How do I get. Pete’s gonna know Jill, then.

0:21:46 Mark Evans: Yeah, yeah. It’s funny because it’s such a small world, is diving. That’s why we sell to people. It’s a global. It is a global entity. But everybody knows everyone because it’s such a small world. The number of people that you know, you meet someone, and then within ten minutes of talking to them, I can guarantee there’ll be five people that they know that I already know and not always famous people. I can just meet somebody on a boat and I can guarantee there’ll be someone they know that I know.

0:22:12 Mark Evans: And it is, yeah, very small world, which is what I like about it.

0:22:15 Matt Waters: It is, it is, I love it. And I’ve said it before, it’s. For me, it’s the closest thing that I found to the community that I had within the military. You know, it’s. It’s so, so small. In fact, I was recording the other day and someone, someone else mentioned the same, you know, being able to go across the other side of the world and end up talking to someone, and lo and behold, they’ve dived with you or someone that you’ve been connected with.

0:22:41 Mark Evans: Okay, number of times as well. You go somewhere and then you bump into people. I died with a guy when I was out in Egypt, and then I was in Bonaire, of all places. And I’m on up, I’m on a boat, and there’s a boat moored up about 20ft away, and we’re both on the top deck. It was like, both spotted one that we were like, what are you doing here?

0:22:58 Matt Waters: It was just.

0:22:58 Mark Evans: Yeah, it was just incredible. It was like, what? You know, amazing. There was just somebody I bumped into on a boat. Four years later, there we are. We’re both in Bonaire.

0:23:05 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Much the same. In fact, the band of sea crossing. And you can imagine where the hopping points are from Komodo, right the way across to Rajah. And one particular evening, I’ve got the drone up, and then someone pings a message, are you on such and such a boat? I’m like, yeah, I am. How the fuck do you know that? He said, look to your left. And lo and behold, there’s my old boss from, like, six years previously, and he’s on the boat having a bit of fun.

0:23:34 Matt Waters: So we popped across and had a few beers. Very small world. Yeah, it is.

0:23:39 Mark Evans: But I say, I think that’s part of what makes diving special, that it has, that there’s people from all walks of life, but it’s a great leveler, is diving. And then you can just talk diving to people and it doesn’t matter what you do, where you come from, how old you are or anything. And then I’ve done quite a bit with diving with veterans that have, you know, lost limbs, um, or traumatic brain injuries that never. And they, uh. When, you know, they’ve used diving as a kind of a, you know, form of healing, you know, that it gets them out. They’ve got.

0:24:11 Mark Evans: And they said that that’s a great thing. When they’re out of the military, for whatever reason, suddenly they’ve lost that camaraderie they had, and this and that’s why they said diving is great, because it did. You feel like you said they feel like they’ve got that back. So, uh, yeah.

0:24:28 Matt Waters: In fact, you know what? You just sparked an idea in my head. I thought of another person you can have on one of the stages at the show if you want. Lindy Leggett, and she runs the Scuba gym Australia. So she takes disabled people and PTSD sufferers underwater in the pool to give them some treatment and assist with their mental health. She was on the show last season and we ended up. I went and helped out with a few of the pool sessions just to check it all out. And then we ended up taking four disabled divers into the shark dive experience in Sydney Aquarium for the first time. It’s never been done before.

0:25:07 Matt Waters: Yeah, and she’s a lovely lady. And speaking of links within the scuba diving industry, she’s really good mates with Paul Toomer.

0:25:18 Mark Evans: Oh, there you go.

0:25:20 Matt Waters: But she would be a cracking one to have on one of the stages and she’s a great speaker.

0:25:26 Mark Evans: Ah, right. Yep. No, I’ll definitely get the contact details off her later, then.

0:25:30 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, she’s good. Oh, I’ve just had a brain fart. It’s a good job that this is just recording and I can just delete out bits like this. How long are you down here for in Sydney?

0:25:42 Mark Evans: It’s a very quick trip, so we fly in on the Wednesday. I believe we arrive on a Wednesday and then I think we fly out the following Wednesday.

0:25:54 Matt Waters: Holy shit.

0:25:55 Mark Evans: Pretty much down, do it and back again, because then I’m straight into the cycle of three magazines to print. So Australia goes to print on the 11th, the UK goes to print on the 18th, and the US goes to print on the 23rd.

0:26:08 Matt Waters: Just to keep you a little bit busy.

0:26:10 Mark Evans: Yeah, exactly. Just what I need when I’m trying to recover from traveling halfway around the world and putting a show on is to do three magazines back to back. But, hey, it keeps you on your tails.

0:26:20 Matt Waters: Yeah, well, at least you’re coming this way. First off, you know, whenever we fly, obviously, we’ve always got to go west and it’s easier going out than what it is coming back. The jet lag seems to be ten times worse coming back this way.

0:26:32 Mark Evans: Yeah. The most stupid trip I ever did was when I went to Fiji for a week. So we flew out. Flew out. I did four and a half days of diving and then we flew back again.

0:26:45 Matt Waters: Yeah, no, we tend to anything further now than Indonesia. We tend to add on three, four, five days as a minimum, just to make it worth it because it’s just such a haul from here. Yeah, we did Galapagos expedition last year and tagged on. Was it two weeks? Unfortunately, we went to Roatan and it was a bit disappointing. I thought it was going to be a lot better than what it was, but at least we got some sunshine and some beers. That was about it.

0:27:11 Mark Evans: Yeah, but like you say, if you go on a long trip, you know, I mean, I know I’m usually doing it for work, but even then, sometimes it’s now starting to, like, get, you know, I’ve been doing this now flying around the world for, like I say, 25, 26 years. And it does start to wear on you a bit more when you’re getting a bit older. Don’t bounce back and recover as quick as I used to.

0:27:29 Matt Waters: I take the piss out of the missus because she’s, what, six years younger than me, so I can have my lazy days. As, you know, as a 50 year old, you can’t be asked doing something or it takes you a little bit longer to do something. And she’s like, come on, let’s go, let’s do this. Just you wait, girl. This is going to catch you up in a few years. And I’ll remind you of this moment when you were telling me that I was an old bugger.

0:27:49 Mark Evans: Well, actually, trying to keep up with my 17 and a half year old son keeps me, reads me active. I said, going out mountain biking with him and then our perennial toddler dog, making me go walking with him every day. That helps keep me fit as well. But, yeah, there’s just certain things, like I say when I fall off the mountain bike now, I don’t tuck and roll and bounce like I used to. It’s more of a lighter, you know?

0:28:13 Mark Evans: And then I lay there going, why does it hurt?

0:28:15 Matt Waters: Six weeks later, you bruise is just disappearing.

0:28:18 Mark Evans: Yeah, pretty much. So, yeah, I’m a little bit more careful. He got, he’s got, he’s got that bravado of youth where he’s in, he’s immortal, so nothing’s gonna happen. So he just launches off anything and I’m like, yeah, I’ll just go around that.

0:28:31 Matt Waters: Luke’s his name, is it? Yeah, yeah. He’s a diver as well, eh?

0:28:35 Mark Evans: Yep. Yeah, he’s got about 200, 2230 dives now. And we’re due out to Malta this summer. And he’s going to do his rescue course because I haven’t blasted him through his courses. A lot of people, when he was getting near ten, were all you going to make him like the world’s youngest master scuba dive and everything? I was like, no, I’m not racing him through everything. I want him to enjoy it and experience.

0:29:00 Mark Evans: So he did his junior open water and then he probably did 60 or 70 dives before he did his advanced. And then I say, then he’s junior advanced, switched to become the full advanced, obviously, once he got over 15, and then he’s just been diving. But, I mean, he’s dived in Iceland, he’s dived in Wales, he’s diving in the UK, he’s dived in Grenada, Egypt, Malta before. So, you know, he’s dived in various, various places.

0:29:29 Mark Evans: He’s been lucky with that. So he’s had a lot of different experiences and everything, and I just think that that experience has stood him in good stead. But now he’s, you know, he’s 17 and a half, he’s nearly the same height as me and everything. And I’m like, right, you know, I said, what about doing your rescue course now? He was like, oh, yeah, no, I’m up for that now. So I thought, right, time for him to do it and then it’s, you know, only a couple of days and then we can still have some more dives and that out there.

0:29:53 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. And I’m the same as you. I think it’s the right way to do things, not rush it, obviously. I’ve worked in Ko Tao, one of the busiest locations on earth, for dive training, and on several occasions I’ve heard people that want to do their divemaster training and they’ve only just finished their open water. And I’ll always advise, just take your time, get some dives under your belt, get the buoyancy and the basics just nailed. So it’s, you know, you don’t even need to think about it and it.

0:30:26 Mark Evans: Yeah, that’s automatically doing. And I wanted him to enjoy it. My worry was if I push too many courses on him, it start feeling like he was at school again and then he. Yeah, yeah, I’m not interested in doing that. Whereas when we just go in and actually go in and do some cool dives, because he’s a proper little recce like me, I mean, he likes the big stuff, so he’s desperate to see some proper big sharks and mantas and things like that, but ferreting around in some rusting metal is definitely a chip off the old block on that one. So, yeah, he wants to do Scapa flow with me.

0:30:59 Mark Evans: We were going to try and get up this year, but the dates unfortunately didn’t quite work out. But, yeah, we’ll just shelve that one. Maybe try and get him up there next year.

0:31:07 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. In fact, Scapa flow. You’ve been there before?

0:31:12 Mark Evans: Yes, nine times to Scapa. I love it up there. It’s about five, six years since I’ve been there. The last time I did it, I was on one of the little Hollis explorer rebreathers, the stormtrooper one, I think I put it into Deco on everything apart from one dive, which, considering it was a unit that wasn’t supposed to be designed for decompression, was quite interesting. I keep scrolling around on the handset so I could see how much gas time was remaining and what scrubber life was remaining and kind of, you know, work it like that until it worked out that we were. Oh, you’re out of Deco now, so I’ll let you have the proper information again. But I’ll tell you what it was. It was great all week and I was only getting out of water, you know, not that long in front of people who were on, you know, proper big, full on ccrs and everything.

0:32:01 Mark Evans: It was a lot less faster set up than there. It was just. We did it on purpose to. To go, because that thing was. I took into Egypt as well and that was where it was really happy. I mean, being able to go and do two and a half hour dive on Ras Mohammed in the middle of the breeding shoal of fish was amazing. And that was where it, you know, in that sort of, like, sweet spot, 15 to 25 meters range. It was just ideal.

0:32:26 Mark Evans: But we just wanted to show that you could actually push it and do a little bit more hardcore diving and it was capable of doing it. So, you know, we were doing dives at 35, 40 meters and, you know, and stuff like that. And it. Yeah, it handled it really well. But, yeah, next time I go up, I’m just going back up on scuba. I’m just enjoying myself. I don’t want to have to try and think how to dive something.

0:32:47 Mark Evans: And like I said, if I can show it to Luke, because I say it’s one of my favorite spots up there. It gets in your blood. One of them things people have is it’s like, oh, it’s somewhere you have to go at least once. And I guarantee if you’ve been once, you will definitely want to go back again.

0:33:01 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. See, I’ve not had the pleasure. I got very close one time, but obviously buggered off overseas again, but there’s. How much. Do you know how many wrecks there are in total up there?

0:33:12 Mark Evans: Well, this is the thing. If they. I think there were when they all went down, I think it was 70 odd when the whole scuttling went down. And if they were untouched, it would blow the pants off truck at bikini or anywhere because there’d be all these scuttled vessels lying there fully intact. Would have been awesome. But then there was a gigantic salvage operation, so most of them got raised. So there’s only seven left, and they’ve all been salvaged in one way or another.

0:33:40 Mark Evans: But the ones that you have got are amazing. So it’s, you know, it’s definitely worth seeing because there’s not many places in the world where you can dive. World War one german battleships, indeed.

0:33:51 Matt Waters: I mean, I can’t think of many other places that you would.

0:33:54 Mark Evans: No. And not as easily accessible either. I mean, the maximum depth is on the mark graph. I think it’s 44 meters. And then the shallowest ones, when you hit the top of them, you’re in about 1112 meters because they’re that big. So, you know, and it’s. There’s not a lot of current where they are either. So you can kind of jump in, go down the shot line, swim around, and then either come back up the shot line or fire up an SMB and just come up that way.

0:34:21 Mark Evans: But you don’t have to even go down to the bottom. You know, the battleships are all upside down because of the weight of the, the turrets. But the, the cruisers and the minesweeper, they’re lying on the side and they’re actually my favorite dives because you don’t have to go down to the bottom. So if you’ve got one sitting like this and you hit this side at, I don’t know, 17 meters and this is about 35, you only actually need to go to about halfway down.

0:34:43 Mark Evans: So you might be in a 29, 30 meters range. And then you can kind of see everything. And you just go along the deck and then you got all the windlasses, the battle bridges, and it’s amazing. All the decking is still there. German workmanship because you can, some of the deck guns, you can go around the back and you can still see all of the dials and stuff like that. Yeah, it’s incredible.

0:35:05 Matt Waters: No, that sounds good. And I’ve had a few people tell me in the past that it’s, if you get it right, the visibility there can be absolutely insanely good.

0:35:14 Mark Evans: Yeah, it can be. I mean, if the worst I’ve had because I’ve gone at all times a year when I’ve been up there, the worst I’ve had is probably four to 5 meters, which you still can still see things. But I usually try and go in either by April, may or September time, because I find it’s either side of when you might get any algal bloom, you know, if the water temperature gets up a bit and it’ll prompt that.

0:35:39 Mark Evans: I mean, there’s no rhyme or reason to it because I did it once in October, in August, and we had amazing visibility and it was really warm. We’re all sat in t shirts in, in between dives, but the vis was great, so there is no rhyme or reason to it. But generally earlier on in the season or later in the season when the water’s that little bit colder, you can have really good vis. I think I probably had easy 12 meters on the, on the wreck sometimes, you know, which is pretty good, to be fair, where there isn’t any current, you know. So.

0:36:07 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that sounds good. I might. I might go and dive there sometime in the future.

0:36:13 Mark Evans: Yeah. So you break out. You definitely want to break out your dry suit and your heating vest for that one, though.

0:36:17 Matt Waters: Yeah, for sure. I think if I mentioned it to the misses point blank, just. No.

0:36:22 Mark Evans: Yeah, I think as soon as you start talking about 1214 degree water, she’ll.

0:36:25 Matt Waters: Be like, yeah, not a chance, not a chance. Where’s your go to place then for diving? Do you actually get much time for diving with all the. All the work that you’re doing?

0:36:35 Mark Evans: Yeah, I mean, I still managed to do. I don’t do as many trips as I used to. I mean, the first 16 years that I worked as the editor on Sport Diver, I was doing one week every month. I was doing twelve trips a year. And. Yeah, so I got around a lot of places then, but that what people said to me, you’re burning the candle at both ends. Because I’d literally be away for a week. I’d come back, get a magazine to bed in three weeks, go away for a week, come back and do a magazine in three weeks. And it was like a cycle.

0:37:05 Mark Evans: So they said, you’re burning the candle at both ends. I went, no, I’m blow torch in the middle. I mean, it was, it was absolutely annihilating me, but it was just the opportunity to travel and do things. It was like you snap it off with both hands. Yeah. So I don’t do as much now, maybe three trips, four trips in a year. Which still ain’t bad, don’t get me wrong, but I’m just. Yeah, it’s just trying to fit it in with everything else that we’ve got going on. I have to try and be realistic, but like I said, this year we’re going to Malta.

0:37:35 Mark Evans: I think we’re due out to Grenada as well. I think Tobago’s on the cards because we need to go out and do some stuff with them. Obviously, I’m flying down to Australia, but no diving, unfortunately, unless it’s diving into a beer glass. There might be a bit of that.

0:37:49 Matt Waters: I’m sure we can arrange that bit.

0:37:51 Mark Evans: And then we’ve got dema in November, but again, no diving there. But that’s in Vegas, so that’s going to be messy. But then also, do you know plenty of diving in the UK still? Because I still enjoy testing the equipment. So that’s when I’m over in Cape and Raider quarry we mentioned earlier, or my nearest coastline is off north Wales. So often go in there for shore dives or a boat diver and stuff. So, you know, they’re nice. I mean, even if you’re going for a bimble around at 7 meters on one of the shore dives, there’s still lobsters and crabs and all the kelp and squat lobsters and, you know, different fish and everything. So you see plenty of marine life and it’s nice and shallow. You can have a good long dive, you know, you don’t have to be. You don’t have to go deep, dark and dirty. You can just stay nice and shallow and still enjoy it.

0:38:34 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. We’ve got a lot of shallow diving here as well, but the biodiversity in Sydney is just ridiculously good. You know, people pay a small fortune to go, likes of lembe and Amban, etcetera, and we’ve got it right on the doorstep here. It’s just remarkable.

0:38:54 Mark Evans: Yeah, I was going to say, some of the articles that we’ve had in the magazine about Sydney diving, some of the critters and stuff, you know, that are there seahorses and this, that and the other, it is. It’s amazing. It’s like you’ve got muck diving on your doorstep. Really?

0:39:06 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. But last month when or last month? A couple of months ago when PT came up and we went for a couple of dives and that was just in at Clifton Gardens and I think the maximum depth we got was about 11 meters. But the critter hunting there is just ridiculous. So much so that, you know, Nais was there for the first dive as well. So the three of us went in second dive, me and PT, and then she decided that she was going to hang around and do a third dive.

0:39:31 Matt Waters: You know, it was that good. And at seven to 10 meters maximum, eleven, if you were lucky, stick your, stick your wrist into the sand. But it’s, it is absolutely remarkable. And you know, you’ve dived in Sydney before, right?

0:39:46 Mark Evans: No, I have never dived in Australia.

0:39:49 Matt Waters: Mate, mate. Well, obviously you’re not going to be.

0:39:53 Mark Evans: Diving to Australia when I fly down. Get out of here a week. That’s my first ever time in Australia.

0:39:59 Matt Waters: Holy shit. Oh, mate, you’re gonna have to. Okay, so obviously not this trip, but the, for next year, plan to spend a bit more time down here and we’ll go and get some critter hunting done. And also the weedy sea dragons, grey nurse sharks that you just come nose to nose of the grey nurse sharks and they just hang around and treat you like one of the family. It’s great.

0:40:21 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, that’s, that is our plan for next year. Gonna get it organized a bit more that. Then we can come down, do the show and then have a couple of weeks holiday at the end so I can get a bit of diving in, do a bit of the, uh, you know, the tourist, tourist bit as well. Um, problem is Adrian keeps right out editor who’s based down in Brisbane. He keeps posting whether he’s been and done like with a grey nerve sharks or he’s gone and dived a young gala or he’s gone and done one of the, you know, the HMAS ships that have been scuttled like the Perth and the Brisbane this, that, the other. And I’m just looking at him like, I really want to do that. Really want to do that one. Oh, that looks good. I want to do that. And then he goes and does Rodney Fox with the great whites. I’m like, oh, I definitely want to do that. And then I look and I’m like, yeah, I’m going to need more than two weeks.

0:41:07 Matt Waters: Oh, yeah, for sure. You need two weeks just to get across the country. It’s that big.

0:41:14 Mark Evans: A few things. I think it would probably this next year it’ll be, you know, like you said, a few dives around Sydney and touristy stuff in that area and then I’ll plan a trip to come out, just a dive trip and hit some more of the other stuff.

0:41:27 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. And if you time it, well, time it right. In fact, you’ll know anyway because don’s done a couple of articles for you on South Australia with. You can get in all three down there. So Rodney Fox Wiella, for the cuttlefish aggregation, and then the leafy sea dragons under the jetty. So you can do all three in one hit. That’s what we plan to do as well. Maybe next year. Maybe next year.

0:41:49 Mark Evans: Yeah. The cuttlefish just amazed me because I love cuttlefish. Cuttlefish and octopus are amongst my favorite marine creatures because there’s so much intelligence, you know, like sometimes when you’re looking at fish, you know, there’s not a lot going on. There’s a definite dory moment, but then there’s other fish, you know, they’re looking back at you. I always feel that a little bit with manta rays when they go by you, that they’re definitely kind of sizing you up.

0:42:09 Mark Evans: But octopus and cuttlefish, definitely, they are intelligent and they are properly eyeballing you. And just the colors and the way that cuttlefish can change and undulate. You don’t have to look far to get ideas away. Like people who do close encounters of the third kind and stuff. Got an idea for the aliens because you’re like, well, we’ve got them right here. Just the way that they can change the color and just their eyes.

0:42:34 Mark Evans: And the biggest cuttlefish I’ve seen are about that sort of size we get here, you know. So when I’ve seen the pictures that he’d done where they’re like, these monsters, I’m like, that must be amazing to see that many of them.

0:42:44 Matt Waters: Yeah. And they’re a prime example of the, you know, the biodiversity we’ve got here. You’ve got the almost meter long ones down at Waiala. And then again, you go in at Clifton Gardens here and you find the tiny little pygmies that are only a couple of inches long. Yeah, but they’re all the same, all super intelligent, like you say. Even those that they’re tiny fellas. You know, I tend to. Usually I’m doing macro, obviously, when I jump in there. But over time, I have taken the dome port down and the little fellas are the most curious. When they start seeing their reflection in the dome port, you can get super close.

0:43:21 Mark Evans: Yeah.

0:43:21 Matt Waters: And you can almost read the mind as they’re like, all right, well, what the fuck is this?

0:43:30 Mark Evans: Once, and he was hiding in a hole, windlass hole, on a wreck in a red sea. And he was just. His eyes were peeking up. I mean, he kept going in. He was just peeking up at me. And so I just literally just hovered and I was there probably about five minutes, just floating, just watching him. And he kind of, he came up a bit more and then he got a bit more confident and he kind of plopped out and then, like I say, I put the camera down and then he could obviously see himself in the dome park because he like, put a tentacle out and he was like going dink, dink, dink on the glass, like figured out what it was.

0:43:58 Mark Evans: Then he like stuck his, pulled it a bit and I could feel him like tugging it and I’m pulling him back. Little tug of wall with his little octopus. It was like, did the entire dive there. I don’t think I got any more than about 12 meters away from the, where we jumped in. Everyone else had gone off down the reef and I got picked up. I pretty much got up and got on the boat. They all got picked up by the door.

0:44:16 Mark Evans: Where did you go? I went nowhere.

0:44:18 Matt Waters: I just stayed there, down and up.

0:44:20 Mark Evans: I won’t go in anywhere.

0:44:21 Matt Waters: Oh, fabulous, fabulous. You mentioned the other day, um, your Egypt trip that’s coming up. When? When is it? Who’s it with what you’re doing?

0:44:30 Mark Evans: Uh, yeah, so doing a trip in July 2020. And so it’s on the scuba scene, live aboard, which is, I think it’s the largest liveaboard in the Red Sea at the moment. It’s 48.5 meters long and ten and a half meters wide. And it’s even got a very. It’s got a pool on it, not a hot tub. It’s got a hot tub on the roof. It’s got a pool that are filled with salt water and it’s got seats in it, so there’s nothing better than chilling at the end of the day. Sat this deep in the water, nice warm seawall. When I’ve just pumped it out, it’s like 28, 29 degree water sitting in there over cold beer. Perfect.

0:45:05 Mark Evans: But yeah, so we just like heaven. So we, we’re going to get on it in Port Galib, which is the southern most egyptian marina where liver balls tend to go out of. And then we’re doing all of like the deep south and fury shoals and all these famous sites down there. We’re going up through the offshore marine parks, including Daedalus and the brothers and Zabagad and Rock island, and then we’re nipping into Safargah to do some of them there. And the wrecks up to Aber Newhas, which is famous for its wrecks, where the Janis deers and the Carnatic and everything.

0:45:35 Mark Evans: Cross the thistle gome wreck, cross the Ras Mohammed, go up to the Straits of Tehran, back round to the Rosalie Muller wreck, maybe the thistle gom again, and then go back into her garden. So we’re doing a, like a one way trip through the best dive sites in the Red Sea. So I chartered the boat to do it. Came up with the idea of doing it with, with the rep for all star liverballs, Kevin, who markets the boat worldwide. He was the one who said, oh, we have to move the boat, because we do half the year doing the southern trips and half the year doing the northern trips.

0:46:08 Mark Evans: So that was when I was asking him, well, when you move the boat, does it have customers on? And he was like, yeah, we just do a week trip. And I was like, well, could it be a two week trip? And he was like, well, yes, and that’s where it grew from. So I chatted boat, and I pretty much filled the boat for my trip, but I couldn’t do it this year because it was already busy doing other things. So I booked it for July 2025.

0:46:32 Mark Evans: But because he had to lock off that two weeks on the, on the list, they had plenty of their regulars saying, what’s that two weeks? It’s blocked off. You went, oh, well, the chart, the boat, explain the trip I was doing. There was that many people were interested in doing it. He put one on for July 2026, and he’s already sold out. So I think now I think he’s going to make that, that when it has to do that transition from one marina to the other, it’ll do that two week trip. So if anyone’s ever thinking of doing the Egyptian Red Sea, that’s the trip to do, because you don’t have to have the choice of, oh, do I do the deep south?

0:47:07 Mark Evans: Do I do the offshore marine parks? Do I do the north? Do I do the wrecks? Just do them all in one it, yeah.

0:47:14 Matt Waters: And that. I tell you what, that would be highly attractive to the Anz divers, I reckon, again, because of the travel time.

0:47:23 Mark Evans: To come up, if they were going to come up and do it instead. Like I said, if that, you know, because we actually had a couple of Aussies on a trip that I went out on, I went out of Port Galeb and we were only doing the deep south. And the first question he asked was, are we going to be able to do this thistle gorm? It’s like, yeah, no, because that’s like hundreds of miles to the north. But they’d obviously come a long way where they’re doing it. And the trip, if you’re traveling a long way and you can hit all of the key sites in that one two week trip, you know, if you never ever do the Egyptian Red Sea again, you’ve hit all the main parts then. And July is a great time to do it as well because Ras Mohammed, that’s right in the middle of breeding season, so you get shows of literally thousands of batfish, thousands of parrotfish, thousands of unicorn fish.

0:48:11 Mark Evans: It’s amazing. So, yeah, yeah, I’m really looking forward to that one. But like I said, I reckon that’s going to be a regular that they’re going to do every year. Now.

0:48:19 Matt Waters: What’s the price tag on it?

0:48:20 Mark Evans: So it’s not too bad at all, that boat, even though it’s a mega boat, it’s got four chefs as well. So you get fed very, very well. But you’re looking. Yeah, you’re looking at around about 4000 us for the fortnight, which I don’t think is bad going at all, really, because the normal price to go on the boat side, bearing in mind the miles you’re doing as well because it’s burning some fuel. Because if you look on a map and you look from the deep south right up to the north and where you’re going, you seriously covering some mileage?

0:48:49 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Well, mate, you’ll have to give me his contact details because I’d be keen on sorting something out. Clearly can’t do it. 26 now, by the sounds of it.

0:48:59 Mark Evans: Get your name down for that one. I’ll probably have enough to. But again, then maybe we’ll do a joint one.

0:49:04 Matt Waters: That sounds like a spanking idea, mate. I’d be keen on that. How many. How many people can get on board? How many divers?

0:49:12 Mark Evans: It is 26, I believe. Yeah, 26, I’m sure.

0:49:18 Matt Waters: Yeah.

0:49:19 Mark Evans: But it’s. The thing is, it’s such a gigantic boat. When we were on it, it was almost full to capacity. I think there was just. It was two off full capacity. And there’s, the main roof is a massive sun deck. You could get 80 people up there and you wouldn’t be sat on top of one another. Then the next level down was where we used to congregate because there’s a bar there with a proper barista coffee machine.

0:49:44 Mark Evans: It’s got some nice little stools up against the bar and then lots of like, comfy sofas and everything, we were all sat up there. And even though everybody, a guest on the boat, was all sat on that sun deck, there was still space, and we weren’t sat like this. Everyone was spaced out. And then the next deck down is where the pool is, and there’s a massive dining out area for alfresco dining and more sun lounges.

0:50:07 Mark Evans: And then at the front, there’s a seating area, and then there’s even a games room with a massive tv and a games console at the front. They showed us that when we got on, and never, nobody ever went in it again for the rest of the week. And that was a massive rumour. The front, it’s such a big vessel. If you want to relax somewhere, you can be away from everyone. But even, like I said, when you’re all sat together, that’s part of the reason I chose it to do this trip.

0:50:32 Mark Evans: Because you’re on a boat for two weeks, you know, sometimes you might want a bit of a break or whatever, and that boat has got enough room for everyone to find their own space or all hang out together and whatever, so. And like I said, you don’t get bored of the food with four chefs.

0:50:48 Matt Waters: Oh, no, but that’s. You hit the nail on the head there because, you know, having worked on liveaboards and done many boats myself, you need, every now and then you just need that little bit of space where you can just have a bit of own time and silence. And there’s nothing worse than having to hide in your cabin if you want that. You know, just being able to stay out in the fresh air somewhere and relax without the hustle and bustle noise of a crammed boat.

0:51:16 Mark Evans: Yeah. And that’s it. Like I said, it’s so vast, you know, for doing that. And then the two zodiacs are great because they’re. They’re. They’re a big zodiac. Tank racks in the middle. So all of your gears all racked up, not just lobbed in and piled in the front. And they’ve got ladders.

0:51:31 Matt Waters: Yeah.

0:51:31 Mark Evans: So you’ve got flopped down ladders. So it’s dead easy to get in. None of the kick like hell and flop over the side like a fur seal or a manatee in danger or something like that. You know, it’s like. It’s not exactly graceful, is it? So this being able to climb up a ladder and get in, it’s much better.

0:51:48 Matt Waters: Yeah. Well, that. Just having the racks on board is a substantial difference as well. There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than having to pass your equipment up because they insist on it rather than leaving it on your back. And the amount of times that I’ve been on rides back to boats now, and you hear the free flow going off or a bc inflating, the amount of damage that occurs is just ridiculous. And I can understand why they do it, but at the same time, we should be given choice. But a tank rack.

0:52:19 Matt Waters: Tank rack sounds like absolute heaven.

0:52:21 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, it’s great because it just literally, it means that when you’re going out to the dive site, you might have your gear on. If it’s a short trip, if it’s a longer trip, they put it in a tank rack and you put it on when you get to the site, which makes for the longer trips far more comfortable. But like I say, when you hand it off and they can literally just put it straight into the rack, bungee on, your gear is safe, and then it’s just, you know, you finish around your neck, fins are in the bottom of the boat.

0:52:44 Mark Evans: Sorry.

0:52:46 Matt Waters: Beautiful. Beautiful. How’s that for timing?

0:52:48 Mark Evans: I thought I’d be a pirate tonight. Left. Estella. I’m on the rum.

0:52:52 Matt Waters: Oh, Jesus. I’ll just say, whiskey and coke, I’ll be with you, but rum? Oh, I think it’s one of the few things that will make my head a little bit tender in the morning, really.

0:53:02 Mark Evans: See? Rum, I’m fine. Vodka, I’m all right with. I’m not allowed Jack Daniels. It turns me into the tasmanian devil. So, yeah, I reckon. I reckon I was a pirate in a past life.

0:53:12 Matt Waters: Yeah, we went out a couple of nights ago. I do a lads only curry ketchup once every couple of months, and it’s all divers. And we went out and did this on Wednesday. And you meet in the pub, have a couple of beers, and then go and have your meal. And this bright spark. I’ve not been out for a while with the lads. I was like, should we go back to the pub and. Oh, yeah, 230 in the morning. I got home and so when we were planning to do this recording, Thursday mornings, like, no, no, I’m gonna. I’m gonna keep that one free just in case. And I’m so glad I did because there’s no way we’d be talking right now.

0:53:46 Mark Evans: I was gonna say, though, it’s always one of them in it. Number of times I’ve done that, especially if it’s like, you know, someone from, like, my best mate from school. If I haven’t seen him for, like, I might not have seen him for three years in the flesh. We’ve talked on the phone or whatever, but when you see him, like, within five minutes. It’s like you. It was only a week since you saw him. You just straight back into it and that was it. You go, I will go for a couple of beers and, you know, a couple of beers. It’s not gonna be a couple of days, it’s gonna be a couple of beers every 20 minutes.

0:54:12 Mark Evans: And then you just, yeah, like you say, next thing it’s like, right, 09:00. Yeah, an hour. And then, like you said, four in the morning, you might go, yeah, right. Where else can we go?

0:54:24 Matt Waters: And then the gentle reminder in a morning that you’re 50 years old and not 20 anymore.

0:54:28 Mark Evans: You see, that’s why I’m not too bad. As long as I just stick with rum or with Stella. I don’t get hangovers.

0:54:35 Matt Waters: Really. Yeah. See, I never used to get hangovers, but nowadays I’ll have. Well, Thursday morning is a perfect example. You know, I wake up with a thinking my head’s going to be pounding any second now and maybe 2 hours later I’m all good again. But that’s about as close as I get to a hangover the majority of the time because I don’t drink as much as I used to anymore. I’ve kind of flipped the coin and reduced.

0:55:04 Matt Waters: Yeah.

0:55:04 Mark Evans: Dialed it back a bit.

0:55:06 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. I mean, living on a beach for five, five and a half years and remote, remote dive locations, it’s a beer every day. Yeah. Yeah.

0:55:17 Mark Evans: Then it can be a bit of a slippery slope. I know what you mean.

0:55:20 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Enjoy that rom have you? Good. Is it spicy?

0:55:28 Mark Evans: Oh, yes. Black spice rum?

0:55:30 Matt Waters: Yeah. See, I don’t like the stuff, but at least I know the good ones. Are we having an after party at this go diving show?

0:55:39 Mark Evans: Yeah, we’re having a party on a Saturday night.

0:55:41 Matt Waters: So we’re still on a Saturday.

0:55:43 Mark Evans: Details on what we’re going to do. We’re going to be doing it somewhere near the venue because when we do the party at the UK one, we actually have our own bar in the like the relaxing socializing area. So that’s where we held it. But obviously the Australia one, we’re still kind of finding our feet. It’s exactly how we’re going to do it. So where we might host it in one of the nearby hotels. We just got to finalize it. But we will be doing something on the evening because we always do an industry party.

0:56:17 Mark Evans: We used to do an industry party back when the other show was going and we were just an exhibitor, the sport diver, and we used to do a mega party on the, on the Saturday night, and he became legendary. We used to have like, hundred, 7080 people from the dive industry all came to the, to the event. And, yeah, there was many people on the Sunday, used to come up to me looking rather green, saying like, yeah, bad man. I’m like, hey, I didn’t force you to drink.

0:56:44 Mark Evans: They’re like, yeah, but you got a free bar. And I’m like, well, I still didn’t force you to drink. So, yes, we will be doing that. And we might see you might do some entertainment as well, because we’ve done that. At a previous party when we launched scuba diver, we had dueling pianos, and that was great. And a guy on a digital saxophone wandering around doing it, and it was. They were absolutely fantastic.

0:57:07 Mark Evans: We might have a look at doing something like that.

0:57:09 Matt Waters: Yeah. Well, if you need someone to check out the venues for you, just let me know. I’ll happily pop along and have a few beers and scope them out.

0:57:17 Mark Evans: Yeah, well, that’s it. We could. You could be out. We’ll send you on a mission. Be like, mission impossible.

0:57:22 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, I’ll take that. Not a problem. Happy days. Um, all right. I keep. I can’t help but keep looking at your t shirt. Star wars.

0:57:32 Mark Evans: Yeah, you’re right, actually.

0:57:33 Matt Waters: You’re clear. You’re clearly a massive fan, aren’t you?

0:57:36 Mark Evans: That’s why Luke is called Luke.

0:57:39 Matt Waters: Really?

0:57:39 Mark Evans: And our dogs call wicket after one of the e one I did do it is there’s Penny. She’s just given birth to him. We had four names. I kept pushing for Luke, but she had, like, Jack, Jake and Alex as well. We short names. We just wanted. And I was still like, yeah, Luke, Luke. Luke was pushing that, but we hadn’t kind of decided. So anyway, they gave him to me, and I looked at Penny and I went, you know, I remember just, like, looked, and she nodded at me and I did, the moment I have a look at him. And I went, luke, I am your father.

0:58:11 Mark Evans: And the midwife just went, please tell me that’s not what I think it is. Like that. And I went, could have been worse. Could have called him Anakin. He’s got no hope, really. He was. And he grew up in his bedroom to start with. He decorated it all with loads of Star wars stuff, and he’s still into it. He still gets quite a kick out of the fact that he is a Luke. And it was due to me being addicted to Star wars. He went to a fancy dress party when he was about five, dressed as Darth Vader, who was in a Darth Vader outfit.

0:58:46 Mark Evans: And everyone kept saying, oh, you’re Darth Vader? And he kept saying, no, I’m my dad. They were all like, what? Then he take his thing, Luke and my dad. So there’s a lot of people in the diving industry who are into Star Wars. I soon discovered that.

0:59:00 Matt Waters: Man, I love it. It’s one of my childhood memories from when I was very young and the first, the original Star wars came out, and it was the one and only time. I remember my mum pulling me and my brother from school just so she could take us to the cinema without all the crowds. And we were the only three people in the cinema watching Star wars. It was phenomenal. Oh, I was addicted from the word go.

0:59:24 Mark Evans: Yeah, it’s funny that it’s. I mean, there’s a lot of people in other stuff, but it’s just. It’s become. It’s almost like a cult within that as well, with Star wars where you just got that, and it’s so funny in the dive industry, number of people that you see, and it’s like, almost like they’ve all got something on. They’ve got other tattoos where it’s an imperial logo or this, that and the other. There’s like little signs. You all look around.

0:59:48 Matt Waters: What do you reckon on the Mandalorian?

0:59:51 Mark Evans: No, I liked it, actually. I mean, I think the first season was the best by a long way. The first season was amazing, and I think it kind of. It’s lost a little bit, but I’ve still really enjoyed it. I mean, you know, I even enjoyed, like, solo and stuff like that, which. Some of the films that got slated, I still kind of enjoyed them. The original trilogy are the ones still for me. But I did enjoy Mandalorian. I thought it had enough of that old school charm that it harked back to the original trilogy.

1:00:20 Matt Waters: I thought it was fantastic. Absolutely loved it so much. So my. My carry on camera bag, the rucksack, it’s got a patch on it, which is. This is the way, and it’s the mandalorian helmet.

1:00:33 Mark Evans: Fantastic.

1:00:35 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, no, I love it. See, again, just another brave heart. It’s got to be the time of the morning, you see, it’s because you.

1:00:41 Mark Evans: Should be drinking, mate. That’s why you’re going wrong. Doesn’t matter what time it is. Remember, if you’re drinking rum, it doesn’t mean you’re alcoholic. Just means you’re a pirate.

1:00:49 Matt Waters: I wish I could say that about whiskey I got. If I had my talking about being 50, I’d I had my 50th last month and we went out to Thailand and just so I could reminisce on the places that I dived and worked and obviously take a load of friends. So we chartered big blues boat in Simmerlands and a lot of friends came along, along with quite a few bottles of whiskey. And trying to travel even domestically in Thailand with bottles of whisky in tow is a. A right old pain in the arse. But it kind of dawned on me that people seemed to have a link between me and alcohol. Thankfully, there was enough people there to help drink it because there’s no way it could get back to Australia.

1:01:32 Matt Waters: However, I did retain one bottle and it’s from a good buddy of mine over in Sweden. And it’s a very specific bottle of whisky that’s distilled in Sweden. And he was explaining that his family have a bottle in the house and it’s probably six or seven years old now and it only comes out for particularly special toasting events. So it’s the one bottle that has survived my trip and it’s the one bottle that’s going to sit there and do exactly that. So I.

1:02:04 Matt Waters: I should imagine that one’s going to be on the shelf and doing much the same as Kent and only coming out on special occasions.

1:02:11 Mark Evans: Yeah, that’s it, though. It’s nice. Nice to have something special like that where you just bring it out and because it makes even more special when you have it, then.

1:02:18 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, I’m looking for. But I’m still. Every now and then I’m like, oh, I wonder what it tastes like. And I think that’s going to be the torture until I do actually crack the cork on it, I think.

1:02:30 Mark Evans: Yeah, savor it.

1:02:33 Matt Waters: So let’s talk some more about the mag and how little time in life you have because of the magazine. Have you got a plethora of people behind the scenes that are assisting you in getting everything done?

1:02:47 Mark Evans: No, we are a very, very small team, believe it or not to say. We’re like this, you know, pretty big global entity. It’s actually, there’s a handful of us. So there’s me as editorial director, Ross, my business partner, is publishing director, and that’s where the name Roque media came from. So it’s the Ro of Ross and the RK of Mark. So that’s why we did rock media, because if we did it the other way, it was mass media and there was already a company called Mass Media, but we thought Raw Media Limited actually had quite a nice ring to it. So that.

1:03:19 Mark Evans: That was where the name came from. So, yeah, so he’s been like the front man on the editorial side of it. My wife Penny, she’s business development manager. So she’s heading up sales for the UK show, UK magazine and the US magazine. Sorry, did I say Australia magazine? The UK magazine and the US Magazine. And then we’ve got Adrian, who’s the one I mentioned before, who’s Brit, but he lives in Brisbane, got an australian wife, he’s got two australian kids.

1:03:46 Mark Evans: So he’s our editor for the australian magazine, but he’s also does the sales on it. So he’s like two in one down there. His wife Sass, she’s just come on board with us part time. So she’s helping out with some input in data and everything because we end up with all these bookings. There’s so much stuff that needs inputting on that takes forever. So she’s coming to help out with that. We’ve just taken on Leo Groer, who used to work for simply scuba, which is one of the big online companies in the UK.

1:04:18 Mark Evans: And he worked for various other big retailers in the diving industry over the years. So he’s ended up out and we took him on. So we just brought him on to help out on sales with the photographic side and the manufacturers who were the ones that he mainly dealt with. So we have literally just brought him on now. And then we’ve got Mark Newman, who again, used to do the YouTube channel for simply scuba.

1:04:47 Mark Evans: So when simply Scuba ceased to be, we took him on. And so he’s heading up the. So he basically runs that. We’ve got Steve Weinman doing diving it because he used to be the editor of Diver magazine. And then when that company went into liquidation and everything, and we bought their assets, we resurrected Diveanet. And then we brought Steve back to run that as his own, like, little entity. And that’s pretty much it.

1:05:14 Mark Evans: We’ve then got Walt Stearns, he’s our editor in the US, so he does some of the articles out there, but otherwise I’ve got a cohort of contributors that I can use, like Don Silcork and this, that and the other who write stuff, but actual staff, that’s pretty much it. And then we’ve got Matt, our designer, and he designed all the magazines, which is why we have to be on the ball, because some of the content in the magazines I can use across everything. So, like some of the equipment reviews, if we’ve got an article on, say, the Philippines, because people from the UK will travel to the Philippines. People from Australia would travel to the Philippines, people from North America would travel to the Philippines.

1:05:56 Mark Evans: So I can utilize them in the. In the, you know, across all three magazines, but I’ll do them at different times and won’t be in the same issues. But then there’s a lot of content is bespoke for each region, so the news is region specific. There’ll be local diving, which is only applicable to that magazine. So there’s a lot of new stuff for each issue that we have to do. So, yeah, for a small team, we do a lot of different things.

1:06:21 Matt Waters: I was going to say, that’s a lot of work. Everything that you’re listening down there, I’m thinking, bloody hell, that’s a job in itself for two people, let alone one.

1:06:29 Mark Evans: Yeah. So it does get busy. Well, like I said, me and Matt have kind of got it down to a fine art now, because the UK magazine is monthly, the australian magazine is monthly, the US magazine is currently bi monthly. So what we do is we basically, I’ll plow on and I’ll get the UK magazine done and the UK magazine will go to bed. So, for instance, that’s going to print tomorrow, actually, is the UK mag.

1:06:55 Mark Evans: I’ve then got two weeks before the next Australia goes, so we’ll then get that magazine finished, that will go to print. We then got two weeks before the next UK goes again. So it’s like a constant cycle. But every other month, us gets thrown into the mix, so what we tend to do is next week. So the UK goes print tomorrow, next week, before we get into Australia, we’ll get some of the US done, so that when we get round to the month that US needs to go to deadline, we’ll have 90% of it finished. And it’s just mocking it up then.

1:07:28 Mark Evans: And we’ve kind of got it down to a fine art now. So on a. On a three, three on a month cycle, that’s got the three magazines, it kind of just all falls into place like a jigsaw. But when it’s a month where you’ve got three magazines going to print, and then at the end of it, I’ve got our show, which is what happened with the UK show that was a little bit more hectic because I was trying to do the load of show stuff while I was doing all of that. And that all got a little bit where sometimes I’d just be sat there and I’d stop and I’d go, hang on a minute, what was I doing.

1:07:59 Mark Evans: I’m doing UK. Was I doing Australia? No, I was doing something on the show to go and get my head in the right place. But it keeps you busy. That’s the main thing.

1:08:11 Matt Waters: Well, this is why I can see you keep looking up at your wall planner. I can tell where the wall planner is because you’re talking about all the dates and stuff. I can see why you use it.

1:08:18 Mark Evans: Now, mate, that’s my life. If it’s not on there, it doesn’t happen. I have to write it on there.

1:08:24 Matt Waters: So it keeps me in track.

1:08:25 Mark Evans: So I’ve got little stickers on there with all of the dates when they go into print and this, that and the other. But there is some good important stuff on there as well, like the 27th and 28 April. I’ve got a weekend down at Twickenham for the rugby, so it’s not all work.

1:08:39 Matt Waters: Oh, nice. Yeah. Are you going watching? It’s.

1:08:45 Mark Evans: I think it’s Harlequin to play in someone because I’m not a massive rugby fan. I do enjoy watching it, but my mate Steven Whelan, who does deeper blue.com, the sort of like, free diving and diving website, and he’s a massive rugby fan, so he’s dragged me along to various ones. So we’ve seen. I think it was England versus Wales. Was one game. There was England versus Ireland, I think was another. So this one is the first one I’ve been to. That’s not an England match, but it’s at Twickenham. But the best thing is we get very, very spoiled because it’s what he did last time when we went, which. He’s wearing one of their sky boxes.

1:09:25 Mark Evans: So we get our own bar. We get our own barman. Everyone private, me. And it’s very, very fancy. I’m just humbled that I get to go along because the atmosphere is amazing. But when you’re in one of those.

1:09:37 Matt Waters: Places, it’s like, yeah, it’s superb.

1:09:40 Mark Evans: It isn’t all work. There is a bit of play as well.

1:09:43 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. And it’s not a far run for the Quinn’s either, because they’re based just down the road from twiggers. And if you end up going out on the piss afterwards, which is a high probability at Twickenham, um, hopefully it’s still there. It should be. But the. The Twickenham tub was a local pub and it’s absolutely fabulous. That was always a go to after a game. Whenever I was down there, I was lucky enough to be dating a chick that lived about 15 minutes away, so it almost became a local.

1:10:14 Mark Evans: Oh, that’s handy.

1:10:15 Matt Waters: Yeah. Yeah. Rugby Christmas. See, I lost connection with a lot of sports. I love sports, especially when I was in the military and in particular, rugby, a big part of my life. But when I moved overseas and started diving, you lose connection to what was available media wise, because you’re limited on what you can watch from country to country. So I dropped off from the rugby element, and it’s only now coming back into Australia. I’ve been here, what, six years now, that have started to pick up the.

1:10:50 Matt Waters: The addiction of watching the games again. And I don’t think it matters which shape ball it is. If you’re into a sport, then it’s. It’s nice to sit and relax and watch it, and even more so, live, like you say.

1:11:02 Mark Evans: Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, the atmosphere and everything that you get there is just incredible.

1:11:06 Matt Waters: Yeah. What’s your. What’s your go to sport, then, if you’re not much of a rugby dude?

1:11:11 Mark Evans: Well, I want to know people that doesn’t like football. I’m just not a football fan at all.

1:11:18 Matt Waters: No, I can’t stand it.

1:11:19 Mark Evans: Just not interested at all in that. My wife’s canadian, so I have been to a few ice hockey matches when we’ve been over in Canada. Now, I could really get behind that sport because it’s. That’s it. It’s like rugby on ice, because they just knock the hell out of one another. It’s like there’s a fight going on the pucks way over here. Everyone else has just stopped and watching them while they’re like, you know, and then once they’ve had a punch up, they’re only off the ice for, like, five minutes, and then they’re back on again. It’s just. Yeah, and that’s got a great atmosphere and everything as well. But the thing I couldn’t get my head around was you sat there and they come down, like. Remember when you used to watch a movie and there was the intermission and they’d come round with the little ice creams in the tubs in a little thing. Yeah, they come down like that. With tubs, with beers in.

1:12:05 Mark Evans: I’ll have a beer. So you hand your money along.

1:12:08 Matt Waters: Yeah.

1:12:08 Mark Evans: And then your change comes back. Then you send the tip back to them, and then your beers get handed along to. You don’t even have to get out your seat. It’s like, what a sport. You don’t even have to get out your seat to get a beer. So, yes, I do like watching ice hockey. And then, like I said, if I’m going to watch a sport in the UK, it’s probably ended up being rugby for the entertainment side of it and the atmosphere. So I do enjoy that.

1:12:33 Mark Evans: But otherwise, yeah, I don’t really watch lot of sport with the stuff like that. If I do, it’s motorized sport. So I’m quite into me rallycross and rallying.

1:12:41 Matt Waters: Oh, yeah.

1:12:42 Mark Evans: And I do like watching mountain biking as well. Downhill mountain biking. But that’s mainly because I’m watching for when people fall off because you just watch, that’s gonna.

1:12:51 Matt Waters: Oh, mate. When. When COVID kicked off and obviously my main income is me scuba diving travel company. And that closed down. Okay, ground to a halt. So I ended up picking up a job working for a distributor or importer of bicycle components. And I used to, much like yourself in England, loved mountain biking. So it was an easy job to say, yeah, I’ll give this a go for a while and get some pennies through the door.

1:13:20 Matt Waters: So I was looking after a shitload of shops throughout New South Wales and Canberra. Hundred stores, I think it was. And I got to travel around a lot and visit them all. And on my visit down at Cambridge, just happened to get this call from a fella. He said, oh, I’ve got a mate who wants to open an account with your company. He’s starting a new store down in XYZ. Any chance we can come together and have a quick chat?

1:13:46 Matt Waters: I was like, where are you? He says, oh, Canberra, yeah. Whereabouts? I’m there today such and such. Right, I’ll be there in ten minutes. It was literally on my route back up to Sydney and I stopped in and started talking to him. Graeme Albon, his name is. And he was rattling on and talking about his mates store and his son is just working on a bike, on a stand, quiet and silent, just cracking on. And you have the friendly chat and then what you’ve been up to. I’ve been out with Lewis and Lewis is doing this and Lewis is his son.

1:14:20 Matt Waters: At the time he was 15 years old and the penny started to drop. I’m thinking, this is a 15 year old kid and he’s won some of the biggest races in Australia already and beating people that are two, three, four years older than him. Do you get much support? He said, no, it’s all self funded. I sell my cars and then we’re off to America next year or next month and doing Canada and then down into America and doing all competitions over there and.

1:14:52 Matt Waters: Hold on a minute. And I legged it back out to my car. I got hold of the boss on the phone. I said, dude, I’ve got this, this amazing kid who’s just winning everything and not getting much support. Any chance we can get him some tires and a few bits and pieces? Because Max’s tires are the mutts nuts. And we were one of the distributors for it. We was like, fuck yeah, Matt, get on it. And even though I’m not doing the job anymore, I still got him on my instagram and watch what he’s doing.

1:15:19 Matt Waters: And he’s just won. I mean, he must be 17, possibly 18 coming December this year. And he’s just won his fifth cannonball, king of Cannonball. And it’s the biggest, largest event in Australia. And he’s kicking ass on the under nineteen s. I shit you not. This guy is going to be, he’s going to be top of the world at some point. There’s no doubt about it.

1:15:44 Mark Evans: Right trajectory, isn’t he, with that?

1:15:46 Matt Waters: Yeah, it’s insanely good what he’s putting out and what he’s doing for such a young lad. Remarkable. And I’ll flick you a link. You can check out some of his little videos that are going off. And he’s. When I say he’s winning a lot of the races that he’s winning, he’s kicking ass. The time differences are just ridiculous.

1:16:04 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, send them because Luke would enjoy to see them as well.

1:16:07 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. He’s a young lad as well.

1:16:10 Mark Evans: So we’ve been and watched, I’ve watched some mountain biking races because we’re lucky. We literally, we’re 30 minutes away from land Egla in north Wales, which is where we go mountain biking. And you’ve got people travel four or 5 hours to go to Llandegler because it’s such a good spot. And we’ve been up there and we’ve watched some of it because they actually have some of the world downhill championships and stuff are in Snowdonia and that. So we’ll go and watch them.

1:16:32 Mark Evans: And again, it’s the atmosphere live. I mean, watching it, if you watch it on, you know, tv or on YouTube or whatever, it’s still cool. But when you’re actually there, there’s that whole, you know, they’re just. You’re involved with everything. I think something about live is different now. That’s part of the reason why we did the shows, because being at a show and you’re sat there in the audience and you’ve got a Pete Mesli or a Jill Highnuth talking.

1:16:59 Mark Evans: Yeah. They might be doing the same talk or talking about something that they’ve talked about on YouTube, you know, on a recorded thing, but it’s totally different to sitting and watching it on your tv at home or being in the audience and there you are and they’re right there in front of you. So that’s, that’s what I think is it’s bringing that whole live element to life. And it helps that whole dive tribe feeling as well that you’re all there with like minded people. And it, you know, it gives you that buzz that, oh, this is why I do it, because it’s not just because diving is cool, but look at the people that are involved in it.

1:17:32 Matt Waters: Yeah. And it closes that gap, that, that big gap where people are reading the likes of Scuba Diver magazine and listening to, like, say, jill or Pete on YouTube, whatever, the kind of, I wouldn’t say celebrity status, but it feels like there’s a bit of a difference because the person’s on camera quite a lot. People tend to be a little bit apprehensive of approaching, and just being able to have that live event closes that gap significantly. So it allows people to realize that you’re all one, one clan.

1:18:07 Matt Waters: Doesn’t matter whether you’re a bin man or a barrister, you know, you’ve got the same, the same love in life for going diving.

1:18:13 Mark Evans: Yeah. And like you said, it gives that familiarity with these people. You have got these people who are celebrities in the world of diving, but they are just divers and they love talking to divers. So then when, you know, I see it, you see that on people, you can see they’re apprehensive about going over to talk to them and they start chatting to someone and they just raise. They’re just talking to them like they’re a mate.

1:18:33 Mark Evans: And you see them to relax and then they’re like, oh. And then you see him walking off and they bounce away. They’re like, properly buzzing because they’ve just talked to someone who’s been like some icon, they’ve read their books or whatever, and they met them and had a selfie with them and this, that ever. And they’re made up. You know, it’s like they probably have a great day doing all the other stuff that’s available, but that one thing that they did where they met that person and did that will stay with them for the rest of their life. So it’s like, I just get a buzz out of that because I always walk around the shows just all the time, just so I can see what’s going on.

1:19:06 Mark Evans: I have to say it does give me a bit of a thrill when I see that, and I think I’ve helped enable that. You know, it’s. Yeah, it’s good, you know, and I do think it’s just nice to see that. Like you said, it just brings everything just. It brings it all down to that, you know, that core love of something.

1:19:24 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Let’s get the fins on and get wet. So what else is at the show? We’ve got people on the stage, we’ve got this stunningly beautiful guy.

1:19:34 Mark Evans: Yes, we’ve got a main stage, we’ve got a tech stage, we’ve got a local diving stage and an inspiration stage. And then we also have a photo stage as well. So, like, some real dedicated ones for, you know, some people, then others are a little bit more generic, but there’s lots of interesting stuff on them. We’ve then got a big tank that’s mounted on the back of an articulated lorry trailer that’s glass sided.

1:19:59 Mark Evans: So we’re gonna have demonstrations in there so we can have free diving demonstrations. I think we’re gonna have a mermaid in there. I think we’ve got some techies that we’re gonna have doing demonstrations like thinning techniques, donating air, all sorts of stuff like that. Because being able to see through the side and through the glass, it’s great, because, you know, there’s nothing worse than the tri dive pools are great, but you’re looking in the top, you can’t see anything, can you? So at least when you’re looking, it gives you that, that feeling. So gonna have that. We are gonna have try dives.

1:20:29 Mark Evans: We’re still just finalizing how we’re gonna do that, but we are gonna have try dives for people who want to try diving for the first time, or if they wanna have a go on, say, side mount or something like that. For qualified divers, there’s something for them to have a go at. We’ve done that at the UK show from day one, and it’s always rammed out all weekend with people wanting to have a go. So we’re definitely doing that. We’re then gonna have some virtual reality diving experiences as well.

1:20:57 Mark Evans: So even non divers can have a go at that. Or you got people who don’t want to dive, they’re just interested in the underwater world, but they can experience it then. We’ve had them at the UK show and they’re always very popular, and then we’re still finalizing some of the other interactive elements. One thing that we’re trying to find, because I’d love to have one there that we’ve had at every UK show is the cave.

1:21:20 Mark Evans: So, you know, like these climbing walls that are on the back of a truck that they rock up somewhere and they lift it up and you can have four people climbing it at once. It’s like that. It’s mounted on the back of a truck and it’s 30 meters long cave system, and we’ve had everyone. Jill went through it, Phil Short went through it. All these cave diving gurus went through it and all of them, when they came out, went, that is so close to real caving.

1:21:46 Mark Evans: And that’s about as close as you’re going to get to the feeling of cave diving being dry. Because when we, when we saw it and we had the idea, like, oh, that’d be really cool, but I have to admit that I thought you were just going to go in on your hands and knees. You’d kind of crawl around and out. But no, you’ve got helmet on with a light knee pads. It’s pitch black inside. And I went in, went around the corner and immediately you can’t be on your hands and knees. You’re down and you’re having to, like, crawl through, wriggle your round corners, bits the bit. You come around the corner, you’re like, well, where do I go now? Oh, I’ve got to go up.

1:22:22 Mark Evans: So you have to then get yourself up and you’re on the next level. And then in the middle of it, you fall into a ball pool, a massive ball pool in the middle. So then you got to get through all the balls. You got the other side and then you end up, you’re on the high, but you have to then fall down to get down to the lower level. So by the time you get out, you’ve wriggled and crawled and everything. And it’s. It was great. And that’s been a hit from day one. So we are trying to find one of them, or the equivalent to have that there because that’s. That is really good. And we are bringing Bruce the rodeo shark with us. So we came with this idea.

1:22:56 Mark Evans: We were looking for something to add for the interactive elements and it happened on this site and they had a rodeo bull, but the skin was a shark. And I’m like, gotta have one of them. So we’ve had him there. We gave him a rest this year and so many people came and said, where’s Bruce? So he’ll be coming back next year. But the company, because we’re pretty much the only person that uses him, they’ve said we can use Bruce. So we’ll be bringing Bruce with us.

1:23:23 Mark Evans: And we’ve already found a company down there with a rodeo bull that we can mount Bruce on.

1:23:28 Matt Waters: So we count him as Bruce, the.

1:23:30 Mark Evans: Only shark he should be riding.

1:23:32 Matt Waters: Oh, that’s fabulous.

1:23:33 Mark Evans: So again, the whole idea was to, for a fun day out for all the family. So, you know, we were thinking initially, the cave, the rodeo shark. We had a interactive bouldering wall this year, you know, we had all sorts of stuff and it was, you know, to keep the kids occupied, because if happy kids, you know, then mum and dad can have a good wander around and enjoy what they’re doing. But we actually end up. It’s more adults.

1:23:58 Mark Evans: We’re going in the cave and going on the shark and everything. It’s not the kids, so. But it just adds a bit of fun to it. You know, we wanted. It’s supposed to be a celebration of diving and so we just thought you got a bit of humour. At the end of the day, diving’s supposed to be a fun activity, so you’ve got to have a bit of a laugh.

1:24:16 Matt Waters: Oh, for sure, for sure.

1:24:18 Mark Evans: And also, it is quite funny if you’ve got a bunch of blokes there from their dive club. The competitive element comes out as to who’s going to stay on Bruce the rodeo shark the longest.

1:24:27 Matt Waters: Maybe you can take him to the after party as well. That’ll be a bit of fun.

1:24:30 Mark Evans: Yes, well, we have thought about that, because alcohol and a rodeo shark, what could possibly go wrong?

1:24:36 Matt Waters: Exactly. Yeah. No broken bones whatsoever. Is there going to be like a photography competition and all that as well?

1:24:45 Mark Evans: Yeah, the guys who are running the photo zone, we’ve got two or three companies are all linking up together and so they’re all going to be promoting a photography competition which will be run over the weekend. I think they’re lining up some quite good prizes for that as well, so. And they’ve got some. They’re bringing some banging speakers to go on the photo stage as well. So, yeah, so if anyone’s into underwater photography, or, again, is thinking of getting into underwater photography, there’s going to be plenty of people there to hand out, you know, some good information or for them to get inspired by, you know, listening to their talks and stuff.

1:25:23 Mark Evans: So, yeah, quite excited about that. That should be good.

1:25:25 Matt Waters: Who’s running that bit, then?

1:25:26 Mark Evans: So I think we’ve got underwater Australasia, one of Adrian’s been dealing with most of those, and anything is underwater photo guide and someone else, the three of them, are all linking together, so they’re doing one mega underwater photography competition and the photo zone, which is great because it’s nice to see them like them all working together to a common end, because that’s what the diving industry needs more of.

1:25:52 Mark Evans: We need more people working together like that. There’s enough other things for people to get involved with. You know, people get into mountain biking and wakeboarding and kite surfing and, you know, this, that and the other that can tempt them away from diving. So the more people that can work together to get people into diving, it’s better for everybody then?

1:26:10 Matt Waters: Yeah. I mean, collaboration is key. It’s something that I say time and time again and rather than, you know, it’s all right, you know, being competitive because everyone’s got to earn money that’s in the business, but working together just makes everything run so much slicker.

1:26:25 Mark Evans: It does. And that’s probably one of the. That is one of the biggest things that gets me in the dive industry. If I was going to change one thing, that would probably be. It is. It’s like, just stop the infighting because there’s too many where you’ve got this training agency thinks that that training agency is the threat. It’s like, no, it’s mountain biking, it’s kite surfing, it’s wakeboarding. You know, it’s all these other cool sports that people are getting into, and they’re not getting into diving.

1:26:51 Mark Evans: You know, it’s like, it doesn’t matter if they come in through, but they’re a diver means they’re going to buy kit, they’re going to go on dive holidays, you know, and like we said, they might do a course with that person. Might do a course with that person, but you’ve got them into diving. Whereas if you’re having all this fighting over the pool that we’ve got and you’re all just fighting over the same people, the pool is just going to get smaller and smaller.

1:27:12 Mark Evans: So we just need to work together to try and get more people into diving in general, and just. I think that that’s, you know, that’s nice to see that that’s happening in the photo zone.

1:27:21 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. No, I 100% agree. And that actually answers one of the ten questions I’m going to ask you as well.

1:27:26 Mark Evans: No, there we go. See, I preempted you.

1:27:32 Matt Waters: Got that one out the way straight away, so I’m just going to take that one off my list now?

1:27:37 Mark Evans: No, that is the biggest thing that I have to say that if there’s one thing I change is it’s just that, you know, forget the infighting. Let’s just grow the industry and just concentrate on who the real problem is. And the real problem is all the other sports and activities that younger people are getting into and they’re not getting into diving. You know, that’s what we need to need to solve that problem.

1:27:59 Matt Waters: I do a fair bit of work with Nicholas Remy, an excellent photographer and founder of the underwater club. And the amount of joy that I’ve had out of working with him and collaborating so that we’re both gaining success is just fantastic. And I urge anyone else out there that wants to use this podcast to promote their businesses, get in touch and let’s do it. I’m all about the collaboration. It’s the way that we need to approach it. And exactly as Mark said there, we’re protecting.

1:28:34 Matt Waters: Well, not protecting, just enticing people to our sport rather than all the other fantastic sports that are out there as well. All right, let’s have a crack at the nine questions that are left from the one that you’ve already answered. You did. How do you describe your job as a diver to people who are not familiar with the activity?

1:28:54 Mark Evans: Yeah, well, I say sometimes. I say I get paid to wear rubber in public is one, but that can get some funny looks sometimes. And I say, no, I’m not a politician, but no, I basically say to people is I’m just very lucky that I get to do one of my hobbies as my job because a lot of people really cannot. They cannot get their head around what I do. Like, where I live, I’m in the middle of landlocked Britain. I’m on the border between Wales and England.

1:29:20 Mark Evans: And they go, what do you do? Oh, run a media company doing publishing and scuba diving magazines. I’m like, what? Like, they think that I should live on a beach somewhere if I’m doing that. And, yeah, they just. The cat and they’re like, you do what? Died for a business. Don’t worry about it.

1:29:39 Matt Waters: Whereabouts are you? Right on the border between wasn’t just.

1:29:42 Mark Evans: North of Oswald street. So what? We’re 15 minutes south of Wrexham. That’s the best way. However, being on Disney now, since Ryan Reynolds bought it, everybody knows where Wrexham is. And we are literally 15 minutes south of Wrexham.

1:29:55 Matt Waters: My brother has just moved to Frodgham and he was, he lived in Tannie Frond, a little village just outside of Wrexham. For it must be at least 20 years.

1:30:04 Mark Evans: How funny is that?

1:30:06 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, but it’s just now it’s.

1:30:08 Mark Evans: Amusing because like I said before, I always used to say to people, especially if I was talking to someone in the States or whatever, no, they’re not going to know where Oswe is. So I’d say I’m about an hour south of Manchester or an hour south of Liverpool because I know that because of Manchester United. But now Wrexham’s on. Everybody knows that. I haven’t seen Ryan Reynolds yet though. I’m quite gutted I’m seeing Deadpool, but you never know. I might run into him, ask him if he’s a diver. That’s what I need to do.

1:30:36 Matt Waters: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my brother, he’s an excitable chap and he’s only eleven months younger than me, but he’s. He’s one of those people that speaks really fast and you know, when he gets excited it gets even quicker. And he’s this location that he’s moved to in Frodgeham, there’s two local pubs. So him and his wife have been out and checked one out a few times when they first got there. And this one particular evening Bev said to him, should we check out the other one? Just go and have a look, have a pint, see what it looks like.

1:31:05 Matt Waters: Yeah, go for it. And they’ve gone in there and Dan being Dan, talks to every man under the sun. So they’re at the bar and very quiet pub and there’s a bloke at the end of the bar and chatting away with him and Dan nips off to the loop, comes back and Bev’s like, right, dan, I’m going to tell you something and I don’t want you to get over excited. He’s like, yeah, fine, no problem. Okay, so the fellow that you’ve just been talking to at the end of the bar, that’s Daniel Craig’s dad.

1:31:33 Matt Waters: And boom. That just sets Dan off because he is a massive, like, we are Star wars fans, he’s a bond fan and his favorite bond of all time is Daniel Craig. So all of a sudden you’ve got Dan the man that’s, you know, talking a million miles an hour, getting excited in front of his wife. And then he’s talking to Daniel Craig. Now he’s. I think he’s turning into Daniel Craig’s stalker because I think he must go to the pub every day just waiting to see the fella. He’s going to be torture when he does see.

1:31:59 Mark Evans: Yeah, because Daniel Craig’s mum and dad, they used to. Their cottage is literally about ten minutes away from the village where I am, because my mate who’s lived here all the time, we’ve been up here eight years, no, nine years we’ve been up here. But we’ve gone for a. We’d gone for a walk and he went, Daniel Craig’s parents house. I was like, really? He went, yeah. You often see him in Oswald street.

1:32:23 Mark Evans: And sure enough he was in book, a book shop in Oswald street. One day when we were in town, somebody was like, oh, Daniel Craig’s in bloody hell. Just wandering about like he’s just, you know, anyone. So it’s. Yeah, it’s quite amusing that, because he just wonder how many people are going up to him, you know, but he was just in there and that was the thing, a lot of people weren’t paying any notice to him, you know, just leaving him to do his own thing.

1:32:46 Matt Waters: So, yeah, oh, that won’t be Dan.

1:32:49 Mark Evans: We don’t want to disturb people.

1:32:52 Matt Waters: Yeah, that won’t be Dan. As soon as Dan sees Daniel Craig, that’s it, he’s going to be all over him. He said, matt, he said, it’s the only time. He said he’s one of these. He’s a bit older in the head than most, so he doesn’t like the idea of selfies, he doesn’t like social media. He said, it’s the one and only time I’m going to have my camera out. He said, I’m going to get so many fucking selfies you would not believe.

1:33:10 Mark Evans: We have to ship him over because our mc on the UK show is Andy Talbot and Andy was a stuntman on the last bond movie.

1:33:18 Matt Waters: Oh really? Yeah.

1:33:21 Mark Evans: Everyone said, cuz he has got, like, he has got a bit of a resemblance to Daniel Craig where, you know, just air color and this, that never anything but. Yeah, he was a stunt, he was a stunt man on there. So yeah, he’s. You can come up, do that, just say that. He can get like, you know, it might not be the full Daniel Craig but at least he’s kind of going that right way.

1:33:43 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. All right, let’s get away from Daniel Craig. Can you share a memorable diving experience that stands out to you as the best you’ve ever had?

1:33:54 Mark Evans: That would be in 2007 when I did a two week trip to Sudan. Of all the trips I’ve done, like I said, I was doing twelve trips a year for 16 years. I have been a lot of places, been all through the Caribbean, you know, the Middle East, a lot, all over Southeast Asia. I haven’t been everywhere. I haven’t been to Galapagos yet. I haven’t done, like, bikini and truck and stuff, but the place I’ve been, hands down, Sudan, that trip, it was just mind blowing.

1:34:25 Mark Evans: Like, the Umbria is like the world’s best shipwreck. It’s, like, fully intact because it was scuttled. It’s got like 350,000 bombs still in the hold. You can go inside the kitchen and it was an italian ship. There’s two pizza ovens, there’s a dough mixer. There’s. All the pots and pans are piled up on the floor. You go in the engine room and there’s still tools welded on the wall where they’ve been crust. It’s incredible. So that’s an amazing dive. But then you’ve got Shaburumi, which is where Cousteau did his underwater living experiment. And there’s the remnants of that, so you can see that. So that’s like proper touching history. There’s a.

1:35:01 Mark Evans: The. What do they call it? It’s a garage. They call it for the submarine he used to have. And it looks like a sea urchin on legs, but it’s massive. And you can actually surface inside. There’s an air pocket and you can take your reg out and talk to one another in this air pocket. So that’s cool. And then you can go off the north tip of Shabarumi and you can do a dive there and you can get tiger sharks, which we had, which was cool, then went to Sanghanab and we had 50 hammerheads on three dives.

1:35:27 Mark Evans: But the. Out of all of the, like, the whole trip is the most memorable trip I’ve ever done. But one particular dive, we saw ten species of shark on one dive, which was just mind blowing. And the top of the tier was a 16 foot tiger shark.

1:35:45 Matt Waters: My word, it was epic.

1:35:47 Mark Evans: I love the Middle East. I mean, I’ve been to Egypt 80 odd times, so I love the Egyptian Red Sea. But that trip to Sudan was just off the chart.

1:35:57 Matt Waters: Yeah, well, when I was talking to Natalie Lasselin, she said about the sudanese trip, it was the first one she was going on, and she much the same as you, echoing what you said, how fantastic it was.

1:36:09 Mark Evans: Just also, it’s the way the marine life reacts, because there are as many people there, you know, there’s only a handful of boats operate down there, so the sites aren’t visited by as many divers, so they’re not as used to seeing people and they’ll just swim up to you or they just completely ignore you. They just assume that you’re like another fish on the reef or whatever and. Yeah, yeah, it’s hard to describe, it’s, it’s just that it was just amazing. It was, it literally was one of those trips that, like I said, it was back in 2007 when I did it and I can still visualize certain things from it as if I did it yesterday.

1:36:45 Mark Evans: Yeah, proper mind blowing.

1:36:46 Matt Waters: Yeah. And that you do that with royal evolution.

1:36:51 Mark Evans: That was royal evolution. I did that on, I think it was about the second or third trip that they did when they started doing that because that was the best way of doing it. Get on that in Egypt. So you use all the tourist infrastructure of Egypt for getting there and everything, then you mortar down, you do your czech dives in fury shoals, which is amazing diving anyway, and then off you go into Sudan, do all your trip in Sudan and everything and then, you know, back up to Egypt to fly on.

1:37:18 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, perfect. Maybe one day in the future. Alright, here’s a good one for you. Yeah, for sure. Good one for you. You have a little ponder over this one. If someone wanted to pursue a career similar to yours, what advice would you give them?

1:37:31 Mark Evans: I would have said the biggest thing, which probably applies to anything but particularly with this, is never give up, put yourself out there, volunteer, you know, get, get involved with as many people as you can, get to know as many people as you can because sooner or later it might open a door up for you. Because, you know, for me, I came into it from a journalist point of view because I was a newspaper journalist to start with. So I’ve been a diver since I was ten.

1:37:58 Mark Evans: I started working at a newspaper when I was 17 and then I volunteered at the newspaper while I did my a levels and when I came out of 6th form and finished my a levels I went straight into a job in journalism, didn’t go to university, I went straight into into there because I’d volunteered for two years while I was doing my a levels. I had like a raft of stories like this that I done while I was doing my a level. So came out and I was weighing it up, it was like do I go and do a media degree or something at university or do I go straight into a job?

1:38:32 Mark Evans: And it was like, well actually I’ve got all that experience because I’m a volunteering and that actually got me in with a job. So then I progressed through different jobs with that and that’s why at 25, when this job came up for the editor of a water sports magazine because I can sail a windsurf, you know, kayak diving was my main hobby, but I did all those other water sports. I applied for it and it ended up. That was the editor of Sport Diver, and that was when I got it. So I was 25 when I started as the editor of Sport Divers, the youngest dive magazine editor in the world by a long shot at that point.

1:39:10 Matt Waters: Yeah.

1:39:10 Mark Evans: And the only reason I got in at that was because I’ve been doing it since I was 17, you know. So I was going up against people who were 1520 years older than me, but they didn’t have the experience I did because a lot of them had been in university and then they’d been doing other jobs. They hadn’t actually been working in journalism, whereas I’d been progressively doing that, working on local papers where you do a lot of things, you know, and just progress like that. And then once I got into it, it’s just like I said, you get to know as many people as you can and that’s what keeps things opening up.

1:39:41 Mark Evans: But like I said, never give up is the biggest thing is just keep, you know, if that’s something you wanted to get into, you just have to keep pushing, keep knocking on doors. Sooner or later someone might let you in and then that’s that hook and then you can keep going from there. But experience is the biggest thing. And even if it means you have to give your time for free, you know, as long as you’re getting something out of it, I don’t mean that, you know, you’re doing like a load of donkey work and you’re getting used and abused.

1:40:10 Mark Evans: But if you can, you know, volunteer and you’re getting something out of it, I can highly recommend it because it definitely worked for me.

1:40:16 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Sage advice. Yeah, yeah. Put the work in and get some grinding.

1:40:21 Mark Evans: Yeah. And that was a big thing. Like I said, you know, don’t mean just, you know, just where you’re just logistic and you’re just hauling boxes around the weather because you’re not learning anything. But if you get in with someone where you kind of, you are learning on the job, you might not be getting paid for it, but the experience you get in is worth ten times the money you get.

1:40:39 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Okay, well, actually just, just reflecting that back into the dive industry, I know there’s lots of ways people can get into being dive professionals and, you know, like the work for free and get your ITC pay for, etc. Etc. I think just recalling or recounting what you said there about not being the box humper and dumper and actually gaining something from it, I think it’s got to be on balance as well. And those people who are considering getting free qualifications and putting work in, just make sure that you’re not used as a slave.

1:41:21 Matt Waters: It’s got to be on balance.

1:41:24 Mark Evans: That’s it. You don’t mind when you have to do a bit of, like you said, a bit of hunt work, that’s fine. You know, that’s going to be part and parcel of it. But you also need to be getting some proper useful stuff coming back your way, you know, rather than just little tidbits. But as long as there’s a balance, like I say, as long as you put the graft in and you’re getting something back, no worries.

1:41:44 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. Okay. If you could change anything about the diving industry or scuba diving in general, what would it be?

1:41:52 Mark Evans: Yeah, so that one, that is the one I’d say that would be the infighting. You know, it’s like Paddy need to understand that SSI are the problem. You know, Bezak need to know that it’s not Paddy’s problem. You know, TDI don’t have to worry about INTD, you know, or even, you know, beyond the training agencies. Scuba pro don’t have to worry about mares and, you know, mares don’t have to worry about Cressy and this, that and the other. As you said, there’s competition.

1:42:16 Mark Evans: That’s fine. It’s healthy competition that you’re doing, no worries. But don’t let it consume you to the point where you’re just fighting over the same little puddle. We need to make that puddle into a lake so that everybody benefits because I said there’s just too many things now that people can get into and diving doesn’t seem to be attracting the younger people as much as it could be. So we just need to try and make diving sexy again is what we need to do, you know what I mean?

1:42:47 Matt Waters: And bring that awareness to it, its availability and its excitement. Yeah, yeah.

1:42:52 Mark Evans: And I mean theres a lot of people put it down to when ive spoken to them, I said we need to get more younger people. And I went oh yeah, well its the cost. Im like thats got nothing to do with it. Half of Lukes friends have all got like a 1500 pound iPhone.

1:43:04 Matt Waters: Yeah.

1:43:04 Mark Evans: You know what I mean? Its like money in any like hindrance to certain things and a lot of them where theyre that little bit older, but theyre all into triathlons and stuff. Like one of Luke’s mates, he’s just dropped six grand on a bike, didn’t even bat an eyelid. Top of the line scuba equipment for warm and cold waters. You know, you wouldn’t even have to spend half that to get kitted out with a good set of kit.

1:43:26 Mark Evans: So it’s like people are spending the money on sports. So it’s not that diving is ridiculously expensive, you know, skiing’s just as expensive, if not more. Like I said, triathlons definitely are if you buy in the top end stuff. So people are spending the money. I don’t necessarily think that’s a hindrance. I mean, you know, if you look at the price of an open water course in the UK, it’s what, 3400 pound?

1:43:50 Mark Evans: Not that much. You know, even if you don’t go out and buy all your own kit straight off, get yourself a mask and a computer and then rent the rest of it to start with and then start building your kit up, it’s not like you have to go and buy everything to be able to go diving. You can do it in stages. So I don’t necessarily think it’s. That’s the biggest issue, is the money. I just think there’s other things that are attracting them more than diving.

1:44:18 Mark Evans: Yeah, you know, but once you get them diving, if they’ve had a go, I find by and large, people are like, wow, it’s another world. And it’s like, yeah, it’s the nearest you can get to flying, you know, it’s like being in space, you can move in three dimensions, you know, that’s the difference. And once you’ve got them and they’re hooked, then, you know, a lot of people, that’s it. But you don’t want them to have a box ticking exercise where it’s like, this year I’m going to learn to dive and then like next year I’m going to learn to Kayak and then a year after that, oh, I’m going to learn to, you know, parachute jump.

1:44:49 Mark Evans: Yes, they’re a diver on paper, but they’re not a diver. Like in, say, eight years time, they might be on a beach in Thailand to see a paddy dive center and then they go, oh, yeah, I’ve got my diving certification, I could go for a dive, but they’re not really a diver. It was just a box sticking exercise. You need to get people to have done that, to dive and then go, I might still do other sports, but, wow, that was amazing. I want to do that as more of one of my main hobbies and then get them hooked a bit.

1:45:18 Matt Waters: I completely agree. What are your thoughts on the ways to minimize human impact on the oceans?

1:45:22 Mark Evans: I mean, it’s not an easy one with that. I mean, I’m a big one for recycling because like you, you know, you go on a dive and I’m fed up of seeing the amount of plastic bottles floating around on the surface, plastic bags drifting around underwater. You know, it doesn’t matter where you are. I can be in a fresh water site and you can find plastic bottles and bags that are blown in. You know, it seems to go everywhere and it just seems that water attracts it.

1:45:44 Mark Evans: It’s like an inexorable black hole that when things are blowing around, it ends up in the ocean. You know, like they go in the river and then the problem is the rivers, where the rivers go, they all end up in the sea. So anything that goes in a river flows down and gets kicked out. So that’s probably the biggest thing is, you know, I am very much anti single use plastic and do try and, you know, sort of like push that as a big thing. And I think, you know, if we can limit the amount of plastics that we’re using, that will have a big impact. But particularly those two things, plastic bottles and plastic bags, you know, I mean, I know it might only seem minor, those are only small things, but they can have a big impact in the oceans, as you know, you know, from turtles eating bags because they think the jellyfish or whatever, but, you know, on a, on a bigger scale than that when it starts breaking down and the fish eat it. So then you’ve now got the plastic in the fish which then people are eating.

1:46:41 Mark Evans: So then people are getting the plastic in them. So if you want to take it full circle, it’s not that we’re just doing it to be like, you know, hunter fish and be all, you know, eco friendly with that. It’s like if you really want to get down to it, that’s going to start getting back into the human population again. So, you know, we kind of, we need to do something because we’re helping ourselves.

1:47:02 Matt Waters: Yeah. Yeah, indeed. Okay. Has your passion for diving or your industry changed over time and if so, how?

1:47:09 Mark Evans: No, I reckon, like I said, I started out when I was ten, turned 50 in December. And if anything, I’m probably more passionate and enthusiastic about diving now than I was when I started. I have so many people say to me when I meet them and, you know, talk to them about diving. Or they ask me about it and they went, God, you’re so like, you know, you’re so enthusiastic about diving. You’ve done, you’ve been diving for so long. How are you so enthusiastic about it? And it’s like, well, because, you know, I do love it, you know, people can’t understand how I can go and dive in places like the Maldives with manta rays and I can go and dive in Sudan with tiger sharks and I’ve done Tiger beach in the Bahamas and this, that, and then I’ll still go and jump in a quarry in the middle of winter. Like I was in a quarry last week. It was seven degrees and we were tear arcing around on scooters.

1:47:59 Mark Evans: It was great fun. It was like, I’ll jump in anyway. I’ll jump in a muddy puddle and I’ll still have a great time. You know what I mean? I’m just, if I’m in the water and I’m diving, I’m having a good time. I don’t care if the visit’s bad, don’t care if it’s cold. I just like being in the water. I like that feeling of diving. But also I said, with the job I’m doing, the day that I’m like, I really can’t be asked to go diving is when I need to jack it in. Because, yeah, you know, it’s an enthusiast sport and I’m writing an enthusiast magazine.

1:48:31 Mark Evans: So if I’m not enthusiastic about it, which comes across in the magazine, you know, I’m on hiding to nowhere. So it’s like, you know, you need to be, you still need to be enthusiastic to be able to do it and try and pour some of your passion into it to enthuse other people. But yeah, if anything, like I said, I think it helps that penny dives and then Luke dives now. So we all dive together as well, which is really nice. Diving as a family is just fantastic. But yeah, I just, like I said, I love diving anywhere.

1:48:59 Mark Evans: Any water get me in it, love it. So yeah, I think I’m probably, I’m getting worse as I get older. I’ll probably be even worse when I’m like 80 and I’m still be diving. I’ll be a nightmare there.

1:49:09 Matt Waters: Yeah, but that’s the beauty of it as well though, isn’t it? I mean, if as long as you’re capable of moving your ass, then, you know, seventies and eighties is not a problem to go diving.

1:49:23 Mark Evans: That’s the great thing about it is the number of people that you do see. I mean, I know we were saying we want to get more young people in the spot and that’s to keep the industry rolling. We need new lifeblood coming in. But it is fantastic to be on a boat and seeing people who are diving and they’re in the seventies and they look like as fit as a butcher’s dog, you know what I mean? You look at them, you think in mid seventies, you know, they look like they’re late fifties, early sixties, and they’re in there doing, you know, liverboards in Red Sea and this, that and the other, and loving it. I’m thinking, how fantastic is that? They’re not just sat in a rocking chair somewhere dribbling, you know, that’s what one guy said to me. He said, I could be sat in a corner, rocking, dribbling. He said, or I could be out here. He said, you know, bouncing around on a zodiac and going for a dive.

1:50:07 Mark Evans: I’m like, mate, you’re an inspiration to me. I aspire to be like you when I grow up.

1:50:12 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah. I’m like that with Don Silcock, you know, the fellas in his seventies, and he does so much training and high intensity training and he’s just done his extended range and I think 55 meters dive stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I look at him, I think, jesus Christ, this old boy could run the socks off me. He’s fabulous. A real inspiration. Yeah, for sure.

1:50:34 Mark Evans: No, that’s the thing, is, it’s not an agey sport. Again, like we said, you can be a bin man or a barrister, but equally you can be on a boat. Well, in the Red Sea. It was Luke’s first ever live aboard and he was on there and he was 16, and I think the oldest person that was on there was 74. And everyone was chatting to everyone. Luke was having a real good conversation with them several times and it was just really nice to see, do you know what I mean?

1:51:01 Mark Evans: Diving was the common denominator, but then the conversation branched off into all sorts of other places from there. But that was the thing that bound everyone together and, yeah, it was just. That was really nice to see.

1:51:16 Matt Waters: Happy days. All right. Is there a particular conservation effort that you are passionate about? If so, which one and why?

1:51:23 Mark Evans: I mean, I’ve been involved in all sorts of different ones over the years, but I think probably the one that resonates with me the most, probably coral reef restoration work, because it just fascinates me. Some of the technology that’s been used now where they’ve discovered that, first of all, they started finding the broken bits of coral, and they were gluing them and fastening them onto frames to try and get them growing back. And then they realized that some of these smaller fragments, if you just fasten them straight onto the metal frames, they weren’t big enough to survive.

1:51:53 Mark Evans: So then they rigged up these trees where they were hanging the smaller fragments so that they were getting all the nutrients from the passing flow. And then once they’ve grown to a certain size, they were then gathering them and then going and gluing them onto these frames. And once they’re at that size, they had more of a chance for surviving.

1:52:11 Matt Waters: Yeah.

1:52:11 Mark Evans: And then they discovered how they discovered this thing, but they discovered that if you run a mild current through the metal frame, it stimulates the coral to grow faster. So there was, like a place there where they’ve wired it up and they’ve got a solar panel floating on the surface and it’s running this current through, and the coral grows, like 40% faster or something. It’s just incredible to see that some of these things, you know, they had photographs showing where these, you know, coralides were this big.

1:52:38 Mark Evans: And in, like, five years, some of these staggering corals were like this. And it was just incredible to see. And I just think that for me, I mean, like I said, I’ve done all, you know, particular fish species, you know, efforts for them or for crustaceans. I’ve done stuff with, like, lobster hatcheries and this, that and the other. But I just think the coral reef one, it fascinates me personally, because I just think it’s incredible how they’ve discovered ways of helping the coral reefs to thrive and regrow.

1:53:05 Mark Evans: But also, if we haven’t got coral reefs, everything else falls apart. So it doesn’t matter if you’re doing something that’s going to save this particular fish species. If all the coral reefs are dead and everything else, then all that’s a building block that, you know, there’s those fish that feed on the coral, and then there’s fish that feed on those fish and they go, you know, it’s that chain, then it doesn’t matter what you’ve done here, because if that’s gone and all of them have gone, they’re gonna go.

1:53:29 Mark Evans: So, like, they’re the building block of everything. So that needs to be our main focus. So I think it’s double whammy, really, for me, that.

1:53:38 Matt Waters: Have you seen on that, on that subject, do you know, of counting coral? It’s a founder is a guy counting coral.

1:53:46 Mark Evans: No, I haven’t seen that one.

1:53:48 Matt Waters: Okay. He’s been on the podcast. It’s a guy called Jolie and Collier. And he’s a. He’s a Brit, he’s an expat that lives in the US. And he was very successful in building houses and construction, that kind of thing. And in his retirement era, he’s decided that he needs to bridge the gap between coral growth and restructure, et cetera, et cetera, and art, try and make a bit of a niche link to entice companies to fund restoration of coral reefs. And he’s got a massive passion for Fiji. So he’s been diving there for 1315 years, whatever it is, even more probably.

1:54:32 Matt Waters: So he took it upon himself and he builds these. He uses his construction skills and his team to build these structures, which then, when you view them from above the surface and looking down, say, for example, a drone, it creates this artwork and the reef itself becomes the artwork design. It certainly is a fantastic thing he’s doing, but it’s certainly something very, very different.

1:55:05 Mark Evans: Yeah.

1:55:05 Matt Waters: Actually might be worth having a look at that for. You definitely have a look at that.

1:55:09 Mark Evans: Yeah.

1:55:09 Matt Waters: No american mag.

1:55:10 Mark Evans: Well, we have a section in the Australia magazine, which is conservation corner, which is a focus on things like that, because we’ve done an article on, like, the coral gardeners and stuff like that. So. Yeah, so, yeah, I will definitely look him up because. Yeah, that could fit in there really nice.

1:55:26 Matt Waters: Yeah, he’s really nice fella. I was meant to go out and do. Because they did their latest build, march, in fact. Yeah, earlier this month, and I was going to scoot out there and do the videoing for them underwater because it’s all hands on. So they’ve been trying to record their plantations themselves, but they need the hands to do the work. And unfortunately, time is of the essence and their window of opportunity reduced so much so that there just wasn’t much point in trying to video it. So we’ll do it next time.

1:56:04 Matt Waters: But he’s a nice fellow, and what he’s doing and what his team are doing, I think, is an excellent contribution to what we’re talking about.

1:56:14 Mark Evans: Yeah, yeah. No, for sure.

1:56:15 Matt Waters: Conservation of the corals. All right. Of the many safety procedures we have in the industry, if you had to choose one as the most important, what would it be?

1:56:23 Mark Evans: I would probably say at the moment, which is quite timely, given some of the things that have just happened recently, which is probably fire and safety procedures on charter boats and live aboards being been paramount. I mean, not only that the boat should be up to spec and all the safety things there, but also that the divers that are on are fully aware of it because, I mean, I’ve always been one of these ones where, you know, I listen to the safety briefings rapidly, same as I always do when I’m on a plane. Even though I’ve been on a plane so many times, every plane is slightly different. So I always make sure I listen to it.

1:56:59 Mark Evans: Yes, I always think the chances of me ever needing it are minute, but I’ve sooner. No, if it did, and, you know, a number of times I’ve been on liverboards in the past, and people are paying attention to the safety briefings. They’re not looking where anything is. They haven’t checked anything out. I think maybe people are a lot more aware now because unfortunately there have been, you know, a few tragic incidents. But I think that that’s probably a key one, is just. Yeah, like I said, one, the boats need to be aware, but the divers need to make it their duty to know where to fire exit is.

1:57:28 Mark Evans: So it’s like, listen to the briefing, you know, make sure the boat has got, you know, decent procedures to deal with fire. Because at the end of the day, when you’re out on the boat in the middle of the sea, you aren’t getting anywhere to go. You know, fire on a boat is about the worst thing you could have. But then also take it upon yourself. Find where, you know, once you’re at your cabin, where’s the nearest fire exit? How do I get out?

1:57:49 Mark Evans: You know, what options have I got? I can go that way. I can go that way. What can you do? And I just think people need to be a little bit aware. Like I said, God forbid they ever need it. And, you know, yes, there’s been a few high profile incidences recently, but you look at the amount of liver balls globally, the amount of divers going on boats, it’s still a very, very small number. But, you know, never say never. Like I said, always be prepared and never need it. I’d sooner be prepared, never need it. Then, you know, be in a situation and think, damn, I wish I thought about that.

1:58:24 Matt Waters: Yeah, well, I’m kind of. I’m of the opinion, you know, you don’t want to be world police, but I think there should be. There should be something that kind of overlooks or approves boats on their standards of safety. And in recognition of that, they get a stamp of approval from an authority figure that can say, hey, this is up to our standards. And that’s not to take anything away from the liverboards that, you know, 99% of them do a fantastic job in making sure they’ve got all of the safety elements in place.

1:59:00 Matt Waters: However, to give customers that comfort and surety that an independent body has looked at the operation itself and approved it and given it the rubber stamp, I think is, is the way forward. I think we need it now. There’s so many boats, like you say, around the world that are providing services, but who’s to say that their standards is meeting the safety requirements?

1:59:26 Mark Evans: Yeah, I’ve like standard because it’s like, you know, in one country it might be a sigh, another country might be that I. Another country, they might have passed everything but the bars down here. So it’s like, yeah, you know, what’s it saying? That’s why I say I always take it on, on the diver. Check it yourself, you know, make sure you know where you’re going. Don’t just rely on them. Yes, they should be doing it and they probably are, but it’s like anything, you know, when you’re diving underwater, I’m, I’m self sufficient.

1:59:53 Mark Evans: You know, I’m not relying on anyone else. You might be diving in the buddy pair, you might be in a group, but you’re still doing your own thing. So it’s like being the same on the boat. Be aware, check everything, you know, better to be safe.

2:00:05 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, 100%. Okay, here’s a good one for you. What’s your top five bucket list destinations?

2:00:13 Mark Evans: Well, if I was doing it for like a general bucket list of ones that I would recommend to people is there’s three that I’ve done, but are definitely on my bucket list because I am going back. So wanna be sedan for sure. One is Egyptian Red Sea. Like I said, I’ve been, I think, 83 times now and I love it. It’s still awesome. Every time I go, you see something different. It’s just an amazing, amazing place.

2:00:35 Mark Evans: I mean, we’re very lucky. In the UK, it’s only a five hour flight, but I’ve taken several liverboard trips where I’ve charted the boat in the past and brought friends over from the states. Now there is a, there’s aggressive boats there. Now there are more Americans are coming over to the Red Sea. But back then, you never saw any Americans out there that like, it’s very rare. But the new, I went all the time and they all wanted to do it.

2:00:59 Mark Evans: So when I said, well, if I charter a boat and they went, well, we’ll feel better going with you because, you know, the area and everything, and they were all blown away and some of them had flown from LA, so. But they were all like, oh, it was so worth it, you know, for the. Because you’ve got a mix of everything. There’s wrecks there, there’s walls, there’s fast drift dives, coral gardens, you know, such a mixture species as well as the topside culture that you’ve got as well with the pyramids and the Nile and all that sort of stuff. So that’s why we see Egypt with that. And then you want to scap a flow, like I said, definitely needs to be on people’s bucket list. I’ve been nine times, can’t wait to go back again. It’s just one of those unique places, you know, just getting there.

2:01:37 Mark Evans: It’s is an adventure going across on the ferry and it appearing, and then, like I said, first drop down onto one of them wrecks and you. You do feel like you’re touching history. So, yeah, so then, you know, those are my three bucket list ones for other people, and they’re still on my bucket list because I’m going to do them again. But two for me that are my bucket list I haven’t done yet is the Socorro Islands and truck lagoon.

2:02:03 Mark Evans: Truck lagoon, to me, is a bit like scapper in warm water. So I desperately want to do that. And I did want. I don’t want to do galapagos because I’ve never done galapagos either. But I keep seeing pictures and stuff from the Socorros and I know they’re known as the mexican Galapagos anyway, but, you know, seeing, like, gigantic shoals of silky sharks and just that. Is it rock or patina? That’s like the really thin rock and you just see, like, mantis going around it. You can get it all in one wide angle shot. Just looks incredible.

2:02:36 Matt Waters: Yeah.

2:02:36 Mark Evans: I’m like, yeah, that’s definitely one place I need to go.

2:02:40 Matt Waters: Yeah, that’s. That’s on my list as well. I’ve not done socorro yet.

2:02:43 Mark Evans: Yeah, no, the problem is, though, there’s so many places, it’s like, you know, I’ll pin it down, I’ll be like, I’m gonna go there, and the next thing you see somewhere else and you go, oh, that place looks really good. Like I said, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve gone to a lot of places as I’m sure you have, but then there’s always still just as many places that you haven’t been that you’re like, yeah, I want to go and do that as well.

2:03:02 Matt Waters: Yeah, yeah, yeah. We get them all done. Maybe by the time. Maybe by the time we’re 80.

2:03:08 Mark Evans: I was just gonna say it’s a good job we can keep diving two or eight, so we might have got round them by then.

2:03:11 Matt Waters: Okay, last of the ten. How would you describe the dive community to a non diver?

2:03:16 Mark Evans: I think we even mentioned this before as well. I think of them as like, a global tribe is the best way of describing it. You know, like minded people who are all enthusiastic about their activity and everything. And, you know, as we’ve said before, I don’t mind if you’re a bin man or barrister, if you’re 15 or you’re 75, male, female, you know, able bodied, you know, disabled, whatever. And it’s just you’ve got that common, common theme and bond.

2:03:44 Mark Evans: And then also I think that a lot of divers are very ocean positive and they’re very conscious about the environment and everything as well. So I think we’ve kind of got a little bit that way. It’s like like minded ocean warriors, if you like. You know. You know, we, we, you know, we want to see our seas being as healthy as they can and. Yeah, like I said, it’s just that easy. It’s that global bond, you know, you think the diving world’s quite small, but like I said, it covers the planet and then you. You always feel welcomed.

2:04:11 Mark Evans: I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere where I felt out of it. You always just get brought into the. Into the fold and I think that’s nice. I think it’s quite welcoming, that camaraderie.

2:04:23 Matt Waters: Yeah. And I love that broad spectrum of people as well. You would never. I mean, even looking around my liveaboard last month for my birthday, you know, everyone’s got something in common, that they’re my friends. However, they’re from such diverse backgrounds and from countries all over the world that you would never get these people around the same table to socialize just because, you know, or under any other circumstance, actually, other than being stuck on a dive boat with. With Muggins here and just having that right.

2:04:56 Mark Evans: It does, it brings people from such diverse. Like I said, diverse backgrounds, diverse jobs, just, you know, such a blend. And like I said, from people from all over the. All over the world. I charted the Aqua Cat live aboard 1012 years ago and just invited a load of friends that were either industry people or just friends that I’ve met on trips. So it might have just been another punter that was on the boat I ended up diving with, or I just got on with that I kept in touch with. So then what I do is ever so often I’ll charter a boat somewhere, I’ll just send out an invite to like, you know, hundred people.

2:05:31 Mark Evans: Like, look, it’s first come, first served. There’s this many spaces. I’m going on a boat that week, you know, come. And that trip we had Brits, Americans, Canadians, South Africans. We had Dutch, French. We had a Britalian, as we called him, because he was italian, but he lives in London, so you used to call him albritalian. We had an Aussie, we had someone come from Thailand, we had South Africa. I mean, it was, it really was, it was such an eclectic bunch that were on there. The crew loved it because the crew were so used to, like 99% of the time to just all american divers that go, because it’s obviously so close for them or Europeans. So for them to get just this mix of people that were on there, they were having a whale of a time because there were so many different, diverse characters. It was fantastic. It was like, you know, that that boat, if you extrapolated that, that was the dive industry, you know how it was. Everyone was friendly, all this sort of stuff, and then you could extrapolate out and it’s like, that’s what it’s like.

2:06:30 Matt Waters: Beautiful, beautiful, happy days. Right, I think we should start winding it up. We’ve been going a couple of hours now, and I think I need to get down. In fact, I’ve got to go down the dive store and get a few bits and pieces.

2:06:44 Mark Evans: No, that’s good. As long as you’ve got plenty of to keep you going there, I think.

2:06:48 Matt Waters: Oh, hell yeah. So just the last push there on Scuba Diver magazine. I mean, I subscribe digitally and get the magazine every month. How do people get to the magazine? What’s on available on offer? And how are they going to get to go to the dive show as well?

2:07:11 Mark Evans: Yeah, so basically, as you said, you get digits. So the magazines are all available print and digital, so you can go into your local dive store and pick a print copy up. That’s the way we, we try and do it because we’re trying to help the dive store. So if people are going in regularly to pick copies up, it gives the dive store the opportunity to interact with them, you know, whether it’s just to have a coffee and a catch up or, you know, it gives them the opportunity to maybe get them on a trip, sell them some equipment, of course, whatever, but it’s. It just gets that regular visit.

2:07:40 Mark Evans: So that’s one way of getting it. If you like the thump of the magazine arriving on your doorstep, you can subscribe to the magazine and have it delivered to you. Or you can go onto our website and you can get the digital version and that gets delivered to you, obviously, as you get it. You know, you get an email every month letting you know when it’s out. The great thing is if you go on our website, which is just nice and easy, scuba divermag.com

2:08:06 Mark Evans: and you go on to there and you go to where the digital magazines are, you’ll see all three. So there’s the australian one there, but there’s also the UK one and there’s a north american one. So you can actually look at all of them for free digitally. So we find that we have a lot of people that are in one area, read the other ones as well because obviously there is still content that might be of interest to them. So, you know, I encourage people to go and have an explore because they’re all on there. The websites also are worth a visit because they’re a mine of information, so that’s worthwhile for people to go to. And then with the show, for inaugural show, we are doing free tickets for everybody.

2:08:46 Mark Evans: So we just want as many people there as we can. So it’s free car parking, free tickets to get in. Just, you know, a great day out for all the family. Come meet a lot of like minded people and let’s just try and get, you know, that, that whole kind of dive festival vibe going so they can go onto the website again. Nice and easy. Godivingshow.com, dead easy. And when you go on that, you’ll see there’s basically, there’s the UK show and there’s the Australia show and if they click on the Australia show, there’s the link then for them to register for their free tickets. And it’s as simple as that.

2:09:19 Matt Waters: That will close us out for now. And hey, listeners, stay safe, stay having fun, keep getting wet. Ciao for now. Close.

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Mark Evans - Go Diving Show ANZ & Scuba Diver Magazine