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From our partners at InDEPTH

How Small, How Deep, How Personal

This month has a bit of everything we like around here: small machines with big implications, old arguments that refuse to die, a long road through Balkan karst, and the usual reminder that the water always gets a vote. We begin with the most overlooked dive buddy of all: water. In Meet Water, Your Most Overlooked Dive Buddy, Marysia Trepat Borecka MSc brings together a round table of experts to look at the global water crisis through a diver’s lens. The point is simple and uncomfortable: if the water is in trouble, so are we. From there, we move into compact engineering and rebreather heresy. In The S7 Rebreather: Rethinking the Size of a CCR, Andrew Goring traces the long path from experimental garage builds to a compact CCR platform, asking whether capability really has to mean bulk. Then we hit the road. Drive and Dive in the Balkans by Ruben Castillejo Argote takes us through Slovenia, Serbia, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina, where caves are only part of the story. Hospitality, meals, people, and generosity do as much work as horsepower. We also revisit one of diving’s oldest arguments. In Team Diving vs. Solo Diving: A Slightly Different Perspective, Olivier Isler steps away from doctrine and argues for context: the sump, the objective, the visibility, the current, the depth, and the equipment. Dr. Argyris Argyriadis goes deeper still in The Ego Beneath the Surface: A Psychodynamic Analysis of Technical Diving, exploring ego, egoism, defense mechanisms, and the unconscious drives that may shape how divers understand risk, competence, and themselves. And because progress is not always comfortable, Not Yet: Lessons Learned From A Provisional Rating looks at what happens when a provisional rating becomes less of a setback and more of a masterclass in humility and growth. We close with Jarrod Jablonski’s Blueprint for Success #5: Form vs. Function — Don’t be deceived by appearances, a return to the basics that are never really basic: control, judgment, and the skills that make everything else possible. That’s May 2026: compact systems, bigger questions, Balkan caves, water realities, solo-versus-team context, ego below the surface, and just enough heresy to keep things interesting.