An equipment maintenance checklist

BANDS AND WISHBONES. Both carry the whole load of a band gun and both degrade chemically — through UV, ozone, heat, salt and simple time.

That is why a gun stored in a sunny shed for two seasons has aged bands whether or not it has been dived, and why a second-hand gun gets new bands before it is used whatever they look like.

Both are the cheapest safety-relevant components in the kit. The cost of replacing them a season early is trivial; the cost of a band snapping while it is being stretched beside somebody's face is not.

The storage advice follows from the same chemistry: cool, dark, dry, unloaded. A garage with power tools is a surprisingly poor location because electric motors generate ozone, which attacks rubber.

A gun stored loaded is separately a problem: the bands take a permanent set, losing power and life, and it is a loaded weapon in a cupboard.

A maintenance list is easy to write and easy to misuse, and the misuse is specific enough to name: a diver who has completed a check acquires a feeling of readiness, and a feeling of readiness produced by a list is exactly what a breath-hold diver must not have.

SO THE FIRST THING THIS RECORD SAYS IS WHAT THE CHECK IS FOR. It reduces the number of times equipment fails in the water. It does not establish that today's dive is a good idea, that the conditions are within your training, that you are fit to dive, or that your buddy arrangement is adequate. Those are separate judgements and none of them is on a list.

THE SECOND IS THAT A CHECK IS NOT A CREDIT. A diver who inspected everything is exactly as obliged to end a session when something fails as one who did not. `which-spearfishing-failures-end-a-dive` sets out which failures end which, and the sorting question — does this affect getting to the surface, staying on it, or being found there — is worth carrying because it is short enough to use while cold.

THE THIRD IS THE ORDER, and it is deliberate: the items whose failure is life-threatening come first, not last. The quick release, operated rather than looked at. The cutting tool, in its place, reachable with either hand without looking. The float and float line and their connections. Then the buoyancy and thermal kit. Then, last, the gun and its rigging, which is the part everybody starts with and the part whose failure costs a fish.

THE FOURTH IS WHAT FAILS QUIETLY, because that is what an inspection is actually hunting. Rubber hardens with age and ultraviolet and splits without warning. Cable frays inside a crimp where it cannot be seen. A hinge pin corrodes and a barb stops deploying. A clip's gate spring weakens. Salt left inside a mechanism keeps working after the outside has been rinsed. None of these announce themselves, which is why the inspection is scheduled rather than triggered by something going wrong.

AND THE CASE THAT CATCHES PEOPLE is the kit that has been in a cupboard since last season. Bands perish in storage, salt continues to work, and a rig that was sound in September is an unknown quantity in May. It gets the full inspection rather than a glance, and rubber gets replaced on age rather than on appearance.

WHAT FISHINGHQ DELIBERATELY DOES NOT PUBLISH is a tick-box readiness tool that returns a verdict. The tool ledger records that refusal with its reason: a checklist that outputs 'ready' is a permission calculator, and the judgement about whether to get in the water belongs to a trained diver standing in front of the conditions.