As with everything, if you do it often enough someone is going to take issue. Mine comes from an incident at Bear Island, namely diving in the channel doing an archival survey of the sunken horse barge. There was a crazy old lady who lived on the Island and was very put out with us being there day after day. She kept calling the MPs to complain and of course the MP Officer would come to roused us out of there. Naturally we felt we were well within our rights to be there and to counter the Officer’s advancements, we logged a complaint that he was in fact violating the Dive Fag ordnance. Out came the rule book and the tape measure, we were busted again… All’s well that ends well, we decided to call it a draw and all complaints were dropped, besides our mission was complete, however, some valuable lessons were learned that day…
I have modified my dive flag to exceed the state regulations by simply replacing the ¼” fiberglass shaft with a 6’ one. The reason most all flags are to short is; they have to be able to fit within the dive bag when you travel, but New Hampshire being New Hampshire they have their own way of doing things. The reason the state is not willing to conform to rest of the world standards is they want some obscure law in which to rain in nefarious divers such as myself… I’m sure you can see this very same approach on hundreds of other issues concerning the state; such as, a national ID… By bringing my equipment into the State’s standards, it’s one less thing they can use against me when I’m caught looting the States treasures…
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