All next week I’ll be taking a cave diving class on my CCR down in North Florida. Cave diving has been a dream of mine since reading an article about Sheck Exley’s exploration of the Nacimiento Mante cave system in Mexico. At a time in my life when I almost bought into the idea that [...]
Centralia Washington is most known to technical divers as the home of the “Meg hatchery” where the Megalodon rebreather is made. It turns out, however, that it’s also the home of Ester Medley, a Ninety-four-year-old woman who managed to bowl the most impressive score of 244 yesterday.
Now, a bowling score of 244 is impressive [...]
The Inspiration and Evolution rebreathers from AP Diving are really good rigs, but the design of their housing and harness systems have always limited the flexibility of the units to a degree. The housings are quite fragile, and because they do not use a metal backplate, clipping in side-mounts always seems to be more of [...]
In the end, the Meg ended up winning the day. There are a lot of reasons for this. The Meg is an outstanding rebreather in just about every way, but perhaps the most compelling reason for my decision was the fact that most of the people I tech dive with regularly are using them. This [...]
The Megalodon is made by Inner Space Systems, and is the brainchild of ISC owner and CEO Leon Scamahorn. I first got a chance to see the Megalodon on the Nautilus Explorer after a friend had bought one, and I was very impressed. It is a very serious looking unit and has a distinctively hand-made, [...]
I had seen some photos of the PRISM coming back from DMEA, and it wasn’t too long before I started to hear some very positive things about it. In fact, one of the divers I admire most decided that the PRISM was the rebreather for him. Ergo, I decided that my rebreather evaluation would be [...]
Leigh Cunningham and Mark Andrews figure they’ve made the world’s deepest wreck dive on the Yolande, a 72m ship in Egypt which had been carrying a bunch of toilets.
The wreck sank in 1981, but slid into deeper waters because of a storm in 1985. It currently sits in water ranging from 145m to 160m, and [...]
A LOT of people chose the Inspiration as the right rebreather for them. In fact, this unit has been in production for more than seven years and has, by far, the widest distribution of any rebreather available with somewhere between 4000 and 6000 units. It is also the only unit out there currently that carries [...]
Most of my tech diving buddies are now diving rebreathers, and I’ve been tempted by them for a couple of years now. You can make some serious dives with a lot less bulk and weight, the systems blend gas based on your partial pressure of oxygen, giving you an optimum blend at all depths. They [...]
Because many of the dive sites I love require travel, and because a full-blowen technical diving expedition for open circuit diving requires a sometimes prohibitively large volume of helium and pure oxygen, I made the decision some time ago to get into rebreather diving.
Many of the people I dive with have been using them [...]
Last December one of the largest earthquakes in recorded history (measuring 9 on the Richter Scale), struck just off Sumatra, Indonesia, in a fault line running deep under the water. The rupture caused massive tsunamis, that hurtled away from the epicenter, reaching shores as far away as Africa.
A few days after the disaster, a friend [...]
Ever since I discovered the article about the $99 home made ROV, I’ve been all excited about building my own and using it to attach decent lines onto wrecks that are below 300 feet. In other words, wrecks that are deep enough to dive on technical scuba, but too deep to spend bottom time searching [...]
It’s not remotely operated, so you can’t really call it an ROV, but the guys over at engadget.com and divester have posted stories about this nifty little 99$ creation last week, and I think it’s pretty cool. Apparently it was made for under $100 in just two weeks. It has two cameras, an IR illuminator, [...]
In the world of archeology there are no digs more difficult than those lying beneath watery depths. With land sites archaeologists are sometimes faced with extremely difficult challenges such as such as the environment in Ozette Washington where they found themselves digging through sticky mud and trying to preserve spongy artifacts. Or the Inca site [...]
Back in the Fall of 2002, a bunch of us headed up to the Nautilus Explorer in Vancouver to do some deep diving along the British Columbia coast. The highlight of the trip was the "Transpac", a wreck that sank prop-first, and came to rest on a shelf at 285 feet. From there it points [...]
