Risks

I love how the readers of this blog have such a depth and breadth of experience. Nothing illustrates that more than the SCUBA discussions we have been having. I keep my gear as simple as I can, both because I want to manage the dive, not my gear, and the simpler your gear, the lower the odds for a malfunction. Let me explain my setups:

Buoyancy Compensator

My BC is one I made myself. There was a custom metal shop in Pennsylvania that made custom backplates out of solid stainless steel. The company was called Hammerhead SCUBA. They have since gone out of business. The plate and tank adaptor, pictured below, weigh in at about 12 pounds.

To that, I added a single length of seatbelt webbing wound through the plate, making it into both a waist belt and shoulder straps. On the waist belt, there is a single pouch for adding a single soft weight, so I can use it to adjust buoyancy for things like thicker wetsuits. Also on it are numerous stainless steel d-rings so I can attach various things to my gear when needed.

Also attached to the backplate is an OxyCheq wing with 30 pounds of available lift. They are great wings, and in over a decade of diving, I actually wore one of them out and they let me buy a replacement at 50% off. Great company.

To make things comfortable, I also put a back pad in it. This also created a pocket of sorts that is the perfect place to hide a folding dive flag for when I am on the surface and want to be seen by nearby boats.

Regulators:

I have two Aqualung Legends, one with a DIN connector and one with a Yoke. The yoke connector fits my pony bottle. I also have an older Mares regulator that I sometimes use, there is a DIN fitting on it, and the two DIN regulators I have are tuned so that when you take a good breath on them, they practically force air down your throat. When I am working hard, I want there to be no feelings of being air starved. I have a mechanical pressure gauge on all of them, as well as a QD hose for my dive computer, which allows me to move the computer easily from one regulator to the other, if needed.

Computer

I went through a few computers before I found one I really liked. I tried the wireless ones, and didn’t like them. They lose connection to the pressure sensor too easily. My favorite computer is the Oceanic Pro Plus. Also, it has large numbers that are easier for this old man to read without glasses than is a wrist mount computer. Other advantages are that it allows me to change between three different gas mixes on the same dive. I’ve had great luck with this computer- it served me on hundreds of dives with no issues, including the occasional decompression dive.

Tanks

For tanks, I have a pair of 120 cubic foot high pressure steel tanks, and another pair of 100 foot tanks. I like the 100 foot tanks better. They are 11 pounds negative when full, 2 pounds negative when empty. Using this and a steel backplate enables me to dive without using a weight belt. With this configuration, I am neutral at 10 feet of sea water and an empty tank. Perfect buoyancy. I only accept EAN from companies that blend. I will not use banked EAN because I have had too many issues with contaminated gas from them.

I also have a 19 cubic foot aluminum tank that I use either as an emergency supply or as a deco tank. As a deco tank, I fill it with EAN80, as an emergency tank, it either has air or EAN32.

The rest of it

Completing my setup, I dive with 36 inch freediving fins, because I find that a long stiff fin allows me to drift and steer with little effort but also lets me take advantage of strong leg muscles and really get some speed on. I wear a pair of diving shorts with pockets, so I can store a lift bag and thumb reel with 100 feet of line in one pocket, and a rechargeable flashlight in the other. Attached to my waist belt is a short 4″ dive knife. No snorkel, none of that other extraneous stuff that isn’t really needed, just a simple mask. Too many divers buy a ton of crap that they don’t need, then look like they are wearing half the dive shop while they are in the water. All that does is create drag and weight, which slows you down and causes you to use more gas.

Diving for (Almost) Free

At first, my girlfriend at the time and I used to maintain a website that was a list of dive spots and boats in Florida. We would review all sorts of sites and boats. That’s why my internet handle is divemedic. The site is gone, but it was fldiving.com, and once a boat or shop found out you were running a website for divers, you got all kinds of free stuff. Then my girlfriend and I split up, and I let her keep the website. It lasted a year or two longer, then it disappeared. I guess she didn’t keep up with it.

After that, I spent a few summers working as an underwater dive guide. You don’t make any money at that. What you do get to do is dive for free. Get on the good side of a local dive shop, especially near a tourist area. Florida does some odd things diving that people up north aren’t used to. One of the things we do is drift diving, which other places really don’t do. Tourists want someone to walk them through it, so the dive shop gives them your name and number. They call, and you recommend a boat. There are boats that know my name and offer to let me dive for free if I bring at least three other divers with me. The tourists make the reservation with the boat and pay for their dives and give the boat your name. It doesn’t cost the tourist any extra money for my services, they get a guide who makes sure they have a good time while being safe, and the boat gets some business for the price of an extra diver that costs them nothing. Everyone wins.

When it comes time for the dive, you help them get set up on the boat, then right before we all jump in, I would check their gear to make sure it was setup correctly. After that, all I had to do was throw on the BC and mask, jump in the water, pull on my fins, and I was good to go. This setup is very quick and easy to get into and out of. Fitting these dive trips into my fire department schedule was easy, and I would spend the summer getting in as many as 50 or 60 dives a month. One summer, I hit almost 200 dives from June through August. The most dives I have ever done was a two day period when I did 10 dives between 60-110 feet in just two days. All free.

I would guide my tourist puppies through the dive and get them back to the boat. Sometimes they would tip, sometimes not. I didn’t care. All the tips did was pay for the gas and tolls to get from Orlando to West Palm Beach, Pompano, or Boynton Beach, those being the locations of my favorite dive boats.

The drift diving here is fantastic. The boat drops you on a reef one or two miles offshore, with the bottom being 55-110 feet below, depending on which reef you are diving. For tours, I used to seek out 55-65 foot deep reefs so I could dive it on EAN36 without an issue. The leader (me, when I was the guide) tows a buoy with a dive flag on it using a rope. The divers drift with the current along the reef. You can see a tremendous amount of interesting sea life. At least one or two sharks on every dive- most of the time, you will see even more. Occasionally, you see a really large one- 8 feet or more. During the summer, water visibility can vary from 20 feet all the way up to being able to see the dive boat while on the bottom at 80 feet. On those days, it’s like swimming in a glass of gin.

The limit for the dive is when the first diver in the group hits 700 pounds of gas remaining, a diver hits his NDL limit, or we have been in the water for an hour. I would then have the entire group surface with me. We would spend an hour on the boat, change tanks, then do a second dive. In all, we would spend about 3 or 4 hours on the boat. I would use the rinse hose and some baby shampoo to shower on the back of the boat while we were headed back to shore. Sometimes, I would take a vacation or sick day and spend a week diving every day.

Those were my best days of diving. I spent my summers (this was about 2 years after I divorced my first wife) SCUBA diving. I was great- my tan was awesome. I can see the allure of being a beach bum. It was amazing. I got over 2,000 dives in less than 3 years, averaging more than one dive every calendar day.

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One of the boats used to joke with me, because I once spent over an hour and a half on a 60 foot dive and he was pretty pissed. I pointed out to him that he said “dive the limits of your computer or until you are at your reserve air pressure.” Not my fault I have great SAC, a 120 cubic foot tank, and was breathing EAN36.

After that day, the captain would drop my buddy and me in the water first, motor off some distance to drop the rest of the divers, pick them back up, then come over to get me. He was a nice guy. Near as I can tell, his boat is no longer in business.