Diving, ice cream, and lots of seals

[g_na]

Yay, my husband and (another) one of my best friends are now scuba-certified! Charlotte and Frederick completed their open-water classes with flying fishes colors, and are now ready to dive their little water-logged hearts out in Kona later this summer

Comments

[jackbrinks]

Switching to steel tanks was one of the best things I did for my diving. They weigh almost the same as Al tanks, they hold more gas, and they've got much better buoyancy characteristics. My Steel 104 single tanks weigh the same as an Al 100, but since my steel tank is low pressure (2640) I can get a shop to safely overfill it to 3200 and get ~126cf of gas. Steel tanks are either neutral or slightly negative with 500psi left in them so you don't have to have that extra 4 - 6 lbs on your belt to offset the buoyancy like you would with an empty Al tank.

The high pressure steel tanks (rated at 3500 psi) are nice and compact for the amount of gas that they hold, but they don't give you quite the same buoyancy benefit of the low pressure tanks and you can't overfill them. If you bring them on a boat they won't be able to even fill them up to 3500, so you'd get short fills. The PST brand HP tanks are great for shore diving though.

I haven't been there in a while, but last time I checked, Aquarius dive shop on Del Monte near Hwy 1 rented steel tanks, as did MBDC which is near Breakwater, the building with the huge mural on the side.

The other thing that made a big difference for my weight belt was switching to a backplate style BC. I had been using a Zeagle Ranger, and I tried out a friend's Halcyon steel backplate/harness and loved it. That was 6 lbs off of my belt and onto my back. They're an aquired taste though. More for the tech-bent crowd I guess.

Ahh the SCUBA, she is expensive.