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]

Good for you learning to dive dry! When I was taking OW and AOW classes, my instructor made it sound like a big deal to learn to use a drysuit. I took the PADI specialty and spent a night in the pool learning how to tuck and roll and pull the hose, which never works in 12' of water. I did the checkout dives and got the card. The instructor taught me to dive using the suit for buoyancy though. It was so much harder than just shrink-wrapping yourself in the suit and using your BC for buoyancy as I'd learn later on my own

[g_na]

I guess there are two schools to drysuit diving - the people who use their BCs normally, and the people who use their drysuits for buoyancy and only use their BCs at the surface. I took a (SSI) class on Saturday and the instructor suggested I do the former, which I did, and it worked well. It seems like the less air you keep in the suit, the easier it is to deal with it.

Next time I dive I'll use a steel tank. Plus, my next dives will also be deeper than the ~20 feet we did at the Breakwater (the vis was better there than it was at 30-40') so hopefully I can lose some lead and avoid the bruised shoulders I got from walking up and down the beach.

[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

[allartburns]

BLONDE CHARLOTTE!