Dry Dive and a Full Frontal Exposure

After eight weeks of waiting, my Inspiration rebreather was finally reunited with its electronics (the working heart of the machine). The first thing I had to do was check that the "repaired" parts were working, so I decided to do a dry dive on the unit.

After setting everything up, I strapped my Inspo onto my back and began the 'dive' from the comfort of a chair in my lounge.

Being first thing in the morning, I was still wearing my dressing gown. This presented no problems until my wife asked me to go and get the mail. "Okay, no hassle", I thought. Pulling on a pair of sandals, I walked out of the house and up the driveway to the mailbox whilst monitoring the oxygen level I was breathing on the rebreather. As I approached my mailbox I could hear a car coming up the road. I picked up my pace a fair bit and lunged towards the mailbox, hauling the mail out. All good, but my neighbour was away on holiday and wanted me to collect their mail too.

The neighbour's mailbox is separated from mine by a planted border of small bushes and a concreted driveway. I was now sprinting as the sound of the car got closer and closer. I ran around the end of my driveway, past the end of the bushes and over the concreted driveway. Almost tearing the mail from the box, I turned to catch a glimpse of the car coming into view. "Bugger!", I thought. Not wanting to be caught milling about in a dressing gown, and more strangely, wearing a rebreather, I quickly fired off a list of options for evading being seen:

    Run down the neighbour's driveway and out of view.
    Squat down and hope that the car occupants are not looking my way.
    Try and get back to the safety of my comfy lounge via the shortest/quickest route through the bushes.

Hmmm, well I chose the third option! It was a good plan and went well up to the point I tried to get through the bushes. Fate being fate (and it's always cruel), the car passed me at the exact moment my dressing gown was pulled open by knee high bushes on either side of me. What a sight for the poor car occupants!!! It was enough to make them slow the car down to a crawl as they watched me free myself of the bushes, look at my controllers to check the oxygen level, and then to peg it back into my house. What a surreal moment to have in an otherwise average day! :-D

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My dry dive lasted 1 hour and 20 minutes. I watched the controller readouts run erratically for the first 15-20 minutes and then settle down to give consistent readings for the remainder of the time. A linearity check carried out as per the manufacturers instructions showed the new style R22D-AP cells were performing well.

I flew the Inspo manually for 50 minutes and conducted 'dil' flushes, high and low oxygen drills, bailout to open circuit and back onto the loop drills, and flew semi-closed for about 10 minutes to finish.

My positive and negative pressure tests went well prior to the simulated dive. I did discover that after a few dil flushes, the dump valve on the exhale counterlung failed to seal properly and developed a slight leak (I will service it immediately).

More New Toys

Yesterday was an interesting day, but for all the wrong reasons! I started the day with a nagging thought in the back of my mind, namely, “What’s happened to that order from Australia.”

Ten or so days ago I placed an order for an Oxycheq helium/oxygen analyser kit and various other bits of dive gear with a company called Scubaroo Diving Supply. I had no means of tracking the parcel, so after ten days passed with no contact from NZ Customs to say how much duty they wanted before releasing the consignment, I got a bit worried about its whereabouts. Best thing would be to contact Scubaroo and ask for a tracking number, I thought.

Having quickly composed a short email enquiring about a tracking number, I paused for a second before pressing the ‘Send’ button. A thought had entered my head about how it would be typical for the parcel to arrive before Scubaroo had time to reply with the tracking number. I dismissed the thought and pressed the ‘Send’ button anyway. As I watched the ‘Sending mail’ progress bar race across my screen I heard the sound of a person getting out of a vehicle outside my window. “Bugger!” It was a courier delivering the parcel. “Spooky coincidence”, I thought as I signed for it.

In the blink of an eye I moved on from the whole spooky coincidence thing and entered the ‘new toy’ mode. The superbly packaged goodies were extracted from their bonds and carefully spread around me in an arc so I could survey them all at once. I finally could no longer resist the temptation of opening up the analyser kit and playing with the analysers.

Inside the box, in a pre-moulded foam tray were three small objects. One was a charging unit, and the other two were the oxygen and helium. I proceeded to turn on the oxygen analyser. Nothing happened, the display was dead. I tried again and again but it wouldn’t start up. Okay, time to see if the helium analyser would show more signs of life, but it too was unresponsive.

Not beaten, I looked out some tools to remove the back of the oxygen analyser. The voltages of the three AAA batteries inside all carried a full charge. Dead batteries was not the problem.

Time to get in touch with Scubaroo and advise them that the analyser kit was ‘dead on arrival’. Thoughts of overzealous postal workers throwing the poor analysers through an x-ray machine with the power setting set to somewhere between fry and incinerate raced feverishly through my head as I composed a frantic email to Scubaroo. It was all too much to take, so I sent the email and quietly abandoned the analysers in their box.

…

Both units had the same power-on switch marked clearly with the letters ‘Pwr’. My instinct with new things is not to force anything where it doesn’t feel like it wants to go. In this case the switches were pushed in a left/right motion, no movement. Pressing the end of the switch caused the switch bar to sink into its housing and then return to its previous position, but the units would not power up. I even tried various lengths and sequences of pushes. Nothing.

…

My wife came home and opened the box containing the analysers. Seeing the ‘Pwr’ switch on the oxygen analyser indicated where the power-on switch was and she turned on the unit. The display gave an indication of the oxygen cells reading in all its yellow back-lit glory.

It appears that I was a ‘slow maze learner’ that day. Apparently the switches had an up/down action, not a push or side-to-side action! “IDIOT!”

Both units work extremely well when powered up.

New toy - Silent Submersion UV-18

The 'Inspo' lid was dispatched back to Ambient Pressure Diving this morning, and as predicted, my new Silent Submersion UV-18 (underwater scooter) arrived into the care of Nigel Lees, who also took delivery of two new SS UV-18 scooters for his wife and himself.

Each scooter was broken down into three boxes for shipping, making the consignment total a grand nine boxes that required a forklift truck to lift the pallet off the delivery wagon. Nigel quickly found my three boxes containing the battery, hull and charger, and the motor section. As we loaded them into my station-wagon, I soon forgot about my scrubber lid.

Assembling the batteries and scooter took no time at all. I’d seen how to do the assembly when I was lucky enough to be a support diver on the TSS Niagara 2004 expedition. Hopefully I’ll get into the water tomorrow morning and work out how the bloody thing operates! ;-)

Back to open circuit

I’ve just spent most of the evening carefully packaging my rebreather electronics for an exchange to a replacement scrubber lid from Ambient Pressure Diving. The turn-around time from New Zealand to the factory in England and then back to New Zealand usually takes three weeks. This is a major bummer. Somewhat typically, on the same day that the courier will take my scrubber lid away, my new Silent Submersion UV-18 DPV (Diver Propulsion Vehicle, or for lack of a better description - an underwater scooter!) will arrive here from the good folks at Silent Submersion Inc., Florida.

I guess this means that I will have to dust off my trusty twinset (Hogarthian rig) and go open circuit again. To be honest, I enjoy open circuit as much as diving closed circuit, even with all the noisy bubbles that churn their way to the surface.

What the hey… It’s all diving and time in the water getting wet! Bring it on!