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).
