Find The Boots

Way way back when ... when I had spare time and spare money (before I was married with children) I was really into SCUBA. At that point I had all the top end equipment and latest computer, etc, etc. Actually, my mask was 4+ years old, but it fit my face perfectly, cleared at a thought, and since I kept very very good care of it, well, I kinda liked the old-school high volume look.

In a month or so I'm going to be near some world-class diving, so I thought I would go ahead and get the basic gear going and take a refresher course.

Humbling, it was. All my mad skillz are gone. I knew that I'd have forgotten all the little rituals (Begin With Review And Friend, etc) but I thought muscle memory would have stuck around.

Nope. Luckily my dive instructor, Lana, was very kind. Part of the issue may have been that I was out of the US and some stuff just has different names, or they go in a different order, etc, etc.

I'd actually expected that the equipment would have been really different. Nope. Swear to Gnu that only the snorkel has really changed at all. Everything there is all about "dry" snorkeling. Fine, and my 'dry' snorkel seems to be dry. But they all breathe like pulling air down a garden hose. Not the tradeoff I'd have made.

Ok, the computers are better, but not different, just more functional. Quite a surprise - I'd have thought all singing, all dancing. The wrist-watch wireless ones with inertial compasses (!!) are really trick - but they are also thousands of dollars. What every happened to our head-up-in-mask displays?

I was, frankly, not at all impressed with the regulators. I know all rental regs are, well, krep after enough time in the pool, but these were just as bad as the ones we had 15 years ago. Whassup with that.

One area where there seems to be some major improvement is in fins. You can tell that lots and lots of computer modeling has gone into them. I'd say the ones I have on are 2x as comfy, easily as fast, and much lighter. Very impressive.

A minor improvement, that actually translates into some comfort in the water, is a swiveling bearing at the mask/strap interface. So now the strap and the mask can move a bit independently - it makes it much easier to get the face and the head/strap stuff sorted.

Oh, and everything was a lot more expensive. How did that happen, exactly?

Anyway, if I drown next week, well, it's been fun at the blog. :-)