Just Got up and looking at this forum, let me answer some of the questions.
1 Where will I be diving: I live in San Diego so most of my diving will be there. My girlfriend is from Montreal so I go there a lot and I figured that since she is also getting started in diving that eventually we ould dive in Canada and on the eastern shore. This is where the cold water diving comes in. I also travel a lot for business and it takes me to places like India, Singapore, etc........ so there is definitely some Warm diving in my future. With this in mind, I wanted a regulator that I can use across the board rather than buying different regulators. After doing some research seemed like the Ice xtrm was a good fit for this.
2 The BC Choice I know this is a matter of confort and taste and if I asked a 100 divers their opinion of a BC, I would get 100 different answers. Now the reason I chose this particular BC ( Morphos Pro). When I was in the Maldives doing my certification dives, I used a Seaquest Jacqet style BCD. It felt great but of course I had nothing to compare it to. My instructor used the Morphos pro. On my last dive, he let me borrow his BCD while he used a spare BCD he had. It took me a bit to get used to the airtrim setup but once I had my buyoncy set right, i really liked ho it would keep me very horizontal. I really like this since I plan on doing lots of photography.
I also liked the fact that there was 1 less hose and therefore a bit less clutter.
The third reason for this choice is how compact the BC could fld into. Again since I travel a lot this is a + for me. Now while shopping around, I have seen much much compact BCs but again I guess I am a bit biased simce I tried this one on.
3 Why Mares? I am not sure hy I picked this brand other than for the fact that I really liked the BC I tried on, then I started looking at their other lines of equipment and liked the revies about the Reg mentionned previously. Now I haven t decided if I ll purchase this equipment online (ScubaToys seems like a great online retailler and always willing to give advice on this board) or if I ll go to my LDS. I am still in India and haven t made it back to SD. I totally agree that sometimes it is better to buy from your LDS even if it is a bit more expensive in order to get much more help going down the line however I also figured that I could get the BC, Reg and octo online, then get the rest of the gear + complete my classes and training locally thrugh my LDS which will help me get to know them better. This way I could get the best of both worlds.
As far as local service for Mares, I need to look into this but I figured there has to be a shop in So Cal who services Mares.
4 Rent before you buy.......get some more dives before buying This is probably a very very good piece of advice but it doesn t work very well for me. I have tried this approach with tennis, Golf and for My race Go Kart.
I found thatthe more I tried different equipment, the more I had choices. Some of the equipment I tried was really bad and of course the decision was easy. I however never found any piece of equipment that stood up vs all the others, everything had pluses and minuses so at the end the choice was quite difficult.
Now the reason why I want to buy my equipment now rather than later is becasue I want to complete my certification exercices and dives in the equipment I would later dive in. I think this approach allows me to get extremely familiar with my equipment in a very safe environment and with an instructor.
I should have given some of these details when I first asked for some advice. Looking fwd to some more comments.
Is this a great place or what?
