OP
- Messages
- 5,884
- Reaction score
- 2,997
- Location
- Lake Worth, Florida, United States
- # of dives
- I'm a Fish!
Thanks for Eric's review.....And one thing I am certain of, is that if he had taken a couple of days of use, before doing the efficiency tests ( how many kicks for the bi-fins, how many in the same distance for the Dol-Fin), the results would have been even more amazing.
The thing here is that while I did not find it hard to be able to propel myself underwater with the Dol-Fin system in the first 30 minutes we were using them at the Blue Heron Bridge Marine Park ( prior to going out in the Ocean on a boat), I saw that the technique required to make this thing push me forward, had VERY LITTLE in common with fin kicking coordination.....there was no similarity in kick shape, or what muscle fires first, 2nd, and so one, or even of the main muscles used--there is so much that is different, in the first 3 to 5 minutes, you feel a little like a person that just put on their first pair of snow skiis, and you are about to try some snow plow turns, or some cristies into the hill....It's all new....there is alot of getting it partially right, and needing to perfect portions of each aspect of the process.
After an hour, I was using the Dol-Fin system at the level of someone ready to get off the bunny slope, and maybe get on some intermediate hills....there is no crashing or falling, but you are not moving with the same grace and ease you can see Ron Smith moving around...you know there is a lot of tweaking left to do.....the Freediver that was with us from Jupiter, Ryan, had the same issues.....you want to ben your knees too much, you try to do plenty of things you expect to be right, that are NOT right....and Ron would keep swimming over and suggesting the change--it would immediately become apparent he was right, and then as you got this occasionally perfect, you would need to work on doing this all the time. So I did 4 hours the first day at the BHB, with miles of swimming..back and forth all over the West end for 2 hours, then a swim all the way down to the far east end, and some play in high current in the bridge pillars under the low East bridge span, where a 3 mph current was rushing under the bridge, and we would hide from current oriented behind a bridge piling--resting, pointing into the direction of flow--then move sideways 20 feet to the next row of pilings, and hide behind the next one...kind of like repelling across a wall. Exactly how kayaks work a river section where they hide behind big boulders and the eddies behind them, and go across river, and even upstream with this technique.... And we found we could do this in identical fashion. It was huge fun, as well.
My core muscles were a bit fatigued from all this that day, but not so much my legs...maybe calf muscles a bit too...
Next day on the boat, I used the Big DiveR freedive fins for the first dive to shoot Ron and Ryan, then used a Dol-Fin for the hour long surface interval, freediving to 60 feet over breakers in shore ledge as easily as if I was on a 25 foot deep reef...so easy I used much longer bottom cruises along the breakers reef than I have ever done before, because it was so easy to get back to the surface, without effort or concern....My skill level exploded durring this hour freedive...and that is the time I would have wanted to test in pool...kick..kick glide...distance as in the review.
I did use the Dol-Fin for shooting the video on the 2nd boat dive--after the SI.....While the coordination with a tank on your back is unchanged, the huge drag and mass of my big camera system ( canon 5 D mark II in Aquatica, with big Halcyon Apollo Video lights) was so great that it interupted the flow and the hydrodynamics the wing system relies on, and I found much of the precision and easy directional control was lacking....I could still deliver power and speed--you can see where I followed a nurse shark at a speed well above most scuba fin potential....but tracking in a direction at lower speeds was really messed up by my big camera....Ron uses 2 go pros on either side of a cool wing--held superman style in front of him....and this is so aero ( hydro) it causes no increase of drag to slow him noticably, and the wing in front adds to stability of the camera and diver--even more spectacularly for the freediver shooting video....
Take away here, is that for important video shooting with monster cameras, there is no substitute for the big DiveR fins for reefs...or the Extra Force Fins for wreck penetration.
For go pro type shooting, for sight-seeing, even for hunting, the Dol-Fin is a hot ticket you would want to try. When Ron knows when he is coming back to West Palm ( spring/summer 2013), I will post about this, and a bunch of you should visit then--and I'll get Ron to do a demo day with lots of time for probably up to 8 or 9 people.
Last edited:
