Evan Kovacs visited me in Portland for a few days, following his mission out to sea off the Oregon coast filming deep-sea vents for Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I picked him up in Astoria, OR where the W.H.O. vessel
ATLANTIS docked after the three-week ocean tour. ATLANTIS is also the home of the
ALVIN submarine and the
JASON Submersible. I was able to climb aboard and tour ATLANTIS and I received a brief tour of ALVIN, but an in-depth review of JASON, by Evan and the person who developed the on-board programming for the complicated and large, R.O.V... on this voyage Evan was in charge of Jason's 12, high definition video cameras that take 33 frames per second of whatever target objective the mission is focusing on, and all 33 frames can put forth still shots of incredible clarity.
Toward the end of Evan's visit with me in Portland, we went diving off Bandito Charters in Tacoma, Washington, where Rick Myers the charter owner and Alex the divemaster joined us... both climbed into dive gear and actually got into the water for a change. Two other divers attended, so there was lots of extra room on the boat. Evan Kovacs is developing and diving with a side-mount rebreather made from parts from a PRISM, which he is engineering and testing for another engineer-diver named Billy of a company named Steam Machines.
http://www.steammachines.com/ John Chatterton one of the people Evan films for, is having one such side-mount rebreather made by Billy, from parts off a Megalodon rebreather. "Megs" are manufactured in my own back yard north of Portland - Vancouver, in Centralia, WA.
http://www.customrebreathers.com/meg.html
Evan and I explored Dalco Wall on our first dive off Bandito that day. Vis was very good below 30 feet of depth, so we conducted a deep dive, "deeper" for me than Evan, for he has been on other dives to a depth of 440 feet using a rebreather, and he has conducted decompression dives for a length of 6 hours or more. It was very still at the bottom of Dalco Wall, very beautiful but also very dark. Our second dive of the day was at Sunrise Beach where we saw enough fauna to keep Evan guessing all the way back to Portland. Evan's descriptions of what he saw were in fact so numerous, we had to get out my fish I.D. books, used to identify some things of particular curiously.
Evan has dived in locations around the world, but he was actually quite impressed with the beauty of our underwater environment, in Puget Sound and here on the Pacific Coast. He will return for more adventures on the Pacific coast and in the Pacific Northwest in the not-too-distant future, when I hope to put together more exciting dive trips for him, farther north and into Canada.
Best to you all,
Linear Mode
