5ata, first why don't you PM me with the name of the dive shop, for my intrest, and I will respond with a "local" source for hoses and some out of town sources as well.
Now, as to the Poseidon "cult", here's how it happened to me. When I first started looking at regs, a lot of people recomended the SP 250. When I went to check them out, they had just come out with a 500. A few months later I went to pick one up and they were in the process of being recalled. A few months later they came out with the 550. At no place can I say anything bad about SP, but the price was a lot to me and I needed some stability. On a parallel course at the same time, I kept looking into Akumal and the Costa Maya for more diving. It seemed that in every picture of someone in the caves the divers had some side exaust regs. I started more research and found out that lots of divers swore by them. At the same time I found out that they were expensive to buy, expensive to maintain and disliked by a lot. The dislike almost always came down to service problems and cost of service. Last I went to three shops in a row, where I found knowledable divers, not sales people, that dove Poseidon and loved them.
Also, there is a different "cult" out there that doesn't like the Cyklon because of it's high IP and the fact that they are hard to service underwater. The IP thing I don't understand. My primary and secondary are the same, so if one gets silted up on an open water dive, I'am probably low on air and cold anyway. Time to surface.
Last, Poseidon doesn't give out new Cyklons or Jetstreams every time someone wants to test regs. So you might be led to believe that they can't compete.
So, you don't have a lot of dive shops selling them, don't have any new reviews on a 30 year old reg, and the divers that use them tend to be on the "dark side", not your normal cattle boat diver. They use things like back inflation BC's or even BP/wings, are found in caves or wrecks or at depth and are at the least capable of independent research.
Over the winter I did a Dive Con class with a shop that wants me to wear the uniform. Well there goes my reg, my fins, computer and my BC, that I carefully researched to purchase what was/is best for me. I was told by a shop employee that I had to change regs because he didn't want to have to explain why I was diving with "that old thing". Later found out that he was an OW diver and had never heard of Poseidon.
Now at no place here am I bad mouthing any other Regulator. There are a bunch of divers on Scubaboard that love Poseidons, they seen to be comfortable with it and don't waste a lot of time defending them, just using them. In a lot of repects I might of been better of with an Apeks or a SP, but I know that I was a better diver the first time I used my Cyklon and it seems to late to back out now.
adios don O
