What a great time I attending the Florida Dive Show this past weekend in WPB! In theory I went to the show to help out NetDoc with the Scubaboard booth- in reality I spent lots of time wandering the aisles of the show checking out all the exhibitors & their wares. Despite this being the first year of the show, there were a lot of interesting vendors at the show- from dive resorts to magazines to equipment manufacturers both large & small. Plus, I had a wonderful time hanging out with a lot of friends & meeting new ones. My dive sistuh Scuba_Jenny, the Hermit Crab, Krista (KBeck), Diane (ZenDiva from Scubaboard &
Zendiving.com ), DyvrDan, Padipro, Walter- too many friends to list &, of course, NetDoc who kept me entertained all weekend with his stories & jokes. I cannot even begin to remember all the folks I met, both current Scubaboard members & future ones. Got to spend time with Curt Bowen- former Moderator on SB & the publisher of
Advanced Diver Magazine. His friend Jakub, now a new member & the owner of
Golum Gear. Both great guys with lots of interesting stories to share & were a lot of fun to hang out with. Unfortunately, I wasnt able to attend any of the conference events & I missed meeting Gary Gentile & other speakers who came by the booth while I was out looking around. One of my favorite moments actually did not take place at the show, however. A friend & fellow diver, Tess Madeya from Ft Myers was running her 10th marathon in WPB. About 4 miles into the race, she felt something pop in her hip & was not able to keep running- it turned out to be a torn muscle. She determined that she was going to finish the race any way & WALKED the rest of the course- a total of 26.2 miles. Walter, Diane & I went down to watch her cross the finish line, which she did in a couple minutes less than 6 hours. Her tears of joy at completing her 10th marathon made me start crying too.
A couple of highlights from my visits to the booths. Mind you, these are MY favorites:
The guys from
Atomic Aquatics have come up with a couple of new masks. One of them is really stylish looking- a double lens with a black frame & red accents that my friend Dan wants to get. The one I fell in love with, however, was a VERY low profile single lens mask. They expect to have them on the market by Christmas or the New Years. Chad & Darcy were real sports about modeling them for a picture. (which is still on Pete's camera)
Dive Chronicles Magazine was there handing out magazines that featured an article on Jonah, a turtle who was swallowed by a fish that was caught & cut open in time to save him. The really cool thing was that Jonah was there, complements of
Marinelife Center of Juno Beach. Jonah will spend a year visiting different venues to help increase ocean awareness before being released back into his natural habitat.
Im not a real fan of wearing tee-shirts but I was impressed by the designs of
Bottom Crawlers. Cool stuff! On the art side,
Pascal Lecorq was there & was so gracious about signing postcards for the Hermit Crab & Colins little boy, X-Man. Lots of interesting resorts were there too- Henrik, from
Wakatobi Dive Resort , couldnt seem to stay in his booth either- I kept running across him everywhere all weekend handing out brochures. Thats one place near the top of my list of places I want to dive some day.
Of course, my favorite booths were the equipment manufacturers. Diane & I spent some time at
OMS talking gear with Jack. Diane, who is in the process of getting certified, tried on a backplate/wing- she looked as if she liked it... I had a great conversation about GUE & the DIR philosophy with the guys at the
Halcyon booth.
The guys in yellow & black at the
Silent Diving booth kept luring me in to talk about rebreathers
.tempting but just not practical for someone who primarily does beach diving as I do. Funny, I kept getting drawn to all the booths with rebreathers. Curt had a couple of KISS units at his booth that I looked over too.
Most of all, I really want to thank Lamar Hires from
DiveRite for the 30-40 minutes that he spent explaining their new rebreather system to a couple of us. I walked away with a much better understanding of how rebreathers work- the advantages & disadvantages. I really liked the new O2ptimas cartridge O2 scrubber- much more environmentally friendly & easy to handle than existing scrubbers.
When the show finally ended, Pete & I went out to dinner with Chris & Jared from
Zeagle. Chris is the inventor of the Rapid Diver system- a really cool compact dive system used primarily by military & first response divers. Perfect for some shallow beach diving though
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Truly a fantastic weekend- worth missing some dives for!