@scubaaaronh
The horror !
A pole fisherman asking questions on a SCUBA board !
I will lower my standards and attempt to reply
My son Dr, Sam IV grew up in a pioneer OC dive family and has been diving ,since he was very young child, now approaching almost 50 years. He is a NAUI (LIFE) and PADI Instructor, a 1997 SSI Pro 5000 recipient, the youngest diver listed in the 1993 Who's Who of SCUBA Diving and board certified ER & Scrips trained Hyperbaric doctor.
He began his very youthful diving career using a personal flotation vest aka PFV made from a US Divers flotation bag a Sea Tec-Inflatable systems hose and a dump valve from SCUBA Pro unit.
On his 7th Christmas he received one of the first BIUs, a full size "At Pac" which are no longer produced. He used this full size unit for about 15 years, when we both agreed it was time for scraping.
I would based on our experiences suggest a BUI of your choice based on an adult evaluation and his color ( so long as it was bright and very visible underwater and even topside.
It was always stressed in our household that diving with Dad and Mom was an earned privilege, not a right ! School and church were paramount, diving was an ancillary activity that was earned by top grades ,school and church activities.
Dive logs were always completed and must contain a new never previously described item discovered in the UW world -- Now almost 50 years later reading the logs are a source of enjoyment at family gatherings
There is a recent article in NAUI Sources about me and my son.
I will extract his portion as an attachment so you can read or ignore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Attachment:
Samuel Miller IV, was a diver almost from birth. Having first mastered bathtub diving as a toddler-the regulator had a long hose and the cylinder was on the bathroom floor-he graduated to the family pool at age 4 using a MSA cylinder with homemade backpack. At 5 years old, he was in the Pacific Ocean. "Not too deep and not far from shore, but he was underwater, and in his own mind, he was a diver," said his father. Miller IV had a lot of encouragement from his family and also from family friends who were diving luminaries themselves.
The photo shows "Sammy Miller" on his sixth birthday getting ready for a dive with Dr. Charlie Brown, NAUI's medical adviser, with whom Miller IV dived many times. Brown was interested in learning how a young child adapted to diving.
By the time he reached his l0th birthday, Miller IV had logged more than 100 open-water dives, and that year, he completed the Los Angeles County and NAUI Scuba Diver courses, although he was too young to be certified. During the summer of his 12th birthday, he was accepted and successfully completed a 40-hour US Divers equipment repair course. At age 18, he became the youngest person listed in Who's Who of Scuba Diving.
In SoCal diving circles, Miller IV was considered a top hunter and freediving spearfisher. When he turned 18, he was accepted for provisional membership in the Long Beach Neptunes Spearfishing Club, and then into full membership.
In his spare time, Miller IV designed, fabricated and sold custom-built teakwood spearguns. His guns had a custom-length balance bar measured to the user's arm length and a handle that was shaped from a mold of the owner's gloved hand in the shooting position. During college, he served on weekends as a deckhand on the dive charter boat Golden Doubloon.
In 1991, Miller IV became a NAUI Instructor (NAUI 13227) and taught scuba at one of the Southern California dive shops. He won a scholarship to the Catalina Chamber course, completed their internship and became a qualified chamber technician. While waiting to enter medical school, he began technical mixed gas diving with his friend Jeff Bozanic, making deep technical dives on a regular basis off the California coast.
After completing medical school in Pomona, California, and an emergency room residency in Kingman, Arizona, he won a fellowship in hyperbaric diving medicine at University of San Diego Medical Center. At the end of the fellowship in 2008, he accepted a position at Marion Regional Medical Center in Santa Maria, California, where he is currently their director of ER/Hyperbaric Medicine.
Miller III summed up much of the feelings of him and his family: "The ocean provides bountiful gifts. It's a recreational area to protect for all present and future generations. Everybody should be able to enjoy it.
SDMIII
@Marie13 CE typical SoCal diver
DD
