What do you want for Christmas?

[FinnMom]

I could really use a new drysuit.

 

[bowlofpetunias]

A dive trip to Siladen Resort rayer:

Christmas Day morning dive with my hubby would make it a perfect day.

Gear wise I'm doing fine but a spare set of gloves, hood or sharkskin socks would never go astray. a fill card at one of my favorite dive shops is always appreciated

 

[tennjay]

I am getting cavern and intro to cave classes. Class starts December 27th.

 

[Doby45]

Petrel 2 and O2 analyzer..

 

[Diver0001]

With the holidays fast approaching I'm putting together a list of gift ideas for divers.
What would you get for your diving friends and what would you like to receive yourself?

Money.

LOL.. Ok, that's only 1/2 in jest.

In terms of "stuff", I'd personally like to get an AL80, O2 clean, rigged and filled with 50% for deco. I'd like to "retire" a 7L stage by filling it with O2 and just throwing it in the back of the car for the one time I might ever need to use it. No I don't have an O2 kit with me on every dive but I believe it's a good idea.

The other bit of gear I'd kind of like to have is a Petrel-2. Right now i'm diving with an old Suunto (Vytec) and all it does is (a) show me a ceiling that's completely unrealistic and (b) give me a rough idea (emphasis on *rough*) of the total deco I have to do. The rest is up to me. I invent my own ascent strategy and there's no real way when I'm at depth to do the mental math involved to calculate the entire ascent time (part of that is because we regularly dive pretty deep and I can't do any mental math at all at 50m).

It's kind of like those old navigation computers for your car that tell you that you'll be there at 11:15 but you *actually* don't get there until 11:35. A buddy of mine uses a petrel-2 and he can tell us when we're at 50m that we'll get there at 11:27 and he'll be right within a minute. And please don't tell me to work it out on Vplanner and dive on tables. What Vplanner does is give you the outside boundaries of the box. What you want to know during a dive is how much room you have to move within the box.... That's what a computer *should* do but I'm still diving like I was on tables.... based on some time tested principles and a best guess.

Not only that but OLED rocks. I've made one (trimix) dive with the Petrel and it's just worlds better than anything I've ever used before. I want one but I don't want to spend the money because my kids want to go to Canada next year on vacation and what I *want* takes a big back seat to what I *need*. As an aside the Petrel showed 1min more time at 6m than my own mental math said I should expect. I almost blew that stop. it makes me wonder how much I should trust my instincts.

As for needs. I *need* to buy a new drysuit. Mine has had 2 major malfunctions (ripped neck seal and a 1/2cm tear in the arm) in the last year. For the moment I can dive with it but it's 6 or 7 years old and has 700-800 dives on it and given the type of dives I do I'm starting to "mistrust" it. If it floods in the winter I'm in trouble. We dive in 2C water in the winter. I've already told my buddy that this coming winter I just want to drill skills and avoid taking on too much deco because if my suit does what I think it will eventually do, I could die before the deco was done.

Finally, I'd like 2 tickets for a dive vacation to somewhere safe. The last few years I've spent a week in Egypt with my buddy. Flying from Holland we could spend a week in a dive camp, staring at the stars at night and making 20-odd dives in a week in warm, tropical waters for about €700 per person. This year we decided to avoid Egypt. Friends our ours that just got back from there said that they lost all of their diving gear (confiscated/stolen/lost) because of "terrorist threats". Personally I think that it's because an airplane full of tourists carries about €500K in dive stuff with them and the locals need some way to compensate for the fact that no tourists are coming...... My friends can claim insurance and the locals still make a wage.

I don't need that kind of hassle.

But now we're tossing around and trying to think of where to go. We both *need* to decompress from our "normal lives" but we don't want to break the bank doing it. Maybe Malta. Maybe southern Spain or the Canary Islands.... Maybe Greece or Turkey. None of which compares to swimming for a week in "God's aquarium".

R..

 

[Neilwood]

The remaining parts of my gear namely-
Fins (to fit a size 13 drysuit boot so will probably need to be xxl)
Dive computer
Compass
Hood
Gloves
Undersuit
Torches
Knife/cutter

And the health and wealth to allow me to use them on a lot of dives

 

[Water Boy76]

Spare Air and Split Fins

 

[scubadada]

Peace in the world, seriously

 

[Neilwood]

Spare Air and Split Fins

But you will die if you use them ........*






*according to some sources lol.

 

[Storker]

But you will die if you use them

You will die if you use paddles and a long hose as well.



































(On a long enough timescale, the chance of survival approaches zero for everyone)