You're really lucky Bob...
I found a 10W LED Titan Hydro light SCULA dive light in the cross under tunnel at Peacock Springs. They sold (and still sell) for around $550 so I asked around and left contact information at the local dive shops in Luraville and also posted it on three scuba diving boards but had no luck finding the owner.
The light was dead when I found it so I did not even know if it worked. After it went unclaimed I thought about it for a few more weeks, talked to the Titan people at DEMA about the light and its capabilities and a couple weeks later took the risk of investing $79 in a charger plus $35 for the glove they use with it. Fortunately when the charger arrived the light took a charge and it worked just fine, giving about 4 hours of burn time. Yay! Good news! An almost free cave diving light! Lucky Me!
Unfortunately that's not quite how it worked out...
About 10 dives later I found I really liked the light and preferred it to both my 12W LED Light Monkey and my 10W LED Dive Rite. Which is to say that I in no way needed another dive light, but I really liked it in every way except for the 4 hour burn time - which was just a bit too short for the two 2 to 2.5 hour long dives we normally do in cave country. So at Beneath the Sea I bought an 80Whr canister battery from the Titan folks (their demo model at the show) with a cord for it for $400. I now had a total of $514 invested in what was now an $1100 light with a 12 hour burn time - still pretty good deal, so Im still pretty happy.
About 2 dives later the light quit working...
I sent it in to Titan and they advised it was an early model with fully potted construction, so they could not fix it. *But* they could replace it for $400 - a pretty decent discount on a $550 light - and the new ones were non potted so if this one failed it would be repairable. At that point I had $514 invested in a new charger and battery with proprietary connections that would be useless. So I bought a new one for $400. The total investment was now $914 in a *free* dive light worth $1100, but at least I now owned a light that I REALLY liked, so it was not all bad news. However I didn't need it when I found it and never would have bought it or the accessories unless I'd found it in the cave for "free".
Free = $914
In my more cynical/paranoid/comic moments I like to suspect Titan salted caves in N FL with life limited SCULAs to drum up business. What I've learned is to just ignore all similar "treasures" in the future because I just can't afford *free* stuff like that.
