ScubaBrucie

 It is now 4 months since my disaster and I thought that it was time to reflect from a distance. There are three seperate elements to doing what my instructor does. Being a diver, being an explorer and being a teacher. Firstly as a diver he is very good. He should be, the amount of [...]

 The following is an account of how I wasted a lot of money and over a week of my time to put up with a lot of harassment and grief. I have thought long and hard about whether I should post this and have discussed it with friends who say that I should. Some may [...]

For cave diving you require a primary umbilical torch, usually HID with a rechargeable battery, and two backup torches which must have non rechargeable batteries. Recently these have moved over to being mainly LED because of the far longer burn times and far higher reliability. I have used a wide variety of different backup torches, [...]

Using nitrox is a no brainer unless you are going deep enough to exceed the MOD of the mix. These days membrane nitrox units are getting very common, even on liveaboards, so it is very cheap to use the stuff, in fact it is often free. The benefit of nitrox is very obviously that you [...]

SCUBA diving is not a competetive sport, yeet some people cannot control their natural competetive spirit. This often manifests itself in going deep. How many times have I heard people boasting about this? Yet depth is extremely dangerous. Just look at the accident reports. Narcosis is worse, air consumption shoots up, you encounter decompression problems [...]

       In the absence of a complete list of rebreather fatalities I have started to compile one.  It is important that this information is available in one place.  If you can add any facts to those below please contact me with them using this forum thread: http://www.scubabrucie.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=35  What I am looking for are Name, [...]

You need pockets if you are not doing it wrong. There is nowhere else to store stuff if you are using a BP/W. There is a system as to what goes in each pocket which you will find on DIR websites. The pockets should have bellows held down with velcro with eyelets at the top. [...]

Oxygen is a poison yet rebreathers give you more. Lots more. The effect manifests itself in pulmonary toxicity and in CNS toxicity, where your body goes into an uncontrollable fit. Understanding tolerance to Oxygen is important but is not yet understood by science. It can vary enormously between different people. It can vary enormously in [...]

Mares Avanti Quattros are still probably the best all-round fin, which is why most dive professionals in the world use them. Here’s why: Durabilty — I have seen instructor/diveguide fins that have done thousands of dives and are still in good nick. Weight — They’re nice and light, which is good for travelling. Power — [...]

In GUE-speak a ‘stroke’ is someone you wouldn’t dive with. It has become a derogatory term as used by George Irvine (why doesn’t he have an entry on Wikipedia?) on many a diving forum. Here is a fun test to find out if you are a stroke.