JCdesign97

Hi Erik,

Curious to hear how you made out on the beach dive with your Optima. I've done my fair share of beach diving off of the NJ coast (on OC), so I have an idea what kind of conditions you likely encountered. I saw your post yesterday and I didn't want to rain on your parade, but just from my experience I had pretty much decided that I won't ever do a beach dive on CCR.

My initial reason was mainly because of the amount of sand churned up in the surf zone - you just can't imagine how much sand gets in everything and where it gets. Regs practically need a rebuild, inflators are sticky, valves are crunchy when you turn them, etc. I had made up my mind that the Optima has too many intricate pieces to subject to that kind of abuse. Also you are likely to get planted and rolled when you exit, unless conditions are perfect ... so the sand just gets that much worse.

Now that I have a bit of experience diving the Optima, though, (still a newbie, mind you) I can also say that using it as shallow as a beach dive seems like it would be a pain unless you kept the setpoint low - like 0.4 or 0.7. Anything more and the solenoid constantly injecting to maintain setpoint and the corresponding bouyancy fluctuation seem like they would be more trouble than it's worth, but maybe I'm wrong.

Hope you had a good dive and curious to hear how it went.

Cheers,

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Cheers,

John Cogan