I've been lurking in the shadows and finally decided to register...
I live in Houston, TX and just finished my Optima training with Eric Keibler at Oceanic Ventures in Houston. We drove to Florida for training because our local lake is not cooperating. It is 40ft or so low with extremely limited visibility. For some reason Eric wanted to be able to see us while underwater....go figure... Well anyway we did our training at Blue Groto and Hal's 40 fathom. As with the rest of the posters my buoyancy sucked the first couple of dive (okay maybe it sucked all but the last few dives, but I did see a progressive improvement each dive...)
Like I mentioned in my title I am an Optima diver and owner......my fibs caught up with me when my wife found out how much it costs
. It seems while the unit is paid for monetarily I'm still paying for it verbally. It seems my Christmas present this year is going to be the end of the nagging...
On the unit I did find out the way to go is to sidemount the bailout. Once I installed the sidemount kit I loved the bottle placement. I wish I would have sidemounted the bottles when I carried them with doubles. I am planning on upgrading my sidemount kit to the Dive Rite Nomad system I saw at DEMA. I like the large D Ring in order to ease the clipping and unclipping the bailout bottle.
Once the training was finished we had the bright idea of stopping at Pensacola in order to dive the Oriskany. After driving a total of 1900 miles over the course of the weekend we were very bright indeed. The Oriskany dive was less than stellar, we had a good boat and crew with Viking Divers, but the current was cooking. Luckily the Oriskany was a war ship and had plenty of hand rails to traverse the wreck and was big enough to block the current on the lee side (is this correct usage). I found that the training paid off as I felt extremely comfortable diving the rebreather even in the current. Now I need to visit the Oriskany next year in more favorable conditions...
I look forward to meeting and diving with fellow rebreather divers in the future and if anyone from the site is going I will see you at InnerSpace this year.
My current certs are:
IANTD: Rebreather Diver, Technical Dive Supervisor, Technical Diver
SSI: Dive Control Specialist
I am also one of the equipment techs at the Dive Store
More later...now back to work...its almost time for lunch.....