Inspiration to Megalodon Cross Over Report

Inspiration to Megalodon Cross Over Report
By Dave Cooper


Dear All

Well I said I would finally get around to posting a trip report following my visit to Innerspace to collect my Megalodon.

Well after a nine and a half hour flight from Heathrow I arrived in Seattle and picked up a hire car, drove two hours down the interstate highway and arrived in Centralia, Washington State about eight at night.

Got myself fed and watered and then sloped off to get some kip.

Following morning, Saturday, I showed up at Innerspace at nine and met Leon Scamahorn, CEO of Innerspace and designer of the Meg.

He is a top guy, ex-US Special Forces, and like myself, a military trained diver. He got straight into showing me around the factory and then the CCR itself.

First point to note here: the only part of the Megalodon which is injection moulded are the counterlung T-pieces, everything else is machined and boy, you can feel the quality.

So following a number of strip and rebuilds I was now getting a rough hang of this lovely beast.

I had opted for the Megalodon with Shearwater Electronics, which is a single wrist mounted primary controller, with a secondary, completely independent head up display (HUD). The decompression software in the Shearwater is Buhlmann-based with Gradient Factors.


The Megalodon is a modular system, in that you can put any size cylinders you like on the unit. Ideal for travel and just what I need to take the stash of two and three litre cylinders I have lying around my house.

Furthermore, though it is an over-the-shoulder form of Rebreather, vis-à-vis the counterlungs the gas flow runs in the opposite direction as to the loop on the Inspiration. This means that the O2 manual injection is situated on the inhale counterlung. However this is not a problem, as the O2 inflator on the BioMarines and CCR 500, 1000 and 2000 all injected into a single counterlung and they have never caused problems. In any event, simply inhaling before adding O2 will ensure that upon exhale you fire it straight around the loop.

Scrubber capacity with the standard axial scrubber is 2.49 kilos, against 2.45 kilos on the Inspiration, and is rated as good for 4 hours in very cold water. A big radial scrubber is shortly to be released, as is the Innerspace Cis-Lunar scrubber that will be manufactured under licence from Bill Stone.

The Megalodon is currently undergoing ISO 9000 certification and is expected to gain CE approval later this year.

The next day was the pool session, four hours of drills and skills, one on one. Leon stays out of the water and uses a comms system to dictate which skills he wants you to perform.

High and Low O2 drills ad-infinitum together with semi-closed, open-loop and open circuit bailouts were conducted time and time again. Interestingly I also did three major loop floods that I was able to clear by diluent flushing and forcing the water out through the dump valve on the exhale counterlung. Inspection of the scrubber at the end of the three loop floods found it was bone-dry!

Over the next few days I conducted a number of Open Water Air Diluent and Trimix dives on the unit. I repeated the skills covered in confined water and also did diluent switches and open circuit bailouts on the unit. The controller still calculates deco after OC bailout and you can select and program any gas mix available into the controller ‘on the fly’.


Each gas switch or bailout was infinitely easier to select on the Meg controller than on the VR3, no surprise there then!

One of the nice touches on the controller, is that at the touch of two buttons I can see the millivolt readings for each cell. Also I can see my battery voltage under load as well as numerous other functions including water and loop temperature readings, very nice.

I found the controller to be intuitive and the HUD clearly gave me my setpoint readings, the unit was a joy to swim, luckily so as on one day we did an underwater swim of one mile.

I find the unit much lighter than the Inspiration and of a much higher build quality. I need no weight in a drysuit with an Inspiration and S/S backplate but need six and a half kilos with the Megalodon. It is nice to get that weight into a harness and not something that cannot be removed, much kinder for my back.

Leon also has a checklist that he uses to both pre-dive and post-dive verify the CCR. It is along the lines of a military dive supervisor’s logsheet and definitely something I will use. I am also preparing one for the Evolution/Inspiration.

I also had the opportunity to spend a day and a half in the factory seeing how the units are built. It was good to see Leon’s team hard at work and to obtain further explanations of complex teardowns on the component parts.

Funnily enough it was also nice to see Leon wrestling one of his team to the floor over some dispute, the guys knee appeared to be branching out the side of his head, once his boss had finished wiping the floor with his arse!

All in all it was a good eight days, I learnt a lot about the unit and have complete faith in it’s build quality and capabilities and am looking forward to diving it extensively.

Cheers
Dave Cooper


Technical and Rebreather Training from Diver to Instructor
www.zerogravitydiving.com