Maui PB4Y bomber and IANTD trimix rebreather course

teksimple

Just completed my normoxic and full trimix rebreather courses with Joe Dituri (Training Director, IANTD) on Maui. I am going to do a bit of shameless promo here, as I feel the word should get out.


The dive operator was Brad & Blesi Varney’s B&B Scuba out of Kihei. A very professional but underadvertised operation with a nice aluminum jet boat (no prop danger for live boating), trimix and O2 fills, and full support for closed circuit rebreathers like my Mk 15.5. Brad also has at least one Inspiration available for rent, and lots of sorb. The guy even has his own cylinder hydrotest facility! Brad frankly has a vast amount of dive experience and is increasingly catering to technical divers.

The culmination of my trimix course was a relatively “shallow” 190 foot dive on the PB4Y bomber off of West Maui. Check out Ed Robinson’s write up on it here, when it was dived for the first time back in 1987. A 30 minute bottom time was not nearly enough to satiate me on this dive site. The huge black coral trees, schools of jack, frog fish and pipe fish were just awesome. There was a bit of auditory overload from the male humpback whale songs undisturbed by open circuit bubbles. Not to mention the historical intrigue of diving a World War II wreck that very few people have seen. Unfortunately, we hit the wreck just minutes after sunrise and the very low light conditions made wide angle photography all but impossible. Ray, a friend from college and a NOAA staff biologist in Honolulu, was doing his trimix rebreather supervisor/instructor course with Joe. Ray had done his own research on that sunken PB4Y including interviewing former crew members. His tidbits of really interesting information made me want to come back to this place even more.

We did the rest of our 200-260’ training dives off Molokini and commonly had shark and manta ray encounters. Although Joe Dituri is back in California, Brad now does trimix rebreather courses and will take experienced technical divers to dive that wreck. If you would otherwise do a trimix rebreather course on the West Coast, doing a rebreather course in Maui is reasonable enough to make it worth the flight over. Even with my Mk 15.5, stage kits, two pony bottles, tools, camera and booster pump, I was able to keep my baggage down to two 70 pound cases and a 50 pound bag. I paid $70 a night for a nice studio in Kihei.