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WING
IT WAS A ZEAGLE WING THAT CONVERTED ME to back-mounted buoyancy compensators. Everyone huffed and puffed at the time. "It's not a proper life-jacket. It'll float you face down and you'll drown," they said.
They were right and they were wrong. No BC is a life-jacket, and by simply re-arranging my weights, I countered the forward-push effect when it was fully inflated at the surface.
Zeagle, a US manufacturer, had a brief flirtation with Apeks before the British company became part of Aqua Lung. Zeagle made Apeks wings and Apeks made Zeagle regs.
After that, the brand seemed to dip below the horizon.
But now a Danish company has taken up the Zeagle torch and is attempting to run with it.
Besides being in the forefront of wing technology, Zeagle came up with another idea - "integrated weights". How everyone huffed and puffed about that idea, too!
The Zeagle system had to drop all the weights with a tug on a single toggle if the company was to persuade ultra-conservative divers that such a system would be acceptable.
It managed this by hanging the weights on a wire ripcord threaded around the waistband of the harness of the wing. Pull out the ripcord using the red toggle provided, and there was nothing to keep the weights where they were stowed.
Should you survive the drama, you would need to buy new weight-pouches - unless the person onto whom they had fallen survived, and kindly brought them back up.
I last reviewed a Zeagle wing in the '90s, but when the Zeagle Ranger LTD arrived it was like meeting an old friend, and I was able to pick up where I had left off.
The Ranger LTD has the same buoyancy-cell in the shape of an inverted U, contained within a tough 1050 denier ballistic nylon outer covering. It has a maximum lift of 20kg.
A bottom dump on either side of the U makes it straight-forward to drain water from the bag between dives, or even while floating at the surface with the bag fully inflated.
The weight system has been improved. The weight-pouches are now simple yellow zipped net bags, positioned in the red-zippered bottomless weight pocket and stopped from dropping out by the ripcord.
The weight-pouches themselves also have wide webbing tags that allow you to hoick them out when you need to pass them up to the cover boat. You would use the ripcord only
in a real emergency.
I had to be circumspect about how I stowed the weight-pouches to avoid losing the webbing tags. Because the weight-pockets are positioned so well back, if the tags are
not easily found you will be embarrassed to find that you can't access them when you need to.
Second pockets alongside the pouches, one on each side, have a black zip that works in the opposing direction. They are useful for stowing items such as current-hooks and, in my case, a neoprene camera-lens cover.
The Ranger LTD tested even had a special pocket for Spare Air, though the sort of diving I do would make that pointless. It was interchangeable with a 2 litre pony cylinder pocket.
The wing also has zippered trim-weight pockets attached on each side of the lower of two tank cambands - invaluable when using the wing with a floaty aluminium tank.
Uniquely, these pockets also have a rip-away dumping system, so however much weight you carry with this wing, you can drop it all in an emergency.
All emergency zips and tags are red, as is the tag to access the accessory pocket. This is where I found it convenient to stow a delayed SMB, accessed by yet another rip-away flap.
The Zeagle harness is contoured, so hardly needs its massive sternum strap. There seemed no danger of the shoulder strap slipping off even my sloping shoulders.
The cummerbund is closed with Velcro, with the usual 5cm webbing with pinch-clip over.
Tailor this to fit by moving the cummerbund from where it is attached to the harness, because it is fitted each side with three plastic nuts and bolts. Concealed within the cummerbund is a fold-out redundant-mask pocket. There is also a fitting for a crotch-strap, if you think you need it.
A soft cushion separates your back from your tank. If you want to use a banded twin-set, the grommeted holes are already waiting, 25cm apart, for the bolt-ends to pass through. Otherwise, simply extend the cambands.
Zeagle was at the forefront of the technical diving revolution and I think the first big stainless-steel D-ring I ever saw was on one of its wings. This one has 10, and two can be repositioned along the length of the shoulder straps.
The Ranger LTD wing reminded me of how wings are meant to be. The pull-dump on the corrugated direct-feed hose is positioned at the highest point of the buoyancy-cell, so air goes out as readily as it goes in.
The lower, wider part of the buoyancy-cell that keeps you high out of the water when fully inflated at the surface is prevented from flapping and wrapping itself round the tank by a pair of little 2cm straps with pinch-clips attached between it and the harness. No drama, but it works.
In fact the whole thing works. I guess if it did not, Zeagle would have changed it by now!
The Zeagle Ranger LTD comes in five sizes from XS to XL and costs £529 complete with removable weight-pouches. A zip-on accessory such as the Utility pocket (for DSMB) costs £22 extra. Mounts, either for a pony cylinder or for a Spare Air, cost £18. Bigger buoyancy-cells are available.
Ocean Dive Europe. www.zeagleuk.com
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+ Technical diver's wing in its original and most effective form
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- No-one said it would be cheap
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The Ranger LTD has all the classic Zeagle features
new pouches for the improved weights system
mask pouch
one of the trim-weight pockets
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LIGHT
IT MAY SEEM TRIVIAL BUT HAVE YOU EVER been frustrated when you've jumped into the water from the back of a liveaboard with 20 or so other divers, only to find yourself in the final scene from Close Encounters? It's pitch dark with lamps shining everywhere and you've no idea which one belongs to your buddy. Sound familiar?
When I learned to dive, shortly after the invention of air and water, night-diving was treated as a very mysterious activity. We went in with at least one back-up light in our pocket (don't kid me that everyone still does, because I know otherwise!) and we tied those chemical Glo-sticks to our pillar-valves. We chose different colours and combinations of colours so that we could always tell who was who.
Glo-sticks seem to have gone out of fashion. Whether it was the fact that they cost so much and lasted about eight times as long as your dive, or because the cyanide-based chemical within posed an ecological hazard, I don't know, but I haven't seen a diver using one in a long time.
However, I have climbed a ladder followed by a buddy quite different to the one with whom I started the night-dive.
The Aquatec LED is a little, coloured, high-intensity LED powered by three LR44 shirt-button batteries, double O-ring-protected, and mounted inside a length of solid Perspex-style acrylic rod.
It is said to be waterproof to 100m (I never tested that) and to have a 50-hour burntime, which I can well believe. The manufacturer claims it will last for 50,000 hours of use.
It is not very bright, but the length of acrylic glows in the appropriate colour and the fibre-optic effect allows it to project a little beam that would be just good enough to show a gauge in the last resort.
It comes with a lanyard and in a range of colours including red, yellow, white and green.
As such, it makes an ideal marker to distinguish you from the madding crowd of other divers getting in your way, and should enable your buddy to identify you.
The Aquatec LED Constant Light comes with an extra set of batteries and costs £8.95.
Bristol Scuba 0117 902 0303
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+ Good for being seen with at night
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- Not great as a seeing aid
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CAMERA LENS
INEVITABLY MORE AND MORE DIVERS who have started using digital compact underwater cameras will be encouraged to progress to full-blown digital single-lens-reflex (DSLR) units.
These allow you to look through the lens and capture your picture as soon as you press the button, rather than suffering the delay of the compact, and getting too many pictures of spaces once occupied by fast-moving fish.
Most divers start with close-ups, but once you move on to wide-angle work, one lens seems to dominate the world of digital underwater photography - the Nikon 12-24mm digital zoom.
DSLRs may look a bit like 35mm SLR cameras but, except for a few very posh ones, they have image-receptors with a smaller area than a conventional frame of 35mm film.
The angle of view of a lens is a function derived from its focal length, usually expressed in millimetres, related to the width or diagonal of the frame. It will be less on a DSLR than on a 35mm film SLR.
Some manufacturers have taken to expressing 35mm film-equivalence when it comes to focal length, thereby complicating matters further. In simple terms, a 20mm lens on a film SLR will be very wide-angle yet will equate to a 30mm lens on a DSLR, which is not very wide-angle at all.
Still with me? If not, don't worry. All you need to know is that the Nikon 12-24mm zoom lens can be varied from very wide-angle (12mm gives 99°) to only slightly wide-angle (24mm gives 61°) on a DSLR such as a Nikon D70, D2X or D200.
If a lens is designed to produce an image that will fill a full 35mm frame of film, what happens when you use that lens on a DSLR, with its smaller image-gathering area?
The answer is that the rest of the image spills out inside the camera, and if the camera is not well baffled inside, you get lower-contrast results. This is why professionals always use lens hoods with telephoto lenses, to reduce peripheral light that might otherwise spill around inside the camera.
The snappily named Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor ED 12-24mm f/4G IF comes with its own lens hood, though it's of no help when used behind the dome port of an underwater camera housing. It is, however, designed to produce an image circle that will only just fill the image receptor of the digital camera, so that's another problem eliminated by using a tool specially designed for the job.
It also means that the lens is lighter in weight - and lighter on the credit card, too.
It is an auto-focus lens, and its silent-wave motor is almost instantaneous in its effect. Just as well, because with a maximum lens opening of only f/4, it would prove quite difficult to focus manually in anything but the brightest conditions, despite the built-in rangefinder of the Nikon camera.
I have always been a devotee of large dome ports for underwater housings used with cameras and wide-angle lenses, because they generally allow the lens to focus without the addition of optically imperfect supplementary close-up lenses.
Look closely at a lot of underwater pictures and you will see that they go smudgy at the corners, because the photographer used a smaller port and a strong close-up lens to pull the centre of the shot into focus. Sharpness in the corners is the first thing to suffer when you do this.
That said, with the 12-24 Zoom-Nikkor I was unable to focus closely on many things that I needed to photograph for these pages. This included diving computers that I might otherwise hold in my hand at arm's length, and my own head, breathing from a regulator on test. I usually do this by turning the camera on myself and holding it at arm's length.
I resorted to a plus-2 dioptre supplementary lens, which did the job without being strong enough to mess up the sharpness in the corners.
So how do the optics perform? I found that the lens was at its crispest when cranked back a little from its widest setting at 12mm to about 14mm.
It also proves quite useful to be able to crank the lens so that you can get a bigger image of those animals that refuse to come close enough, but I usually use it at a wide-angle setting. I rarely use the widest lens opening, opting for apertures in the range of f6.7 to f/11. With small lens openings, the depth of field is enormous.
The aperture mechanism uses a seven-bladed iris, so out-of-focus points are rendered in a pleasing way, and there are few signs of those hexagons that bright twinkles sometimes become with simpler lenses. There is no aperture ring on the lens. You set that via a control on the camera body.
Observant photographers will note that I have been using this lens not on a Nikon DSLR but a Fuji S2. I have a couple of these Fuji digitals and the upper camera part is actually a Nikon. The 12-24 Zoom Nikkor works very well with them. My only criticism is that, at around £775, it makes your eyes water when you flood it - and, yes, I have. I am pleased to report that the replacement lens was as good as the first!
DIVER is not a photography magazine, and without getting into esoteric arguments about other Nikon lenses, I would say that for wide-angle photography with a Nikon digital SLR, a 12-24 Zoom Nikkor is probably the only lens you need. It's certainly a good starting point.
Nikon, www.Nikon.co.uk
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+ Probably the only wide-angle lens you need
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WETSUIT
I TRAVELLED TO MARSEILLES to visit the factory of Beuchat, a long-established French manufacturer that fell on hard times and is now being restructured as part of its new owner's rescue plan.
I was interested to discover that the company still makes many of its own products and does not simply outsource its production to less expensive parts of the world, as many other manufacturers now do.
That said, the Focea Comfort suit is made in the Far East to a Beuchat design. Focea is the ancient name for the Greek settlement that stood at the mouth of the River Rhone, but there's nothing old-fashioned about this suit.
It's made from a singularly stretchy type of 5mm neoprene called Elaskin, which means that one size fits a wide range of people, and an inner 3mm vest is attached.
I thought that it would be ideal for a wintry trip aboard Blue Waves in the Red Sea, and I was right.
It fitted me like a glove and had very long inner smooth-skin seals at both wrists and ankles. Those at the ankles were sufficiently long to integrate perfectly with the Focea Boots I was given to go with the suit. These have their own inner smooth-skin seal, and by interleaving boot-seal, then suit-seal, then boot-outer followed by the leg-outer layer, I was able to provide a join that was not prone to flushing.
It was the same story with the rest of the suit. I climbed into the attached inner vest through its neck-hole, and once the rear zip was zipped up over the lower part of the neck of the hood, there was no risk of flushing when I leapt from the boat's rear platform into the water.
The Focea Comfort is zipped up at the back. A long tag attached to the zip made fastening and unfastening it fairly easy. An interesting touch is the fixed loop at the upper thigh, said to be ideal for hanging your hood on after diving. No more of that "Where did I put my hood?" feeling.
The hood itself comes with a hook to pair with the fixed loop. It also has a neck long enough to integrate with the suit and be zipped up over, and it is ventilated, so there is no "pointy head" effect from exhaled air trapped inside it.
The suit has knee-pads made from a very stretchy man-made fibre material, and there are matching elbow pads too. It is subtly finished in blue and dark grey neoprene, which has a certain slimming effect.
I really enjoyed wearing this suit and I was not reluctant to climb back into it after what seemed only minutes since a previous dive. Its smooth inner lining helped make this an equally smooth operation.
The only problem I had was untangling it from its inner vest after I had stepped out of it, when I turned it right-side-out. However, I persevered and finally worked it out.
The Beuchat Focea Comfort semi-dry suit costs £229 with separate hood. It comes in sizes XS, S, M, L, XL and XXL. The 5mm semi-dry boots are available in a wide range of sizes and cost £39.95.
Alpha Distribution 01709 515157, www.beuchatuk.com
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+ Very warm
+ Comfortable
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- Can be a puzzle to put right side out
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