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HEAD to HEAD:
FENZY ABLJ V SEAQUEST PRO QD PLUS SL
In the spirit of our 40th birthday celebrations, John Bantin confronts himself in a back-to-the-future head to head confrontation, if you know what we mean - the latest BC from Seaquest meets the earliest commercial diving buoyancy aid, patented by Frenchman Maurice Fenzy in 1961 and popularised over the following few years
WHAT A FANTASTIC IDEA! Instead of having to get your weights just right for neutral buoyancy near the surface, and then suffering the indignity of crashing around on the bottom once your suit gets compressed, you wear this thing called an Adjustable Buoyancy Life-Jacket, or ABLJ.
It's made by Fenzy and it looks like a cross between a deflated truck-tyre inner-tube and a toilet-seat cover. You put air into it as you go down and let that air out again as you come up.
It has a useful corrugated hose with a mouthpiece so that you can either bend it round to fill it by mouth, having taken a suitably large breath off your regulator first, or hold it up to its highest point to dribble the air out of it to control your ascent.
That's not all. It has this marvellous little bottle that you can fill to 200 bar or more by decanting air from your main cylinder. You carry this strapped across your stomach and should you get into difficulties, you can crack open its valve a little to make yourself positively buoyant. Crack it open all the way and you will be almost instantly on the surface, so there's no danger of the insurance company not paying out because your nearest and dearest couldn't provide a proper death certificate.
The Fenzy ABLJ must be put on before any other part of your kit, except your wetsuit. That's because it will be the last thing you'll want to take off. It's vital to make sure that the straps that go round your waist and the one that passes under your crotch are not tangled in anything else. Put your weightbelt on last.
Under water I found that, with the buoyancy bubble around my neck, it provided a convenient upright stance that allowed me to walk about the seabed as light as a fairy.
I could pile as much weight as I liked on my belt because I could always compensate for it with more air in the Fenzy, although there was a limit brought about by the total amount of pressure I could stand on my scrotum from the crotch strap.
When I first tried it, endless anonymous divers came up to me and said that it was dangerous. "Only if you don't know what you're doing," I countered.
At the surface, I found that it worked exactly like a life-jacket. When it's fully inflated, you float with your head clear of the water, surrounded by inflated rubber. If you're unlucky enough to be unconscious, a buddy could deflate it a little and lever your head back to get a clear airway before attempting to give artificial ventilation. He could drop your tank and your weights away before attempting to tow you anywhere.
However, it's only partly life-jacket, because it has no permanent buoyancy. You have to remember to inflate it before you become unconscious. More likely, you could become unconscious because you inflated it too much.
Purists will say it's yet an extra bit of kit to pack, but it rolls up very conveniently, unlike the bulky Seaquest Pro QD Plus SL. The latter is simply called a Buoyancy Compensator, or BC, because it is not a life-jacket by any stretch of the imagination. However, it is a bit like a jacket, and it does a similar job.
Fully inflated, I found that it floated me comfortably at the surface in an armchair-like manner, if not well enough to let me actually doze off!
The BC works on the same principle as the ABLJ. You put air into it as you go deeper and let air out as you ascend, but it is far more of a complete system. Instead of dressing your kit on to yourself, you dress everything on to your tank and don the whole rig. It makes it easier to see what you're doing.
The Seaquest Pro QD Plus SL clamps conveniently to your tank by means of a camband. You simply pass the loop of webbing over your tank and lever it shut before you fit your regulator. Never unthread the camband. Anyone who knows how to re-thread one of these qualifies as a diving instructor.
The weights are installed within an integrated-weight system composed of two pouches at the front which are held secure by a unique buckle-design. These can be easily ditched if needs be.
There are some additional weight-pockets hidden well away at the back and these prove useful in getting perfect equilibrium when diving with an aluminium tank. They are so well hidden, I bet a lot of owners never even discover that they have them.
Of course there will always be some divers who say that integrated weights are dangerous because you can't ditch them fast enough, but at least those divers who used to say BCs were dangerous because they float you face-down seem to have died out.
The pressure of the crotch-strap of their ABLJs probably interfered with their ability to breed!
Of course, you have to ditch weights only if you are seriously over-weighted in the first place.
An additional hose from your regulator fits to a connection on the corrugated hose. You simply have to press a button to put air slowly and in a controlled way into the buoyancy chamber of the BC.
No sudden inflation followed by a missile-like journey to the surface and a ride in a helicopter. No removing the regulator mouthpiece to fill it and forgetting where you put it afterwards. Why have a corrugated hose? Well, you wouldn't want a Fenzy-owner to have something you didn't have, would you?
Letting air out is done by pulling either on the hose to open a valve at one shoulder or a dump cord to open a valve at the other.
Unlike the Fenzy, you can even dump air when inverted and doing a rapid head-first descent from the surface, as there is yet another valve at the lower back. Bloody luxury!
Under water, the Seaquest BC let me swim horizontally and neutrally buoyant, like a fish. I suddenly found I could visit most of a wreck instead of just looking at the bit where I first landed. If you need to get out of this BC in a hurry at the surface, it's simply a matter of releasing four pinch-clips, two at the shoulders, one at the sternum and one at the waist.
Best of all, there are pockets for stowing away accessories such as late-deployment surface-marker buoys and reels. These are things that were not even thought of when the Fenzy was invented.
Of course there is always a downside and that is the bulk and cost. The Seaquest Pro QD Plus SL costs more than any Fenzy diver would expect to spend on all his diving equipment put together. The BC comes in a range of sizes but is adjustable for fit within that range. You can even walk about with your tank on your back in what almost approaches comfort. The ABLJ was cheap and fits anyone - badly.
The Fenzy ABLJ is no longer available (though some divers still use them), but if it was it would probably cost around £120. The Seaquest Pro QD Plus SL comes in a range of four sizes and costs £380.
Aqua-Lung UK 0116 212 4200, www.aqualung.co.uk
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