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BC
THE SEA QUEST SURELOCK INTEGRATED WEIGHT SYSTEM is one of the most secure and capacious you will find in any dive shop. However, when I first picked up the Sea Quest Pro XLT, I thought it had been supplied with weights already loaded.
At 4.4kg, it's no lightweight. The XLT stands for "Extra Lift", not "Extra Light".
Last time I went to Manado in Indonesia, back at the turn of this century, I took a Sea Quest Pro Unlimited, an early precursor of this BC. I did not relate it directly at the time to the £600 excess-baggage charge I incurred on the way there, but the wounds of that encounter with check-in staff have yet to heal.
So I was doubly conscious of the weights of individual items as I packed my bag this time, including the Pro XLT.
This BC is the sort of kit used by marines entering the water from low-flying helicopters or speeding Gemini craft. The moment I put it on, I felt like one of Philip Pullman's armoured bears - it seemed that robust.
The design also follows the modern philosophy that more is more. It has every conceivable modern feature, other than dispensing with the corrugated hose for the connection to the direct-feed, an idea that does not seem to have taken off.
We divers are an unadventurous lot and still want our corrugated hoses, even though they are now the equivalent of a car's starting-handle.
Being US-designed, the Pro XLT has a lot of patented features with clever marketing designations. I'll risk the boss of Sea Quest phoning me up from America and shouting at me by ignoring these. Instead, I'll tell you what this BC does.
The hard backpack is designed to take a single tank with its solitary camband. A cushion sits between you and it, with a thicker piece of padding at the lower end so that when walking with your tank on your back, it sits nicely on top of your hips.
The waistband is threaded through the backpack and buoyancy cell such that there is no torso squeeze when the BC is fully inflated. It inflates away from you instead.
The front shoulder straps have swivelling buckles that enable the straps to take the easiest route, usually the most comfortable one. A conventional sternum strap prevents the shoulder strap slipping off those with slim shoulders.
Any one of the six stainless-steel D-rings proved fine for clipping off a current hook. No doubt some divers will find other things to dangle from them, but I find that these danglies often turn into floating nuisances under water.
There is no need to dangle kit, because the Pro XLT has two large zipped pockets, and the left one will drop down to double its size, should you need more capacity. The pocket is less of a saddlebag than before, and stows neatly away thanks to a large helping of Velcro.
Besides pulling on the corrugated hose to operate the dump valve at the top, my favourite way to dump air was via the toggle on the right shoulder facing, which operates a separate dump valve above it. Some say that these valves dump all your air in one go. I say use it like the inflator. A quick squirt out is all you need.
If you're inverted or horizontal head-down, there is also a dump-valve at the lower back, operated by a dangling toggle. This was easy to locate during quick descents from the boat to a fast-passing reef in a strong current.
The efficacy of these dump valves enabled me to stow away neatly the direct-feed and corrugated hose through the sternum strap, though it was only just long enough to do this.
How often we see pictures of divers with their corrugated hoses floating up where they will not find them easily. That's because many instructors still teach methods that evolved for use with now-obsolete equipment.
I could squirt in air when I chose, and even pull on the hose to operate the built-in pull-dump at the left shoulder if I wished. I always knew where the inflator control was.
Hidden away between the buoyancy cell and the back of the harness are two trim-weight pockets. They're so well-hidden that a lot of people who own Sea Quest BCs never discover that they have them. When reviewing a Sea Quest BC once before, I forgot to mention these pockets. My transatlantic phone line was soon burning!
Trim-weights are used to counteract the floaty effect of an empty aluminium cylinder, or to add weight when the main integrated-weight pockets are full. The pockets can handle a couple of kilos each.
The main integrated-weight pockets each have a pouch held by a (patented) quick-release buckle system. This pouch has two sets of pockets, which allow you a bit of strategy in how you position your weights. The instructions insist that you put most of the weight at the lowest point, but you might prefer to experiment to find what suits you best.
The pockets are big enough to take as much lead as almost anyone could need. They slot in and out easily enough, but if you let boat crew do this for you, double-check that the buckle is located properly. They ripped away in a satisfying manner when the time came to hand them onto the boat.
At what attitude does this BC put you in the water? Air rises to the highest point, so if you are swimming horizontally the small amount of buoyancy-compensating air will be behind the top of your back - level, say, with your tank valve. This is true whether using a wing or conventional BC, like this one.
The buoyancy cell of the Pro XLT is shaped such that as you put more air in, it fills further down the back. It has an expanding gusset, so that when it is fully inflated, the biggest volume is low under the arms, giving the wearer an upright stance. The effect is most convenient at the surface. So you're horizontal during normal diving and upright at the surface. What more do you want?
The Pro XLT positions very little of the air within it above the surface. It's nearly all used to keep you afloat at this time. So the size ML that I used offers a genuine 20kg of lift, and all of that is viable. I waited at the surface in armchair comfort.
Full marks - but then it all went wrong. After two and a half weeks of three dives a day, I found myself in the remote Pacific islands of Raja Ampat. I descended to find that the direct-feed control had parted from its corrugated hose, and was held only by the cord threaded through it, which operated the dump valve at its top.
I tried unsuccessfully to put it together under water. I couldn't even inflate the BC by blowing into it by mouth. Because all the air is held low down in the buoyancy chamber, it continually siphoned back out through the short length of corrugated hose. Weighted for neutral buoyancy, I could easily swim back to the surface, but once there I floated with my head just below it.
What was worse was that when I finned hard to get my head above the surface, all I got was a glimpse of our dive boat heading off behind an island to drop off snorkellers.
It was a matter of either dropping my weights towards the unsuspecting divers below me or swimming to a nearby shore. I was not in danger of drowning, because I had a full tank that would have lasted forever at a depth of a few inches. However, losing the air-tightness of your BC is just as bad if the direct-feed control has come off as it is if the buoyancy cell is ruptured.
My diver extending surface flag went up, and the boat finally came back to it. Five minutes with a replacement cable-tie solved the problem, but it had been significant.
The Sea Quest Pro XLT is available in sizes XS, S, M, ML, L and XL and, at £410, is a top-price BC.
Aqua Lung UK 0116 212 4200, www.aqualung.co.uk
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+ Every feature you could want in a conventional BC
+ Masses of usable surface buoyancy
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- Heavy to pack
- Expensive to buy
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LAMP
JET-LAGGED AGAIN. I went to bed early, but awoke to a strange sound. It was the burglar-alarm in my house bleating to tell me that the electricity mains had failed.
I opened a blind and saw that the night sky over London had lost its characteristic orange glow. It was obviously a massive power outage. Most of the surrounding houses were in darkness but gradually the flickering glow of a candle or the wandering light of a torch revealed my neighbours coming to grips with living, albeit temporarily, in a darkened world.
If you are in your own home, you probably have a rough idea of where you left the nub-end of a candle, and perhaps a book of matches, or a torch with questionable batteries. But if you travel a lot, and regularly wake up in a strange place, things aren't so easy.
Thankfully disasters rarely happen, but what that means is that if you stash an emergency torch somewhere handy, you're never quite sure of the state of its batteries.
There are places in the world that have no power outages because they have no power. And they're usually a long way from Woolworths, so new batteries can also be a problem.
The Jonta wind-up lamp was designed for use in such parts of the world, but you might find it useful. Max Ammer operates an eco-resort in the Raja Ampat islands, 75 miles north of West Papua. It's a long way from the shops.
I showed the Jonta to him and he was very taken by it. So taken, in fact, that he still has it!
Crank the Jonta's handle for a minute and you get 10 minutes' worth of light. Thanks to a Luxeon Star high output LED combined with a ni-mh battery, it's quite effective. It is light, though not very small, and took up quite a bit of space in my bag.
"No batteries or bulbs required, ever." That's what it says on the box. However, I note that the manufacturer also includes a conventional charger that takes four hours to fully charge a flat battery.
There are three light options, including full power, energy saving and signal setting when it flashes. You change the setting by cycling through the options with the on/off switch, which also doubles as the activation for the charge level indicator. Pressing it for more than a second indicates full, two-thirds, or one-third power left, or whether you should get winding again.
There were drawbacks. Navigating across the shallow lagoon from Max's eco resort back to my bungalow, I sought out the deeper water with the lamp so that the boat did not run aground.
Eventually the jetty loomed up in the darkness, and we were just about to tie up against it when the light went out. There followed some frantic cranking before we could see where we were again.
This is not a specifically diving-orientated product, but as most divers have to travel away from home to pursue their activity, it might be worthy of your attention.
And if it saves you discharging your diving lamp's battery, or burning the bulb while not cooled by water, your diving lamp might prove that bit more effective under water.
The Jonta wind-up lamp costs £49 from John Lewis.
Tango Group 0870 609 1541 www.freeplayenergy.com
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+ Eco-friendly light
+ No additional batteries
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- Could go out just when you need it most
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REGULATOR
THE AQUA LUNG LEGEND LX SUPREME did very well with the panel of underwater judges in our comparison tests of top-end regulators that we published three years ago. However, I have never taken one for an extended diving trip, so I decided to put matters right.
As someone has rightly pointed out on the www.divernet. com forums, among top-performing regulators we often struggle to find differences in performance. They all work, in fact they all work very well, and the differences in breathing characteristics can in some cases be subtle.
This was not always the case, and I hasten to point out that if it were not for hard-hitting reports in magazines like DIVER, some regulators might still be as indifferent as they were 12 or more years ago, when we started doing this.
It's not so much a question of the amount of air as how it "feels". That is something a machine can never quantify, but we humans can express our feelings about it. The Legend LX Supreme purports to be the best Aqua Lung can do when it comes to breathing performance in coldwater conditions. I really didn't expect it to be anything less than sublime.
Like most top-of-the-line regulators, the first stage has four medium-pressure and two high-pressure ports. Alas, when I tried to fit the transmitter for my integrated computer, I found that there was no space for the other hoses on that side, because the ports are positioned too close together to allow for that.
The diaphragm-type first stage is nice-looking, finished in all-black with some parts encapsulated in a soft black rubber coating. It is environmentally sealed to prevent cold or dirty water coming into contact with the works, and it has a few metal fins to act as a heat-sink and reduce the chances of ice-creep on the outside.
The second stage has a finned metal heat-sink surrounding the hose where it meets its main body. The titanium metal ring that retains the soft front that allows easy access to the purge control also helps in this department, and it too is trimmed with soft black rubber.
The venturi plus/minus (dive/pre-dive) switch is easily operated with a gloved hand, and there is a big side knob for turning up the cracking pressure needed to pull open the flow of air on each inhalation. As usual, I left this at the lightest setting, and settled for breathing less heavily if I needed less air.
It's a compact second stage but the exhaust T was just big enough to route exhaled bubbles away from my field of vision.
This regulator comes with a choice of mouthpieces. One is of the Comfobite style that hooks onto your front teeth, while the other is the conventional type gripped by your back molars. I was using it on an extended trip consisting of 60 consecutive dives, so I swapped one mouthpiece for the other halfway through. A change is as good as a rest.
A novel addition is a rubber guard that fits over the mouthpiece and gives your lips some protection from the initial shock of entering cold water. I found an alternative use for this. When diving in water infested with man-eating plankton, I used it to protect my lips from the irritating stings around the mouth that my fellow-divers suffered.
An uncomfortable side-effect resulted from the fact that I'm lucky enough to have a gap between my top front teeth (my wife says it's lucky!). The guard caused my top lip to be pressed on this gap, embossing it by drawing it through the gap, and this became a little irritating. I rang the changes between mouthpieces and guard, and all was well.
As expected, the Legend LX Supreme breathed sublimely during normal diving. What I did discover, however, was that when using my camera to take portrait- rather than landscape-shaped pictures, I tended to turn my head on one side, positioning the hose end of the regulator downwards. This gave me a very wet air supply.
Obviously the exhaust port let too much water back in when I exhaled at this angle. It is not something you would discover unless using a big camera turned through 90¡, and looking through the eyepiece with your right eye, but it spoiled an otherwise good experience.
The Aqua Lung Legend LX Supreme costs £379.
Aqua Lung UK 0116 212 4200, www.aqualung.co.uk
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+ High-performance coldwater regulator
+ Nicely finished
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- No room for computer transmitter
- Could be wet under certain conditions
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SEMI-DRY SUIT
HAVE YOU EVER TRAVELLED A THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME, only to remember suddenly that you left something on the kitchen table? I did, and that's how I came to find myself wearing the Pinnacle Stealth semi-dry suit to snorkel in Wraysbury Lake.
This suit is perfect for use in the Mediterranean, where water temperatures can be quite cruel at depth, but I had forgotten to pack it. So it was fortunate that the water at Wraysbury last August was a warm 22¡C.
Chris and Richard from this inland site are used to me. They know that when I show up, I'm likely to be trying out something I would rather not try in front of a large audience.
The water was balmy but the Pinnacle Stealth was barmy, in that I had to climb into it through the neck seal.
This isn't too bad if you're snake-hipped, but wouldn't suit everyone. But I slipped in, pulling the surplus 7mm material up over my hips, squeezed my arms into the sleeves and wriggled like hell until I was as snug as a salami in its skin.
The Pinnacle Stealth has a hood and an almost rigid rubber-covered bib-front that pulls up over the head from the back and fastens by means of a healthy slab of Velcro and two press-studs at the front. ItÔs a complicated bit of manufacturing. Once in, I wondered if I would need the fire brigade to get me out.
The idea of this suit is to provide as little opportunity as possible for cold water to flush through it. It achieves that aim. Like other Pinnacle suits from New Zealand, it is lined with a woven Merino wool material that has fabulous comfort and insulating properties.
I combined the suit with a pair of Merino-lined boots, and found that the seals at the ankles integrated nicely with the boots and the extended ankle cuffs. They allowed my big feet to pass through, but zipped up tightly afterwards.
Like the Pinnacle Polar wetsuit with its Merino wool lining which got me enthusing in these pages about a year ago, the Stealth has pre-bent arms and legs with reinforced patches inside, where many panels meet. The wrists have smooth chimney-style seals built into the inner sleeves.
There are tough Kevlar knee pads and similar pads at wear sites at the shoulders, and a thick spine pad for keeping out the chill.
Thus fitted out, I strode boldly down the ramp into deeper water. I was equipped with mask, fins and snorkel, and 8kg of lead to counteract the natural buoyancy in the suit. And I hardly got wet. In fact, I've been wetter in some of the drysuits I've tried.
A little cold trickle of water made itself noticeable around my skinny shoulders (I should go to the gym more often) and it was only when I finally turned upright to stand up that this worked its way down to wet the rest of me.
I swam round the lake in leisurely fashion, slipping under to look at the bottom occasionally and scaring the shoals of small fish now in evidence there. It felt almost tropical!
Finally, I decided to come out. There is only so much oxygenating weed one can look at before the need for a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea becomes overwhelming.
Chris kindly took a photograph of me as I climbed out of the water (using my camera, I hasten to add) and kept making references to Pulp Fiction. Was it because I looked remarkably like the character played by Bruce Willis, or that I reminded him of the Gimp?
I took it on the chin, because I knew I would need his help getting out of the suit. Once my arms were free it proved reasonably easy, but this isn't a suit for those with no friends.
People enquiring about semi-drys on the divernet forum usually get shouted down by those who insist that it is stupid to get anything other than a drysuit to dive in the UK.
Well, start writing your letters, Outraged of Tonbridge Wells, because I disagree. Equipped with this suit, you will be warm enough in all but the bitterest of British water temperatures, and surely warm enough in the sea.
You may get chilled while fighting your way out of it, depending on whether you are out of the wind or not, but I hardly needed to towel off after using it.
The Merino wool has some amazing qualities, other than its ability to insulate while wet. It doesn't smell, and it's kind to the skin with which it comes into contact. The Pinnacle Stealth is an excellent suit and, as befits its name, it comes only in technical black. It all depends on whether you're fit enough to climb in through the neck opening.
Of course, you're on a hiding to nothing if you don't get one that fits you perfectly.
The Pinnacle Stealth semi-dry suit costs £295.
Oceanic SW 01404 891819
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+ Warmest, driest semi-dry you'll ever wear
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- You need to be fit to get into it
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FINS
IT'S A SAD FACT THAT THE MOST EXCITING ANIMALS to encounter while diving always seem to be those associated with strong currents. This can make the experience arduous.
I have never considered myself an athlete. The only award I ever won was in running for cover. So you can guess that I was bemused to hear an exceptionally fit dive-guide in a Third World country telling someone else that he thought I was very strong.
Later, a young German man with whom I had been diving said he was impressed by the way I had swum against an opposing current, especially loaded down, as I always am, with a very large camera and two big flash units. I had left him for dead. I suggested that these feats were nothing to do with strength - it was simply that I had very good fins.
Anyone who has read diver over the past few years will know that I am a fan of Mares Plana Avanti Quattro fins, as indeed are so many dive-guides throughout the world.
In our comparison tests of fins, these nearly always come top or very near the top. The question was, how could they be made better than they already are?
My old Quattros were very fluffy round the edges, and had started to go a bit floppy. I recently obtained a new pair, and they were much more rigid.
I like the way my foot gets incorporated completely within the foot-pocket, so that the fins become an extension of my leg. My weak ankles are omitted from the equation and my calf and thigh muscles take on all the load.
Of course, it is important that the fins are held in position snugly, and I improved the security of the fit by replacing the otherwise faultless Mares Advanced Buckle System (ABS) with Beaver Stainless-Steel Fin Straps. These simply fit directly to the lugs on the fins.
Hey presto! The fins were dramatically improved. I was able to transfer all of my effort to shovelling water, with none wasted in taking up the slack, even when I had my head down and was giving it my all in a current.
The springs kept the straps tight, and the feet tight in the foot-pocket, but there was never any danger that an over-tightened fin-strap might break.
And a finger in the loop at the back was all it took to step out of the fins after a dive.
Mares Plana Avanti Quattro fins cost £91.75 a pair and are available in Small, Regular and Extra Large sizes. Beaver Stainless-Steel Fin Straps are available in three sizes and cost £16.95 a pair.
Blandford Sub-Aqua 01823 663849. Beaver Sports 01484 512354
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+ Top-performing combination
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