May 2000 Titan no longer so tiny

Titan no longer so tiny - Aqua-Lung Titan When the balloon goes up - Buddy Lift Bag Cheap housing cuts risks (but don't expect miracles) - Aquatica Mini Sport Fine if your taste is for bent fish - Technisub Sphera mask

John Bantin has been a full-time professional diving writer and underwater photographer since 1990. He makes around 300 dives each year testing diving equipment.

The Aqua-Lung Titan D Impulse Cryo has the distinction of one of the longest names of any regulator available! It comes with the Titan first stage, with added dry-chamber to keep the balanced-diaphragm mechanism remote from the water, and the Impulse second stage, complete with Aqua-Lung patented heat-exchangers.
These are designed to conduct what heat there might be in the surrounding water to those parts of the regulator second stage cooled by the very much colder air arriving depressurised from the diver's tank.
This is another Aqua-Lung regulator suitable for British divers at inland sites, because wherever the temperature of fresh water is liable to fall to 5 or 6°C, there is a real risk of a freezing and free-flowing regulator.
The Titan first stage is a sleek affair. I counted four medium-pressure ports of identical bore and one high-pressure port arranged around its squat barrel. By rotating the barrel to the best position on your tank, the slightly forward-pointing hoses will route just where you want them. It is also one of the nicest-looking regulator first-stages around at the moment, and in common with most regulators is available with either A-clamp or DIN-fitting.
The Impulse second stage is of a size that only yesterday was thought small. Now, with the advent of increasingly tiny second stages, it seems fairly average in size. It is nicely constructed in a mixture of hard and soft plastics, and has a wide exhaust tee which directs exhaled bubbles past the user's face, and a well-integrated but not disguised purge control.
The front was easily removed (though not too easily) but I was unable to take a peek under the front diaphragm at the valve-lever mechanism because it is retained by a ring which needs a special tool to remove.
Talking of special tools, the owner has the option of using the Impulse either right- or left-handed, but it needs to be re-rigged by an approved Aqua-Lung technician using a special converter.
In common with many regulators, the Impulse has a venturi max/min switch on top, which allows the diver to take advantage of the minimum breathing resistance offered below the surface, yet conveniently detune it to avoid those annoying free-flows when first hitting the water.
Again in common with many other regulators, there is a breathing-resistance adjustment knob which allows you to tighten pressure on the spring of the second-stage valve to increase the amount you have to suck before it will open.
I have never found this useful, but it is one of those added-value features which once provided a sales advantage and has now become almost standard. In the event, the Impulse Cryo tended to gush air at me under water if I did not turn this cracking pressure up a little.
I recently used the Aqua-Lung Glacier regulator, which had a Comfobite mouthpiece with an added section. I mentioned in these pages that I wished all Comfobite mouthpieces had this. Unfortunately, the Impulse Cryo was not similarly equipped, and after a week of intensive diving I developed a sore lip, caused by the way it got caught between the mouthpiece and the exhaust tee which rested on my chin.
That said, this regulator certainly gave a nice breathe compared to others that from time to time were rigged on my twin-set.
The Aqua-Lung Titan D Impulse Cryo costs £255.

Aqua-Lung UK 0116 212 4200

PLUS	MINUS
+ Neat first-stage + Reliability in cold water promised	- 'Small' second-stage rather big compared to some current rivals on the market

When the balloon goes up
Early on in my diving career, and in my quest for BSAC badges, I found myself diving on one of the intact Valentine's tanks in Studland Bay, near Poole.
The dive-centre owner with whom I was diving was very keen to maintain secrecy on the whereabouts of the tanks, and as I was about to go into the water, he handed me a lifting bag with the words: 'Quick, there's another dive boat coming. Send up the shot!'
I took his rolled-up lifting bag, but when I got down to the shot at the seabed, I was dismayed to find that he had given me nothing more than a simple open-ended sausage. I doubted if there would be enough displacement to lift the substantial lump of lead at the end of the shotline.
In the event I attached it, inflated it, and was relieved to see it accelerate slowly towards the surface with its load. I turned to swim over to the Valentine's tank, where my buddy waited.
I shall never forget the almighty thud that signalled the return of that great lump of lead to the muddy bottom. It only just missed me.
The sausage had reached the surface, fallen over and spilt some air. The load had come plummeting back down. One metre closer and it would have been a case of: 'Goodnight, nurse!'
The Buddy range of lifting bags are not only balloon-shaped to prevent them falling over at the surface, but are now supplied with the option of a constriction at the filling end, in the same style as the well-received Buddy Self-Sealing Surface Marker Buoy. That means that air will go into the bottom end for filling but will not spill out again.
What happens to expanding air on the way up? Once there is no more space left in the bag, an over-inflation valve, like that on a BC, will stop the bag rupturing. This same valve can also be used as a dump when you want to let the air out of it, either at the surface or under water, when you encounter that embarrassing circumstance that proves there was not enough lift in the bag to break your load out of the mud.
Toppling a traditional open-ended bag to spill the air and take the strain off the load is quite difficult. A dump valve is usually fitted to better-made lifting bags. With a self-sealing design a dump valve is the only option, unless you take a knife to the strop and hope to find the balloon on the surface before it blows away to France.
Of course, the theory of lifting is quite simple and you can use any airtight but open-ended container and a suitable length of string. But a lifting bag is more convenient and can be kept rolled up forgotten in a BC pocket until you need it.
AP Valves has merely applied a tried and tested design from the Self-Sealing SMB to another similarly used piece of kit. It should never allow a properly attached load to come hurtling back down onto you.
The Buddy Self-Sealing Lifting Bags come in 25kg and 65kg lift capacities and cost £33 and £44. They can also be supplied in traditional guise with dump-valve only.

AP Valves 01326 561040

PLUS	MINUS
+ Proven design adapted from the Buddy SMB + Adds essential safety element to lifting	- Costlier than an empty plastic carboy and some string

Cheap housing cuts risks (but don't expect miracles)
I am frequently asked for a cheap route into underwater photography. I tell people to buy a book by David Doubilet and save the heartache. Many are undeterred, but the truth is that there is no cheap route, and even the most basic outfit is likely to set you back many hundreds of pounds.
Ever-optimistic, would-be underwater photographers can be seen entering the water armed with a cheap equivalent of the old box Brownie in some form of waterproof housing. Well, Lartigue used nothing much more sophisticated, but then he had the foresight to wait many years before releasing his work to an easily impressed public. When everybody else's pre-WWI snaps had been thrown away, his proved to have survived and become valuable.
The Vivitar BV40 is a typical modern box Brownie. As usual it is dressed up to look space-age, but close examination reveals nothing more than a simple fixed shutter-speed camera with a fixed-focus, two-element lens, albeit with a tiny built-in flash and modern powered film transport.
The flash is positioned so close to the lens that it will simply obliterate any underwater shot with back-scatter. Luckily you have the option to switch it off.
Aquatica makes submarine housings for expensive cameras and these have been adopted widely by the world's professional underwater photographers, including the aforementioned Mr Doubilet. The same company makes a housing for the Vivitar BV40, too.
Of cast aluminium and with a Plexiglas front, the Aquatica Mini Sport appears to be made to the same standard as its professional brothers. In common with these, it has a simple-route O-ring to ensure its watertightness and cam-catches to squeeze it shut. The lens is neatly masked from the effect of internal reflections and there is only one control to release the shutter and wind on the film. This has a safety catch. Following in the tradition of Aquatica housings, the viewfinder is large and easy to use under water with a scuba mask.
Because you will hardly be using the flash, you will probably employ the camera in shallow water where white light penetrates and select a speed of film to match the conditions. Exposure is fixed (1/100 sec @f/8) but an indicator light tells the user if the ambient light level is inadequate.
If you are prepared to use super-fast black and white film, the manufacturer claims that the Mini Sport is rated to 100m!
The whole thing is carried in a neoprene and mesh ever-ready case which is slung round the waist like a bum-bag. The camera and housing are slightly negatively buoyant in water.
The unit will fire a secondary flash which has a slave facility. Pre-tapped holes in the housing accept Aquatica TLC accessories on which this second flash could be mounted, although all this will cost more than the Vivitar camera inside.
It's all very admirable, but does the underwater world need another point-and-shoot camera? The first excursion under water with it will reveal that there is a lot more to underwater photography than merely pointing and shooting.
The reality is that none of us would risk flooding a £5000 (or more) underwater camera outfit if we could get acceptable results with something as cheap as this.
The Aquatica Mini Sport with Vivitar BV40 costs £180.

Underwater Images 020 8743 3788

PLUS	MINUS
+ A professional-standard housing for a cheap point-and-shoot camera	- You get the results to be expected from a cheap point-and-shoot camera

Fine if your taste is for bent fish
There are some things a manufacturer shouldn't mess with, and the personal vision of its customers is sacrosanct. Divers find a mask they like and tend to stick with it. Dramatic changes in performance are hard to develop in the marketplace.
At the DEMA trade show, we witnessed the debut of the fiendishly expensive, clever, and very heavy HydroOptix mask, a design that promises to do away with the refraction and therefore tunnel-vision normally associated with using a flat mask under water. A man from Technisub reckoned that its new Sphera mask did the same job at a fraction of the price.
It has a curved plastic lens, a development of the successful Seal swimming mask, but with a silicone skirt which incorporates a nose-piece. Being plastic, it resists fogging. Under water, the wrap-around effect stretches the view at the sides but not from top to bottom.
Other divers tried it and agreed with me that it gave a wider view than normal but at the expense of distorted vision. It was a bit like conducting the dive while looking at it through a fairground mirror - not very nice. Its peripheral refraction also made the fish look bent. There was too much distortion and it got a unanimous thumbs-down.
Exchanging his mask for it during the dive, one diver also found it impossible to clear the last drop of water from the Sphera.
However, everyone agreed that it was perfect for high-speed RIB rides in rough water. We also thought that it might do for underwater skiing. So think about it if you are ever coming down the mountain at Tigne equipped to scuba and heading for the lake.
The Technisub Sphera costs £30.

Aqua-Lung UK 0116 212 4200

PLUS	MINUS
+ Increased field of view	- Distorted vision

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Appeared in DIVER - May 2000

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