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  I aqualung dived yesterday at a sea site which had no hosepipe or freshwater
stream to wash my gear afterwards, so I had to wash the salt off it and then
dry it at home that evening. This reminded me of the minor but necessary job
of washing AMRB's (= Automatic Mixture Rebreathers) etc after dives.
  Whan AMRB's become common, many will likely be kept with in private houses
and the like with no special gear-drying room or other facility to cope with
dripping wet diving gear, or with the characteristic smell of unwashed diving
gear, and drying it outside is impossible or inadvisable due to bad weather or
risk of theft etc. In my case (I have no permanent hosepipe) it has to be
washed in the bath, and left there until it stops dripping, with the wetsuit
hanging by a coathanger from the shower fixing. I find that the sooner the
wetsuit's lining (and the stab-jacket, whose somewhat rough surface holds
water stops dripping, the sooner the gear can finish drying in my bedroom, and
release the bath and the shower for their normal use.
  The same will likely apply to AMRB's:-
  (1) With AMRB's in backpack boxes, how easy and how long will it be to wash,
and then dry, the outside of the breathing bag and all floodable cavities
inside the backpack box?
  (2) When an AMRB in a backpack box is taken out of the water, how long and
how easy for all water inside the backpack box to drain out?, so the water in
it won't start rust in the boot of the car going home after the dive.
  (3) If the breathing bag gets seawater in it, how easy will it be to wash it
out and then to dry it? (I find that washing and drying the inside of stab
jackets is very difficult: one man even advised me to "leave the sea water wet
in, so the salt in it will discourage organisms from breeding in there".)

  (PS. My recent statement about a recent somewhat improvement of attitude
towards sport diving in Greece came from pages 19-20 of the April 1994 issue
of the UK diving magazine "Sport Diver" (about an undersea archaeology
symposium in Greece in November 1993). It also gave an address to get further
information from: The Aegean Dive Shop, Pandoras 31, Glyfada-Athens, Greece.)

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