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RMC wrote: > > Cobber wrote in-part: > > "Gavins are not for cave only, they work fine in the ocean, too. You have a > dive club or something like that? > > Once you get a scooter you will want to take it on every dive." > > Absolutely correct. > > Scootering adds a tremendous new dimension to diving. Being able to cover > ten to fifty times the area with little efort for the same dive is like > walking is to cafe racing. Anyone that has not tryed a proper tow behind > single hand balanced scooter is missing the boat. A huge shit eating grin > comes on my face when I think of our great reef runs with a couple of my > best pals every week, not to mention three wrecks in one dive in the off > season. Not to disagree with you, I'm sure you have great places to scooter down there in Florida But.... My buddy and I both have older tow behind Teknas and frankly I find that I don't use them nearly as often as I thought I was going to. First of all, it's pretty difficult to scooter and do photography at the same time. Sure, you can clip off the camera and hold the throttle down but if the point of the dive is to shoot some film the scooter becomes a major nuisance. Lately, at least half my dives are photo dives and the scooter just gets in the way. If I have a camera in my hand I leave the scooter behind. Second, we've found that scootering in typical somewhat murky Puget Sound and Southeast Alaska waters is rather difficult. Summer vis ranges from 10-50 ft on average with vis in the 20-30' range quite typical. When the vis is this limited and you're scootering with a buddy it only takes a second or two of inattention to lose contact. In a cave you at least have a line to follow. In open water you're often zooming along without an exact route in mind and backtracking to find a missing buddy is not very easy. I think you need quite good vis to make open water scootering a relaxing experience. Plus, signaling is much more difficult than in a cave because the daylight and gunk in the water really diffuses your light beam and there's often not a convenient wall or floor to flash a beam on. We try to use the regular cave light signals but they're a lot easier to miss in open water. I would really be interested in hearing how you other open water scooter divers signal each other. To solve this problem when we're out hunting king crab on a flat sandy bottom we usually dive two divers on one scooter. One of us drives the scooter and searches to one side. The other guy rides on his back holding onto a tank neck and searches to the other side. The driver keeps the bug bag between his legs clipped off on the rear crotch strap d-ring and the passenger retrieves the crab. We can catch 3 times more crab this way than with each of us on separate scooters. Kent Lind Juneau, Alaska klind@al*.ne* (or) kent.lind@no*.go* -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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