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Looking over the listings in the Guinness Book of Records you might notice
there's nothing in there yet about the greatest assortment of dive gear
carried into the water by a free-swimming open-circuit scuba diver. You may
be thinking the folks at Guinness have slipped up and are unaware of the
hottest trend sweeping the dive industry. This in fact is not the case. In
a recent press release circulated to members of the "technical diving
community," Guinness announced that the current world-record holder is a
middle-aged, 5 foot 2 inch florist from Moosejaw, Saskatchewan.

Becky the Techy has just conducted a dive in Lake Superior with the entire
contents of the DiveRite, ScubaPro, OMS and Snap-on Tools catalogs strapped
to her body. To accomplish this extraordinary feat she employed 723 feet of
surgical tubing (assorted widths and, incidentally seven times the maximum
depth attained on her dive), 32 pounds of brass snap hooks, three 20 ounce
balls of macram=E9 yarn (12-ply), five meters of kernmantle climbing rope,
and one and a half rolls of 2-inch wide duct tape. The black and white
photograph of Becky taken as she slid gracelessly into the frigid waters
off Harbor Beach is captioned "Holy cow...what does she expect to find down
there?"

Amid the clutter of gear evident in the photograph of Becky, a couple of
things stand out as worthy of comment: the zipper on her dry suit seems to
be open, and she looks a little, well, stressed. Could be the camera caught
her just as she remembered the zipper or maybe Becky has pushed this
equipment fetish a little beyond her comfort zone. Personally, I think
she'd have been better off with just the three stage bottles, the other two
seem a little excessive to me. But then, I'm old-fashioned about diving, I
still enjoy having some movement in my limbs when I'm in the water.

Anyway, now that we know that another diving record is out of reach,
perhaps we can back off the <training> a little and start to look at our
gear and ask ourselves: "Why am I carrying all this stuff with me?" Let's
think about streamlining and let's start with stage bottles.

You first...

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