New Avelo Dive Centers are being announced most months. Last March I was #5. Today there are 15 listed on the website and many more in the pipeline.
Yeah, I figured as much, but the point stands that, now and for many, many years to come at the very least, there will be many places you can rent AL 80's and charter a dive boat, but won't have access to Avelo. Additionally, IDK about the logistics of transporting the jetpack component, since it presumably weighs more than the BCD+regset (since most of your weight savings are in the different tank, loss of lead, and Avelo not having a ton of float foam and padding) and the electronics being perhaps more tricky to get through TSA. Like, I don't know, but it seems like Avelo will mostly be limited to where you can rent it, at least for the immediate future, unless you're one of the few who lives somewhere with good, Avelo friendly diving.
Avelo wouldn't be a great advantage for your basic diving where you want to be negative.
Agreed. I do still think the system is cool, and for the right price, would definitely try it out on vacation sometime, but for the moment, I don't need/want a system that can't the main type of diving I do. Love to see the innovation, and can't wait to see where they go with this though.
We like to train in 50'-60' of depth so divers can experience having a wide range of neutral buoyancy. It's even more impressive when we wreck dive. Imagine swimming down to 105' and still being perfectly neutral. Grabbing your camera to take a pic and still having a perfect hover. So a couple of things here. with Avelo you have to swim down or exhale completely and slowly drift down. You don't drop down and get neutral. You start neutral and stay neutral.
Ok, but that's kinda what I was asking about. Those of you who do a lot of this sort of diving, how often do you go from <30 feet to 105 feet? Twice per dive, I would assume. Not that hard to hit your inflator when you do that. I can see it being very useful on say, a 40 foot tall wreck in 60 feet of water, since you'd be changing pressure quite a bit in the course of the dive. I just don't know enough about "sightseeing" diving to know if that's a frequent occurrence or not. Any thoughts?
If you get neutral on standard at 45' and stay between 35'-55' you will likely not have to adjust until you burn off enough gas that you need to. Now if you swim up over a reef to 30' you probably adjust by keeping very little air in your lungs and use your lungs for fine-tuning your buoyancy. Very standard. Which leads me to the point. With a wide range of stable buoyancy you still fine tune your buoyancy with your lungs but it's like having a sharper knife in the kitchen. It's a lot less work and a lot more enjoyable. Your breathing changes with Avelo. Your heart rate slows as you relax more deeply. Your air lasts longer and you have a more enjoyable dive. Avelo is simply better scuba.
The thing I found that worked fairly well, at least for me that day, was to be neutral on a full breath, and to swim slightly faster on exhale. The lift from my kicking countered out the loss of buoyancy on exhale. I have no idea if this is the "best" way to do this sort of dive, but I've only dove in that style 3 times out of my current 30+ dives, with the rest being either my initial cert dives (I'm sure we all remember the kneeling situation in most OW courses) or my more typical bottom crawling dives.
One thing I am curious about is the potential application of Avelo in a more commercial/professional dive setting. I could easily see say, an underwater welder or a salvage worker hav
