What are your plans after the OW class?
- A dive trip to the tropics the next month?
- Weekend dives off the coast?
- Dives with friends that already dive?
- Any future class plans?
To clear something up:
When I recommend being well drilled in any unfamiliar gear you brought to class, I meant in terms of putting it on, that it fit, where the main buckles and controls were. All on land, not breathing underwater with it before class. Practicing underwater is not recommended until you are trained, which is why shops should not be renting you tanks until then. Which is where the question about you getting a compressor came from. Hopefully that clears that up a bit.
Three out of four of your dive shops recommending the octo inflator does not speak well for them, particularly in the midst of covid.
I'm not worried about Covid. I've had it. My wife has had it. We're not going to catch it. We're not going to transmit it. Most folks I know have either had Covid or have been vaccinated. I'm not going to make equipment choices based on Covid. I'm a lot more worried about whether the length of the tube on my primary regulator is adequate than I am about whether I'm going to transmit Covid by handing the primary off to my buddy.
I would not expect dive shops to rent tanks before I am certified. Prior to certification, all of my training will be done as part of a class or under the guidance of an instructor. The instructor will supply our tanks in those cases.
As for our plans after our OW certification:
We're going to the Caribbean in June, looking at a liveaboard trip to either Hawaii, Polynesia or Australia later this year, and a trip to Mexico with some friends who dive a lot (dates tbd.)
Will likely take some additional more advanced classes and participate in local trips organized by our scuba shop. We've done some snorkeling in various Mediterranean locations and are looking at some scuba options there too.
All the "try before you buy" advice is not particularly useful when my only option for trying out gear is to rent gear that is designed for the rental market. I don't see any dive shops renting out a wide spectrum of high end gear, and if they do have any, it's typically confined to a single manufacturer. The shop that is affiliated with my classes carries only Scubapro gear. If I want to try out something else from a different manufacturer, I can't, unless I sign up for a class at a different shop.
If there were a simple way to rent a wide variety of top tier gear from a bunch of manufacturers, and try before I buy, I would go that route. Nothing of that nature is on offer, however. Again, it goes back to the theme of my original post that purchasing dive gear is not that simple and the dive shops are not really in a position to make it any easier. They can't even seem to keep basic inventory in stock. I don't see it as remotely possible that they're going to make a huge variety of high end rental gear available in every size for folks who just want to try it all out.
At the end of the day, it's not that big a deal. The item that seems most likely to cause fit and performance issues is the BCD, and if I end up replacing it with something else, that's not the end of the world. The rest of my kit (other than the inflator/second) is pretty standard stuff and I can't imagine that I will have too much difficulty with it.
