Several years ago I was in Cozumel and dove with Fernando with Manta Raya Divers. He owns the company. To this day he is the best diver I've ever been in the water with. If a person can actually have perfect trim, buoyancy, and air consumption then this guy had it. I have never seen anyone as comfortable in the water as this guy. So what was he wearing? A good old jacket style BC. And when I say old I mean old. The thing was faded and ragged looking and you would think it would fall apart at any minute. And he was also wearing full foot fins to boot! But he made it all work to perfection.
While I have never dove in the colder waters up north or off the coast of California, I have pretty much been all through the Caribbean more than once. For the most part, the DM's I have encountered in my travels have been some of, if not the best divers overall I have been in the water with. I guess that just comes from racking up 1000's of dives and doing it for a living and not as a weekend warrior or as a hobby. I have yet to see one in a BP/W.
One thing I do notice in many of the BP/W vs Jacket style vs whatever else threads is many people will suggest that getting a jacket style bc is a mistake and somehow when a diver gets more experience and becomes a "better diver", they will see the error in their ways and then get a BP/W. It's almost as if the BP/W is a tool for the more advanced diver while the jacket is for the novice "don't know any better" diver that was tricked into buying one from their LDS.
I wonder why all the excellent DM's I've run across haven't gotten the word yet about how great the BP/W is and if they would only make the switch they could move their diving skills beyond perfection. I guess they just don't have time to read ScubaBoard.
I kinda like the idea of looking and seeing what the "best" divers are using for the diving environment you are going to find yourself in most often. If it's the caribbean and you do what the "best" do, you won't be buying a BP/W.
Most dive professionals who have a good scubapro or other well made vest style bc, that has 5 years to ten years more life left in it prior to the need for replacement, are going to decide that what they are using will be just fine until their bc dies. Many were able to get their BC at a steep discount through the diveshop they work with, meaning they could buy a good scubapro stab for half price, or a Halcyon for full price....Do you think that would be a tough call for them ?
As great a lifestyle as diving can be, it does not typically come with money trees in the DM's backyard....
As to the "Best Diver"...This is an extremely subjective tangent. One I am happy to pile in on
Back in the Early 1950's
Palm Beach's one of Palm Beach's first divers was a guy named Frank Hammett. He read about Gagnon and Cocusteu's Aqua Lung, and then made his own scuba tank from a CO2 cylinder, and he jurried up his own regulator. Frank found virtually all of the reefs off of Palm Beach, between the 50's and 70's....he dove with no bc, or with horsecollar bcs, or with at pack bc's, or with scubapro stab jacket bcs. Whatever he used, Frank was an insanely strong diver. When I first dove with him in the early 80's, he was in his 60's, and I was a bicycle racer....I was used to having far more fitness and speed in the water than other divers..Frank took off ahead of me on this Hole in the Wall dive, and I had to swim at 100% full speed, just to keep up with his cruising pace. He could see a grouper 25 feet away swimming at a tangent, he would aim somewhere else with his huge Palm Beach Rifle, and the spear would go where the fish would end up going, and the fish would be Frank's.
He would dive in the biggest currents you could imagine, he would invent his own methods for handling each obstacle ( remember, there was no one before him, and no scubaboard) and he would have experiences few of us could even imagine ( diving the relatively primitive ocean environments of the 50's and 60's and 70's).
Spearfishing on the 145 foot deep Hole in the Wall, he would be down on a steel 72, suck it dry, free ascend, grab another tank on the boat, and imediately dive back down for more fish until that tank ran dry, focing another free ascent. He was practically "unbendable".
Around the 60's, he dove to around 350 feet deep on a bounce on the cayman wall, realized he was falling asleep in the first few minutes of the dive, and decided he was not going to be stupid enough to dive that deep any more
He had stories of huge sharks , of huge turtles of huge every thing I could write a book on.....maybe one day I will. Being on the boat with him was like sitting next to Ernest Hemmingway, listening to one adventure after another.
Frank was an awesomely strong diver. For certain dive environments, like around the advanced Palm Beach area's deeper reefs and wrecks, there was a time when he could easily have been called the best diver. Of course, he did not need any particular BC. If his weight was not perfect on a dive, he was known to grab a rock from the bottom, and stuff it into his BC pocket for ballast. If he wanted to get some place fast, he was hand over hand on the bottom faster than the fish he was after....By today's standards, he was far from politically correct in much of what he did...but the issue here, is the subjectiveness of someone saying -- this guy is the "best diver".... Frank could have been, at a time...
Regards,
DanV
