I took my Prism2 to Bonaire with myself last week. Being I carried it on with me, it got a few raised eyebrows from airport security when it went through the X- ray machine, but they didn't delay me at all. I did not get to dive it as much as I would have liked, but I did manage to get 9 dives & an avaerage of 9 hrs on it throughout the week. Out of 6 days of diving I only dove it 4. I was limited mostly because of specialty class requests & working on our shop's customer's equipment from time to time. Not a big deal on m part, I am proud to be of service to & trusted by, our clients.
When I did dive the Prism, I worked on fine tuning my trim & buoyancy. I had it down pretty decent by the end of the 4th day. I was totally blown away by how close the unit allowed me to get to the critters there without spooking them. It was also nice to be able to do the dives without freezing my tuckus off, as I do at the quarry. The only downsides I saw to the rebreathers was,... in a group of OC divers, I was limited to their air supply, but I was accepting of that. The other was the prep & maintenance of the unit every day. I would have to rise early every morning (6am) to get the unit ready, run through the operational checklists & pre- breathe, before the dive day began. OK,... so I'm still a little slow at it,.. but I would rather be a bit slow, than to get in a hurry & make a critical mistake. The more I dive the Prism, the more I understand it & the more cautious I am with it. Only a few more hours left to get before I would be elgible to begin CCR Cave & only 16 more dives until I reach the milestone of 1000 logged dives.
When I did dive the Prism, I worked on fine tuning my trim & buoyancy. I had it down pretty decent by the end of the 4th day. I was totally blown away by how close the unit allowed me to get to the critters there without spooking them. It was also nice to be able to do the dives without freezing my tuckus off, as I do at the quarry. The only downsides I saw to the rebreathers was,... in a group of OC divers, I was limited to their air supply, but I was accepting of that. The other was the prep & maintenance of the unit every day. I would have to rise early every morning (6am) to get the unit ready, run through the operational checklists & pre- breathe, before the dive day began. OK,... so I'm still a little slow at it,.. but I would rather be a bit slow, than to get in a hurry & make a critical mistake. The more I dive the Prism, the more I understand it & the more cautious I am with it. Only a few more hours left to get before I would be elgible to begin CCR Cave & only 16 more dives until I reach the milestone of 1000 logged dives.
Guess it could be worse. Though the 10 minute approach makes more sense to me; I've done a 5 minute couch dive without any scrubber in place just to see how it feels, and the only thing I got was a tad light headed from hypoxia…not at all confident a 5 minute pre-breathe is enough to tell me there's a CO2 problem.
