so... What got you into diving, vintage or othrwise?

[8dust]

staying up late, getting ready for the holidays, and feeling a bit reflective.

I just put some of my Son's books away, and noticed he had one I had given him from my collection, stashed in his clubhouse (corner of bedroom, behind a chair, under an extra comforter, with the stuffed animals guarding the door), it's from the 70's I believe, was published by National Geographic, and is called "underwater adventures" or something like that.

I flipped through it to find one of my favorite pictures, thought on it for a moment, and have decided that particular photo is pretty much responsible for grabbing my imagination and hooking the 12yearold me on the idea of diving in the sea many years ago. It's not the pot-o-gold, mind you, but the feel of the moment that seems to be captured there on the rocks.

Anyway, I have single-hosed it since I was a kid, and now this last year that I have been getting a double hose rig together, I am drawn back to this photo. May have to blow the thing up and make a poster for the den/manroom.

Thought I'd share, so here it is. (don't sue me NG!)

I thought it might be kinda fun to hear what inspired some of the rest of you to put on a tank and take a splash, as a kid or as an adult.
Could be a pretty good thread...

8

 

[SwimJim]

I grew up on Lake Michigan. Still live on the lake. When I was real little my mother used to take the row boat down to the corner to get the mail. That's about 3/10's of a mile one way. I remember those summer mornings very well even though they are almost 50 years distant now. I used to peer over the side and watch what was in those staggering depths, like 8 or 10 feet. LOL. I would see big rocks, fish and things like an occasional soda can. That led to my first "command" which was an inner tube from which I learned to skin dive. The end of 5 kids we used to start swimming soon after the ice went out and I remember getting in as late as October. TV shows like Seahunt and the Undersea World of JYC grabbed my attention as did the National Geographic magazines. I remember one National geographic in particular that came out in the mid 60's that had a layout on divers salvaging a Spanish Gallon. As I became a teenager I saved money from my summer jobs and put together my first diving rig. It was a DESCO air supplied mask with the triangle face plate. We didn't have much of a pump, but we could mess around in the shallows. By '77 I was hooked pretty well and ran across a local diver who was willing to sell me some scuba gear. He sold it to me on the promise I would get certified. By then I had read everything I could get my hands on about diving. I began scuba that year by solo diving the local wreck in about 60 fow. I did follow through on my promise and got certified the next year, October 1978. The rest is history. LOL

 

[Slonda828]

When I was in Greece in 2002, I remember seeing some explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) guys diving to look for mines at the harbor. I remember thinking about how crazy that idea was, and that prompted me go to a local diving shop to pick up a Sporasub mask, and learn how to skin dive. Later that deployment, I used some morale, welfare, and recreation SCUBA gear and dove some really shallow dives just kind of figuring things out on my own. I cleaned up for the EOD guys, tended some of their lines, and helped square away their gear in my off duty time, and in turn they threw me off of several moving zodiacs and showed me a lot about diving. 6 years later I finally took an open water course because nobody would give me air fills in America without a card because we live in a society full of sissies and lawyers.

As for vintage diving, I watched some show on public broadcasting that had JYC in it. I looked at how the Cousteau team was diving, and it fascinated me that it was really just skin diving with a SCUBA on your back. No danglies, no poodle jacket, no mass marketed, over-priced, over-engineered, over-stylized crap. They were using J valves and only one second stage, which is how I initially thought everyone dove based upon what I saw in Greece. So I bought a 1965 Aqualung conshelf VI off of Ebay for like 20 bucks and taught myself how to rebuild it. Now here it is almost 2010 and I have a fully restored and totally functional example of virtually every U.S. Divers single hose regulator manufactured between 1958 and 1978 as well as three restored double hose regulators. I also restored an anti-magnetic regulator in honor of the EOD guys that inspired me to jump in the ocean with just a mask and little shorts whilst enduring constant abuse for being a brown shoe in the Navy.

 

[captain]

Here's the story.

NAVED - National Association of Vintage Equipment Divers :: Our Latest Featured Diver

 

[Paladin]

My story is in my SB profile.

 

[duckbill]

1) Watched Flipper in the late '60s early '70s.
2) I used to love looking at and reading my brother's copy of "The New Science of Skin and Scuba Diving" during the early '70s (The cover had the male and female divers on the front holding shells).
3) Had a friend in the mid-late '70s who was an occasional ab diver and scuba diver. I remember seeing his cool gear hung up to dry on the fence.

Then, in 1977, my family took a trip to Hawaii. I was already a good snorkeler at the time. We went on a half day trip on the Fairwinds catamaran out of Kona, Hawaii to Captain Cook's Cove. They offered a crash course for a guided dive and my father was willing to pay for it, so I took my first dive in the clear, warm water in Hawaii and had a ball. They loaned me the the Dacor horsecollar and regulator, and I don't believe we had such a thing as an octopus, except for the ones in the rocks.

My next dive was in 1985 while being cerified with my girlfriend at what was then known as Wet Pleasure in Santa Clara, CA.

Funny thing is that I really got to be an avid diver after having moved inland to the Sacramento Valley. That is also when I became curious about vintage diving. I am always drawn to history and antiques, but I don't even remember what it was that I saw that re-piqued my interest in vintage diving, but here I am now, diving almost exclusively double hose regulators mostly in the fresh water rivers around where I live. It was probably my fascination with the double hose regulators and the schematic drawings of their operation that I saw in "The New Science of..." when back when I was ten or so.

 

[vintagediver]

I was instructed by a friends father in 1969 and my first dive was on a DA Aquamaster in a sink hole in Texas called "Edge Falls". I was so stoked to be doin what they did on "Sea Hunt". I was hooked. I dive Vintage because it keeps me young and I still own my first regulator.
That picture is from "Undersea Treasures" 1974. Those guys were hard core. I know that water is cold.I have always wondered what that regulator is that Dave MacEachern is wearing. Anybody Know?

 

[John C. Ratliff]

I was instructed by a friends father in 1969 and my first dive was on a DA Aquamaster in a sink hole in Texas called "Edge Falls". I was so stoked to be doin what they did on "Sea Hunt". I was hooked. I dive Vintage because it keeps me young and I still own my first regulator.
That picture is from "Undersea Treasures" 1974. Those guys were hard core. I know that water is cold.I have always wondered what that regulator is that Dave MacEachern is wearing. Anybody Know?

If you are referring to the regulator in the photo in the first post above, that is a Sportsways double hose. They had two, the Dual Air and the Hydro-Twin. I think this is a Dual Air, as it does not have a round yolk screw like my Hydro-Twin. The Dual Air came out in 1961-62, and was an unbalanced design for the first stage, and a tilt valve second stage. It had both HP and LP ports, but the single LP port had an overpressure relief valve on it. I believe it had a red label too, so the regulator in the photo may have been a Hydro-Twin. The Hydro-Twin has a blue label, is a balanced first stage design with a downstream second stage. That means that the LP port is free and usable for an LP inflator hose, and the HP can be used for a SPG. This was the first, and for a very long time, the only double hose regulator that had both LP and HP ports built into the regulator body (which was a Master Diver or Navy Unit first stage with the second stage fitted onto their single hose first stage). The Nemrod Snark III eventually came out with a HP port, as well as a few production models of the Dacor dual diaphragm regulator (the R-4 and their descendents). But we had to await the AMF Voit Trieste to get both LP and HP outlets on a double hose regulator again, but again with some design problems that made it artificially breathe too hard. The hose/mouthpiece design of the Sportsways double hose regulators were not the greatest, and caused a lot of breathing resistance. But with a USD hose/mouthpiece, this is a dream machine for breathing. Rumors have it that there were legal battles with US Divers Company, and after just a little while both regulators left the scene. Here is my Hydro-Twin, which I bought in the 1980s at a fellow's rural home in Oregon for $25, mounted on a tank on a Dacor Constant Volume System (CVS), the Nautilus. The system is not floating level as there is 12 pounds of lead weights in the Nautilus. The Sportsways double hose regulators were designed so that they mounted lower on the valve than the USD double hoses (an offset), and the diaphragm is built on a tilt to give more leverage to the diaphragm-lever interface, which to my knowledge is the only regulator ever designed this way. This is the reason for the decreasing size of the exhaust holes in the diaphragm housing assembly.

I'll post my story a bit later in the week.

SeaRat

 

[John C. Ratliff]

From a book I'm currently writing, tentatively titled Between Air and Water, the Memoirs of a USAF Pararescueman. Copyright 2009, John C. Ratliff.

In the late 1950's I was in Waldo Junior High School, and had been on the YMCA Swim Team for a few years. My world started changing when I received a swim mask, and tried it out for the first time in the pool. I was amazed at how clearly I could see, and how close everything was. Trying to touch the ladder, that first swim into the deep end of the pool with the mask, I missed! It turns out that everything looks one third closer than it is when viewed underwater.

This was just the beginning of my underwater adventures. Growing up in Salem, Oregon presented itself with numerous opportunities to swim in the lakes and rivers. YMCA Summer Camp at Silver Creek Falls allowed the adventuresome skin divers a chance to see the fresh water world in a small reservoir. Here trout abounded, and the water was spring-fed cold. It was so cold that we could only swim for about 15 minutes without "freezing out". But thereafter, I was hooked on snorkeling.
In 1959 I spent my summer picking strawberries and beans in order to purchase an "aqualung". I had just read Jacques Cousteau's book, The Silent World, and was determined to learn scuba diving. Then dad took me to a movie by the same name, which featured the Calypso divers in the warm Mediterranean Sea, and I was completely enraptured.

Later that summer, I noticed a diver at the YMCA pool with a scuba, and he allowed me to use it. It was a double hose regulator, and I didn't fit the harness, so I just held onto it and went to the bottom to breath. Breathing underwater! What an accomplishment! This was the realization of a dream. Nobody I knew had ever done that before. Never mind that my ears were plugged up for hours afterward, I had actually breathed underwater. I was one of the fish men!

I worked extra hard, and dad took me to an older fellow who dived and had some extra gear for sale. He allowed me to try out different regulators and scuba tanks in the pool. When I had the money, I bought it from him; a Healthways Scuba regulator and a small tank with a harness. One of my first trips was to the Little North Fork of the Santiam River with my next door neighbor, David Hadeen. He had all the gear he needed, and a wet suit. I certainly found out why the suit was necessary when he took me into the water, which was bone-chilling cold.
Luckily, one of my cousins lived in Portland and worked for White Stag, which manufactured wet suits. Gracy Conklin helped me pick out a wet suit the next year, and I was set to explore the underwater world.

Many have asked what diving is like, and it is nearly impossible to explain. However, some of my daydreams might shed some light.

During this period of my life, we went to St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Salem, Oregon. The church had a very high ceiling. When I was bored with the service, I would daydream that I was weightless, swimming just a few feet below the ceiling, and able to dive down toward the bottom (the pews), for a better view of the congregation. I was blowing bubbles which would drift to the rafters, and up out of sight—each breath emitted a stream which I could follow to the ceiling of the church. I could move freely in any direction. Such was diving!

Today, I worked a bit more with my Sportsways Hydro-Twin. After I wrote the above about the hose/mouthpiece system of that regulator, I decided to get the original one out and take another look. The non-return cage was larger than the Healthways Scuba, but somewhat smaller than the USD (both original straight and curved mouthpieces). Years ago I had put quite a bit of medical silicone grease onto the non-return valves, as there are none available in that size now (although I will look for an equivalent in silicone sometime from single hose regulators). Those non-returns had softened up and were functioning very well now. So I put the mouthpiece onto the regulator for the first time in many years. I was very surprised in how well it breathed. This regulator has a very well-designed venturi, and it produced surprising air volumes even through the somewhat smaller non-returns. So now I will be using the Hydro-Twin in its original configuration, and probably will acquire now hoses for it. My comments above about the design turned out not to be as well-founded as I had thought.

SeaRat

 

[8dust]

Good stuff guys.

Keep 'em coming!