Posted by RaiderKarl on March 07, 2001 at 12:28:00:
In Reply to: Re: On weighting, DIR, and steel tanks while diving wet. posted by AADIVER on March 07, 2001 at 11:27:56:
AA-Diver, I remember those days too! hardly anybody else was diving except us jocks! and we were tough! PADI changed all that by marketing scuba to upwards of 500,000 new divers each year, starting around the late 1980s! and then all these really bright young people started analyzing things, and it got really complicated. in the olden days of scuba, we used to just wear enough weights on our wetsuits to be bobbing at eye level on the surface with our snorkels. I still freedive like that too, so that if I black out from abalone fever, my suit will bob me back to the surface. we wore horsecollar B/Cs (NOT BCDs!) and we had to kick down to get under water, kick really hard! we did have a decomp protocol, because we followed the Navy dive tables religiously. double steel 80s was as much air as you could carry then (now I can carry double 120s for a total of 240 cubic feet!) but you had to carefully plan your dives because there were no gauges in those days either! only a J valve on your tanks if you were lucky. lets not poo-poo the new kids though. they are extremely bright, and because of them, and because of innovations at ScubaPro, BodyGlove, USDiver, and a few others, scuba is easier now, and WE (old buggers like you and I together with the young crowd) can all take our girlfriends, wives, and children down to see Neptune's Lair! And it truly is beautiful down there!!!
/s/ RaiderKarl
NAUI OW1 '75, SSI AOW & Rescue '00, PADI DMC '01
[i raid things of value from the Ocean floor]