Posted by MHK on October 10, 2001 at 09:54:17:
In Reply to: attn. Mr. Kane posted by seahunt on October 10, 2001 at 09:36:52:
The thing that I love about scootering is that it allows for a wide variety of options.. The obvious benefit is when cave diving, but as it applies to the local environment it allows us to cover as much ground as possible, it substantially reduces our RMV's, and at dive sites such as Farnsworth we can cover significantly more of the pinnacle than most. When we scooter at night, you'll really appreciate this, and combine the use of uor HID lights we generally will stay about 10' or 15' off the bootom and scan the terrain with the lights for bugs.. You'll be surprised how much area we can cover and how easily it is to spot bugs.. Last weekend we had Chris Elmore, WKPP gas diver, out here from South Carolina and he had never dove SoCal before so our intention was to show him as much as possible so we put him on scooters and didn't focus too much on bug hunting. He had never dove kelp before so we tried as best as we could to show him as much as possible. We were lucky, we saw 3 octopus, many, many ab's, scallops, bugs and the usual marine life, plus we managed to get him *caught up* in the kelp ;-).. The scooters allowed us to bring our doubles filled with a mix that we preferred, and then given that we didn't really use any air we were able to get three dives out of one set of doubles with a mix to our liking.. By the 4th dive we had planned a depth of no greater then 60' so we were OK with just topping the tanks off with a little bit of air and we still had an appropriate mix..
You'll notice most of us had the Gavin's.. I brought my long body and short body [ for Chris Elmore]. Walker and Kendall also had short bodies while Terry was diving a Mako scooter. The burn time on the short bodies is about an hour, although we charge them in between dives, while the burn time of the long bodies are approx. 3 hours.. You are correct in that they are expensive. They cost about $4,000 if you include shipping and batteries.. They are depth rated to 600' and are by in large the work horses of the WKPP efforts. Absent scooters it's unlikely that they could reach 18,000' penetrations if they needed to swim 18,000' each way..
The use of the scooters locally depends on what we are trying to accomplish.. For example when we scooter the Moody, as you may know the Moody is broken in two pieces, we are able to dive both pieces in one dive.. I often use my scooter at Farnsworth, especially if I'm trying to get any kind of depth. Dive sites such as the Isthmas, little farnsworth, 9 fathoms, black caverns are all great sites to scooter since we get to where we want to go ASAP, we use little air and it also allows us to explore should we so decide.. Obviously any type of recovery work [ ie; bodies, anchors etc. etc.] the scooters provide an invaluable tool..
In addition to the above, it actually is just plain old fun to be scootering around, being lazy and not having to kick back against currents or surge...
Later