Using a chemical glow stick for scuba diving at night

If you dive at night, you know how easy it is to get separated from your buddy.  That's why almost all divers use chemical glow sticks on their tanks as a marker.

This is a basic video for the new diver or the experienced diver who is new to night diving   In this short video, we show you how to attach the glow stick to your gear so it won't get lost:

We have assorted colors available here at our website so you and your buddy can tell yourselves apart from other divers on the same dive site.

Thanks for reading and sharing this - and DSAO!

Scuba Diving for Lobsters

One of my favorite foods is lobster.  There are basically two types of lobsters commercially caught and served up in restaurants, fish-markets and supermarkets.

When you buy "lobster tail," you are generally getting what's known as a warm water lobster.  As you'd probably guess, these lobsters are generally caught in warmer climates.  Called "Spiny Lobsters," these are found in the waters off of California, Florida, throughout the Caribbean Sea and along the coast of South America.  Africa and the Middle East have their own spiny lobsters as well.

The tails tend to be brownish with reddish hues.  The tails often have spots as well:

Spiny lobster, ready for cooking

The most obvious thing you'll note about the spiny lobster is that it has no claws:

Spiny lobster, just caught

When you buy the whole lobster, you are generally getting a "North American Lobster," often called a "Maine Lobster:"

The North American lobster is a much redder color, and it turns bright red when cooked.  Nature did a kind thing for the color blind, by adding a pair of claws to the North American lobster, just in case you couldn't see the color.

The biggest difference between the two lobsters, from a epicurean vantage point, is that for the spiny lobster, most of the meat is in the tail, while the North American lobster has a lot of meat distributed in its claws.

So why the discussion of lobsters on a scuba diving web site?  Because after getting their basic open water experience, many divers develop underwater interests.  Here on the east coast, a common scuba diving activity is catching lobsters.  Or, as some of us sardonically say, "rescuing them from the ocean."

Lobsters tend to live in shipwrecks, hiding under wreckage, in pipes, in "caves" formed by debris and any other place where they can take refuge from predators.  Since the eastern coastline is littered with shipwrecks, it's a great place to find lobsters.

I've been diving for about 25 years, but I'm still a baby when it comes to catching lobsters.  However, let me share this link to a "how to guide" for scuba diving lobster fisherman, courtesy of Dan Berg, one of our Pinterest followers.  Thanks for following us Dan, and thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise:

http://www.aquaexplorers.com/lobster_diving.htm

The full article to Dan's Lobster Diving Guide can be found by clicking here.

A quick parting word about lobstering: the cold Atlantic coast isn't' the only place where scuba divers find lobsters.  Coming up in a future post, catching Spiny Lobsters.

Thanks for reading - DSAO!  (Dive safe and often)

How do you mount your flashlight?

If you carry your dive light in your BC pocket, you know it's only a matter of time until it disappears.  The best place for a flashlight is snapped to a D-ring on your harness or BC. We've just uploaded our first video that shows how to make a short lanyard for that flashlight, wreck reel or any other piece of equipment you take into the water with you.

Using a stainless steel snap-bolt you can make the perfect lanyard using a scrap of nylon line.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks for watching - DSAO!  (Dive safe and often)

When you see the ice, do you still slip into your dive gear?

As I sit in my warm house, looking out the window at the neighbors shoveling snow, two dive trips come to mind from my younger years.  The first was about ten years ago, on the "Dina Dee" out of Point Pleasant, NJ.  It was late December.  The air temperature was 29 degrees, the ocean in the low 40's.

As I arrived at the dive boat, the mate was there early, prepping the boat.  It had snowed the night before, and he was shoveling about 3 inches of snow off of the deck.  He greeted me:  "So, what kind of mental problems do you have that bring you out here today?"


You couldn't have blamed him, how many other people go swimming in the Atlantic in the winter?

We were vising the "Delaware," a frequently dove wreck very close to the NJ coast.  We enjoyed two very nice dives, the ocean was calm and the water clear.  Not a lot of sea life this time of year, but a wreck is always fun to visit.

Fast forward about a month.  Now it's late January.  The air temperature was in the mid twenties.  The ocean was a balmy 39 degrees.  I was on The Outlaw diveboat, from Belmar NJ, visiting a wreck called the IdaK.

Swimming along on the cold bottom, I thought I saw an antenna sticking out of a dugout hole under some wreckage. I quickly stuck my hand into the hole, hoping to grab a lobster.  I couldn't feel it though - was something pinching my fingers, or was I shoving my mittens under a piece of wreckage?  To be honest, it was so darn cold, I couldn't tell.

Because the water was so cold, I decided to do a 5 minute safety hang at 15 feet, just to give whatever nitrogen was dissolved in me a few more minutes to bleed out.  After only a minute, I was shivering.  Five minutes was pretty close to torture, but safety first, I don't want to get bent.

My safety degassing obligation met, I let go of the grapple line to surface.  Wait a second - my fingers were still holding onto the line.  I tried to move them, but they wouldn't listen to me.  I had to use my right hand to peel my left hand free of the rope.

Climbing up the ladder to the  boat was a bit challenging - my hands didn't want to bend around the ladder.  Removing my BC was difficult because my hands didn't want to listen to me when I told them to squeeze the clips.  A kind, much warmer dive buddy helped me.

This isn't a story that ends with frostbite, or any permanent damage.  But after I finally struggled out of my gear, I slipped into my parka and sat down next to the heater.  I turned to another diver and told him, "This is insane.  I'm not going in for a second dive."

And somehow this was supposed to be fun?

"M...M...MM...ee.ee    E..e...e...th..th..e...r" he muttered through chattering teeth.  As a matter of fact, none of the divers on the boat went in for that second dive.

I know there are lots of more hearty guys that don't think twice about going diving in the cold.  Since I'm now over 55, I've decided to avoid diving once the water gets below 50 degrees.  Okay, maybe 49.  Well, 48's doable.  Okay, I'll go in at 45, but only if the air temperature's warm.

Does anyone have any cold water diving stories they'd like to share?  It would be nice to know that I'm not the only one suffering from Nitrogen cravings in the winter.

Thanks for reading - DSAO!  (Dive safe and often)

Welcome to MyScubaStuff

Welcome to MyScubaStuff.

On this blog, we will be posting informative "how-to" information about diving, plus we will share links to other websites where we find interesting articles that would appeal to divers.

My first warm water dive,
Islamorada 1987

Let me share a few notes about myself.  My name is Dave.  I've been scuba diving over 27 years.  I live in the northeastern United States, so most of my diving is up here.  In a good year, I'll get into the ocean every other week between March and December, although I have to admit, as I get older I'm a little less tolerant of the cold.  Since I turned 55, I've decided that when the water temperature gets below 45F, I'll keep my butt in the boat.  After all, this is supposed to be fun.

I'm what you'd call a rec diver.  That's rec; short for recreational.  Not wreck, as in shipwreck.  I dive for the fun of it.  There's no where else where it's as quiet and calm as in the ocean.

I'm not a "macho" guy, I'm a very conservative diver.  I have a family and I want to come home to them after every dive, so I'm not above aborting a dive if I'm not feeling 100% good about it.  I do my safety stops religiously, I exercise to keep myself in shape, I watch my weight (mostly I watch it go up) and I stay hydrated when diving.  I don't buy cheap dive gear because when I'm 90 feet deep, my life depends on it.

Up here in the northeast, we have hundreds of diveable ship wrecks.  Between bad weather, bad maps, bad captains and quite a few wars, the eastern coast of the USA is littered with wrecks.  I've had the opportunity to visit wooden schooners that sank 200 years ago, cargo ships and crise ships that have only been on the bottom for 70 or 80 years, a few war ships that were sunk in WW1 and WW2, plus dozens of "artificial reefs" sunk by the government to create homes for fish and destinations for divers and fishermen.

One of the reasons I enjoy diving so much, aside from my love and appreciation of the ocean, is that I've had the honor to meet so many other great divers in my area.   From the boat captains that told their mates to keep an eye on me on my first trips as a young diver, to the "old salts" whose dive gear seems to be held together by duct-tape, I've learned many tricks and techniques that they don't teach you in dive class.  I try to share some of what I've learned with other new divers when I meet them, and I still look forward to diving with my old friends because I continue to learn something new every day.

I look forward to writing this column and hope that others who have something interesting to add will leave their comments as well.

Thanks for reading - DSAO!  (Dive safe and often)