Cylinders Have Arrived!
Posted in equipment on December 30, 2022 by Paul Armstrong ‐ 2 min read
In another exciting step towards being operational, today a rather large pallet arrived.
After some unpacking:
As you can see, we’re committed to sidemount diving. We have plenty of cylinders for both training and rental, in both 7 and 12 litre volumes. If you’re a smaller diver, or need to have reduced weight for mobility/injury reasons, the smaller cylinders are excellent.
For the moment, they’re only air fills. Once we get our oxygen pump, the cylinders will be O2 cleaned and we’ll provide nitrox fills as well.
We’ve chosen steel cylinders as our default. We prefer steel as they’re lighter to carry and have negative buoyancy when depleted, meaning you need less lead for neutral buoyancy.
Obviously, there are some trade-offs with steel. They’re not the best for deco or stage cylinders (although the 7 liter cylinders can be quite nice) as the total mass of cylinders can make a technical dive quite negatively buoyant. However, for the moment we’re not offering technical diving. If this changes in the future (or you’re interested in renting deco or stage cylinders from us), we’ll add aluminium cylinders to our inventory.
Also in this shipment:
- High pressure hoses for connecting our Shearwater Swift air integration units to regulators.
- High pressure spigots, a commonly forgotten item when ordering high pressure hoses
- 50 kg lift bags, for training as well as recovery
- Whistles, mandatory in QLD and a generally good idea for making your presence on the surface known
- Dive reels, for wreck diving and deep SMB deployments
- A pressure gauge for testing cylinders
- Snorkel keepers, which are useful for any number of attachments
- Valve protectors, important for protecting your hand as much as the valve
- DIN caps, for protecting first stages
- Stage bottle strap kits, so the 7 litre cylinders can be used for stage or deco
- A flashing light, which I’m testing out to see how it compares with the GloToob
- Silicone grease, for keeping boltsnaps and other equipment in good health
- Wetsuit and gear hangers
