Boracay, Here I Come

Next Wednesday, I am off to Boracay. We are staying here:

http://www.namiboracay.com/

Of course, I can't go to the beach without diving. I have been in touch with Blue Mango about doing some diving. I was attracted to their site by this page, which talks about DIR diving. I spoke to Dustin at Blue Mango, who told me that they dive to 50m using 50% and 100% for deco. However, helium can't be found on the island so I guess they use air for backgas.

I'd love to do some tech diving but I'm not doing deep air. Instead, I am sticking strictly to recreational depths. In fact, I am bringing only my single tank reg set, wetsuit and other personal items as they rent backplates and wings.

X-Scooter Rocks!

So I finally took my X-scooter out for its maiden trip this past weekend. We went to Pulau Aur for the weekend. I did 3 dives with it on Saturday and 1 on Sunday. Much of the time was spent adjusting the tow cord and getting the weighting/balancing right. The weighting/balancing is about 98% there, with my scooter still having a slight tendency to float nose up.

Using the scooter was a real blast. I was surprised at how much more maneuverable it is compared to a Gavin. Leon and I were doing loops and corkscrews all over the place. I wouldn't even dream of doing that on a Gavin. The downside is of course that it is a little squirrelly and is fatiguing to use over long distances.

On one dive, we scootered from Crocodile Rock back to the pontoon (about 8 minutes or 300-400m). On another dive, we scootered around until we found the old, sunken pontoon in about 30m of water.

Here are a couple of pics of me taken by Leon: