FOR SALE - Zeagle Ranger BCD

I am putting my Zeagle Ranger BCD up for sale. This is a top-of-the-line rear-floation system with 1050 denier Ballistic nylon construction and 44 lbs of lift.

It's a size SM with all of the accessories coming with the standard Ranger (including integrated weight pouches and trim pockets). Also included is the soft lumbar support that comes with the Ranger Limited edition.

This BCD has had 71 dives on it, but it is in excellent (like new) condition. I don't have any issues with this BCD, except that it is too large for me (in fit and in lift). I would have happily dove with it for another 100 dives (with the BCD none the worse for wear), but I found a BCD that better fits my frame, and lift requirements.

If you need an excellent, durable, cold-water BCD, this is it. This is a BCD geared towards advanced divers and teaching professionals. Zeagle is known for outfitting BCDs for military dive units, and public safety divers. If you are a burgeoning Tech diver, this BCD can be also rigged for doubles.

Here are the standard features that come with this BCD:

• 44-LB lift capacity Ballistic bladder (standard, other capacities available as options)
• 30-lb capacity Ripcord® weight system
• 20-LB capacity rear trim weight system
• PFS Modular Sizing
• Heavily reinforced 1050 denier Ballistic nylon construction
• 11" grommets for mounting twin cylinders

See also this link for Zeagle's official product information.

Standard price for Zeagle Ranger BCD (on Leisurepro.com):
$615.20
My price: $350.00

To indicate your interest, please e-mail me.

Doozy of a Day - Drysuit Certification Dives

I must really love diving. Inspite of it being quite a doozy of a day (boat issues, equipment issues, bad conditions), I had a good time.

First off, we had boat issues. Every time we go out on the water with instructor Kevin, we have problem after problem on the zodiac. This particular day:

• One of two engines wasn't working, so we barely crawled over the water at 7 mph.
• The bow of the boat folded backwards when hit headon by a medium sized wave. Later, we learned that the keel wasn't thoroughly inflated, which explained the lack of ridigity.
• The interior of the boat was a mess with the anchor line entangled with the dive equipment.
• Kevin's GPS and depth gage were precariously balanced and threatened to fall into the leaky boat bottom.
• Kevin's depth gage also ran out of batteries...

Secondly, I had equipment issues. To complete my drysuit certification, I had to don the BCD unit in the water. First of all, I was wearing a drysuit (limitations in flexibility). Layer upon that the pitching waves of the seas. Compound that with my brand new, expensive (and heavy!) weightbelt sliding off my hips, and you have a near panic situation. I am so glad I had to practice the weightbelt ditch and replace exercise in the pool for my Divemaster training because the operation was second nature. Thanks Dan!

To complicate matters, Kevin was teaching several different classes all in the same weekend, and even on the same day. One of the other divers on the boat was completing his AOW Deep Dive. He was wearing a brand new Mares drysuit and couldn't figure out how to use the drysuit inflator and had to sit out the first dive, growing ever more nauseaus on the pitching waves.

Dive #1: Sandflats off of Lover's Point (Cumulative #155)
Max Depth: 109 feet
Time: 0:26 minutes
Buddies: Mark, Kevin D.
Temperature: Oceanic Computer 43 deg. F (49 deg. F)
Visibility: 20-30 feet
Weight: 24 lbs with an HP steel 80 low slung

Observations: This dive is what makes me convinced that I must really love diving. There was nothing to see but sand and clumps of sea stars (I saw an interesting starfish burrowing into the sand). But I was blissfully hovering, frog kicking 3-4 feet above the bottom, revelling in being warm and not kicking up the fine sand.

Also, I noticed Kevin as he geared up on the surface. He looks very comfortable in the water and was steadfast despite the imperfect conditions. He clearly shows the mark of a very experienced and skilled diver.

Dive #2: End of Breakwater (Cumulative #156)
Max Depth: 47 feet
Time: 0:33 minutes
Buddies: Mark, Kevin D.
Temperature: Oceanic Computer 44 deg. F (50 deg. F)
Visibility: 10-15 feet

Observations: Noone felt comfortable to venture far from shore with our myriad of boat problems and with the white capped waves growing in the distance. So we opted to anchor at the end of the Breakwater to see if any sea lions would dive bomb us there (there's a small colony of sea lions that live here). Small shrimp made the water cloudy. I saw a couple of kelp greenlings. The usual nudibranchs, including one that looked like a Aeolidia Papillosa. Mark saw a sea lion posing above a rock, checking him out. I was concerned about Mark's one bare hand, and whether his hand might be freezing, so I decided to end the dive early. I saw a sea lion circling us at our safety stop before it gyrated away into the haze.

Afterthoughts:
This day of diving was the perfect example of trying to accomplish too many things at once. To Kevin's credit, he treated each problem with utmost calm, which is a fine quality for the technical diver that he is. But at the same time, he had too many classes and gear problems to handle, and it all could have easily gone awry.

Drysuit Adventure at Breakwater

Goal of the Dive:
My goal for this dive was to get acquainted with drysuit diving in the ocean before I head down to Catalina next week. Unfortunately, we have not yet completed our ocean drysuit dives with our instructor because he has been on a business trip. So my goal for this dive was to familiarize myself with drysuit diving without any instruction.

We chose the Breakwater as our dive spot, because we know Breakwater well, and because it is shallow enough so that an uncontrolled ascent due to drysuit diving would not be as dangerous. As usual, we dove along the wall.

Details of the Dive:
Dive #: 149
Dive Buddy: Mark
Exposure Suit: Drysuit, Bare Hi-Loft undergarment, with fleece undershirt and yoga pants
Weight: 20lbs, all in weight integrated pockets
Max Depth: 44 feet
Visibility: 20 feet
Temperature: Oceanic 48 deg. F
Time: 50 minutes
Tank: High Pressure Steel 80 cu. ft (PST)

Moon Jelly

Sealife:

Everytime I go to the Breakwater, I see a different story unfolding. This time, there were numerous dead or dying moon jellies in the water, often being consumed by sea stars. This could mean that we are in the midst of the moon jelly breeding season. It is believed that the moon jelly dies after reproducing.

While looking closely at a cabezon, we were briefly inspected by a couple of juvenile sea lions, curious to see what we were looking at.

Later, a harbor seal (similar to the one pictured above) glided by. These are some of my favorite species, because they are so incredibly cute, and fat. This one was quite large, probably about as long as me, but 5 times as big around, of course.

Mina's Observations of Drysuit Diving:
(1) I exerted way too much energy preventing my feet from floating up. I am extremely reluctant to wear ankle weights due to the extra effort this gives to kicking, but this may be my only resort, other than getting an expensive DUI weight harness. Why hasn't someone figured out a better solution for this? Floaty feet seems to afflict everyone moving from wetsuit to drysuit.
(2) I am slightly underweighted at 20 lbs. Adding one pounders on each foot may do it. I will be 8 pounds heavier than what I am used to diving with a wetsuit.
(3) I was toasty warm. Okay, maybe toasty is exaggerating. I did not register temperature either cold or warm even after almost an hour underwater. The temperature at Breakwater is usually 54 deg. F. This means when I do more exposed boat dives at 50 deg. F, I should feel fairly comfortable!
(4) Feeling an urge to pee was not an issue.

Mark's Observations of Drysuit Diving:
Mark had a much less positive experience with his first open water drysuit dive:
(1) He had a severe leak in his wrist seal and felt wetness all the way down to his knees.
(2) He was also underweighted, and his integrated weight pouch was barely hanging on to his BCD by a single rivet.
(3) He was slightly cold in his drysuit. This was most likely due to the fact that his drysuit was leaking, and because he was shrinkwrapped in his suit.

With Mark's equipment issues, we thought it wise not to continue with a second dive.

Drysuit in the pool

I just wanted to write down a few first impressions of what it's like to dive with a drysuit for the first time in a pool. Mark and I joined a Blue Water Aquatics class a couple of nights ago. Putting on my DUI CLXse (see my Nov. 3rd post) drysuit was a lot easier this time around. Randy, the Blue Water Aquatics store owner, quickly criticized the half-assed cuts that I made on the latex seals on both mine and Mark's suits, and said it was going to be an expensive mistake. Typical Randy. I don't know if he's a little miffed we didn't buy the suits from his store or not. There is still a tiny bit of room on the seals to cut some more, so I am not worried. (Nicks on a latex seal are stress risers and will quickly shorten the life our one's seal.)

I wore a total of 18 lbs (including a set of 1 lb ankle weights) coupled with a 47 cu. foot tank. I was a little underweighted because, I had to open my exhaust all the way to keep a little negatively buoyant. I'm going to try the 18-20 lbs to the ocean because the added weight of the high-pressure steel 80 tanks that I own should compensate for the additional buoyancy of the sea water.

I think Mark had the most dramatic experiences drysuit diving in the pool. He has not yet read the drysuit course manual, despite the fact that we are supposed to go to the ocean tomorrow. He was pretty surprised about the suit squeeze at your feet when your feet are lower than your chest, and by the effort of maintaining the position of the air bubble in the drysuit. He was also surprised by being instructed to not use the BCD to maintain neutral buoyancy underwater. He asked me if this was what the PADI manual instructed, and I was a little flustered to answer him in the affirmative, because he really should have read the manual.

My own impression is that drysuit diving doesn't feel much more removed from the water than wet suit diving. Also, I didn't feel like I had good trim at all. The air bubble wanted to float my feet up, despite the ankle weights. I found myself naturally frog kicking instead of flutter kicking because frog kicking naturally bends my legs, restricting the flow of air into my legs, and also the trajectory is slightly head up, keeping the air bubble in the torso area instead of the legs. I am looking for solutions for maintaining good trim, other than putting heavier ankle weights on because I don't think I want to convert to frog kicking permanently. Theoretically, frog kicking would mean converting to blade fins from my Apollo split fins, which is undesirable (split fins are so efficient in the water when flutter kicking).

I agree with Mark when saying that drysuit diving forces one to pay more attention to trim in the water than wetsuit diving, which isn't such a big deal once you gain experience, but for now is added mental tasking that wouldn't exist as much with wetsuit diving. Drysuit diving forces you to dive like the sluggish, perfectly horizontal cave diver, rather than the acrobatic wetsuited tropical diver. Not to knock cave divers or tech divers, who are beautiful underwater, but I would rather be able to do sea lion acrobatics if I wanted to.

Any thoughts, suggestions from those of you who remember wetsuit diving?

Also, my BARE thinsulate undergarment kept me toasty warm in the pool, which does NOT bode well for the ocean. I expected to be overheated in the 80 degree pool. I will probably wear the extra high performance fleece that Divetank threw into the package underneath the Thinsulate undergarment. Funny, Richard at Divetank swore to me that the BARE Thinsulate Hi-Loft undergarment was what they wore up in British Columbia. Dammit, I should have gotten the BARE Super Hi-Loft, which wasn't available at the time.

Once done with the pool dives, our first time unzipping our drysuits at the surface was pretty dramatic. Mark and I both let out audible exclamations as we felt the onrush of air on our bodies. We both felt like we had just come out of vacuum sealing. Upon unzipping, we both realized we had slight leaks up to our elbows. We were told that we needed to push back our wrist seals back further. Even more reason to get DUI drygloves once we rip our seals due to my poor craftmanship!

Drysuit Ordered!

After a year of deprivation, I'm finally getting my drysuit. I promised myself I wasn't going to get one until I had achieved certain things at work, and got rewarded for doing it. Well, I finished what I set out to achieve, but did NOT get rewarded for it. Instead, I saw other people around me get rewarded for accomplishing less.

My friend told me, why not get the drysuit, because in your heart you know you should have been rewarded. I was feeling pretty beat down lately, culminating in an outburst last week that was more uncontrolled and more crazy than I've had in many years. I decided something had to change. I decided I had been depriving myself too much. This whole year, I had set things aside in anticipation of my reward. The reward never happened.

Anyways, on Friday I talked to Richard at DiveTank. He quoted me a CLXse Select for $1400, including undergarment, rockboots, hood, and gloves. This is an excellent deal not beaten by any local store due to the volume that goes through DiveTank nationwide.

To be precise, however, the CLXse Select is NOT a fully customized suit, but a suit selected from 16 women's sizes. But, they can shorten the legs on these suits easily without extra cost, which is one of my main concerns regarding ordering a stock size. I forwarded them my measurements to see which Women's size is best suited for me, so we'll see what they say on Monday.

Picking a DrySuit

DUI TLSse
-nylon trilaminate material
-rear entry

Why buy a drysuit? For me, the answer has been long in coming. I've been diving in my 7 mm wetsuit in Northern California for 3 years and have stubbornly resisted getting one. First of all, drysuits are prohibitively expensive, running from $1500-2500. They are also baggy and create a lot of drag in the water. Feeling at one with the water is very important to me, and being encased in a drysuit would only separate me further from the water.

Why have I changed my mind? We were starting to do deeper and colder dives. I was tired of ending each dive shivering uncontrollably and near hypothermic. With a drysuit, if I wasn't exactly warm underwater, I at least could quickly warm up on the surface by staying dry. Also, pulling on or pulling off a tight wetsuit especially a 7 mm one is not a fun experience. A drysuit, would be far less strain to don, then a wetsuit. Finally, a nice drysuit seems to be something every long-term self-respecting diver should own.

After almost a year of on-and-off research, I've narrowed down my top choices:
-DUI (Diving Unlimited International), TLSse (see picture above)
-DUI CLXse
-Diving Concepts Pinnacle
-Pinnacle Evolution

DUI CLXse

-Cordura Blend exterior

-Rear entry

DUI TLSse

Walk up and down the Breakwater, and you will see the DUI TLSse (or TLS350) on almost every diver walking by. It costs about $1498 for the fully customized version, as advertised on the DUI website. In summary, this is a drysuit composed of a nylon-rubber-nylon trilaminate material. Trilaminate material, is just a three layer material that was invented for the military in defense against chemical and germ warfare. Usually rubber is the middle layer, providing a waterproof barrier. Because trilaminate material doesn't stretch, these types of drysuits tend to be baggy. The TLSse is less baggy than other trilaminate drysuits offered by DUI because it is a rear-entry (back zipper) drysuit, rather than self-donning (diagonal front zipper). The reason for why rear-entry drysuits are less baggy escapes me.

DUI CLXse

The DUI CLXse is the more hardy version of the TLSse. Like the TLSse, it is a trilaminate drysuit, except instead of having a nylon exterior, it uses a Cordura blend. It is slightly more expensive, running at $1798. (See below.) The Cordura blend makes this drysuit much more abrasion resistant than the TLSse, which is important if you're diving in rougher conditions, or just plain careless with their gear, as I am.

Diving Concepts Pinnacle

The Diving Concepts Pinnacle has cornered the market with the most experienced divers in the Monterey, CA. Instead of trilaminate material, it is composed of a single layer of compressed neoprene. This drysuit is perhaps the most durable of the bunch, and also the most streamlined. Being slightly stretchy, you can get away with using less fabric on this type of suit. The Diving Concepts stock sizes are cheaper than the cost of DUI stock suits. However, the customized Diving Concepts suits are much more expensive than the DUI customized suits, running at around $2000+.

Diving Concepts Pinnacle

Pinnacle Evolution

The Pinnacle Evolution was a front-runner because one of my local dive shops, Blue Water Aquatics, had a good offer on the Pinnacle Evolution. This drysuit also uses the durable Cordura blend trilaminate material. For $1800, the local dive shop was offering the suit at an attractive price, and was giving me the opportunity of patronizing a neighborhood small business that I wanted to support.

Pinnacle Evolution

-Cordura blend exterior

Final Choice - DUI CLXse

My final choice is the DUI CLXse, and it was based on the convergence of price, streamlinedness, durability, customizability, and warranty agreement.

People on Scubaboard rave about the prices for DUI suits offered by Divetank. I called, and found out that they were offering the CLXse, fully customized for fit and color, for $1400. This price also includes the undergarment, a drysuit hood, boots, and gloves. This price was truly unbeatable, by local dive shops and other internet sites.

Streamlinedness was also important to me. The drysuit had to be as conforming as possible in order for me to move easily through the water. Short of the Diving Concepts suit, this suit was as streamlined as any.

Knowing how much abuse I would inflict upon my gear, the durability of the drysuit was paramount. The CLXse was many times more abrasion resistant than the TLSse I was considering. Cordura blend is used on high end sporting equipment and I know first hand how durable this material can be.

Most important was the customization of the drysuit. All customized DUI drysuits are designed around 20 or so body measurements. Neither the Pinnacle, nor the Diving Concepts drysuits have near the sophistication around fit as DUI. Having looked at DUI, Diving Concepts, and Pinnacle's stock size measurements, I realized I would never fit into a stock size. Being Asian, I have wider calves, and shorter legs than most American women. Customization was my only option. At $1400, Divetank was offering an unbeatable deal around the fully customized CLXse suit.

There were various other factors that contributed to my final decision. The sales service around the Diving Concepts drysuits was non-existent. After several e-mails and phone calls, I was told to look up a local dive shop. In contrast, DUI is very well established with accommodating customer service. DUI's 7 year warranty far outlasted any other warranty offered by any other company. Also DUI, I was told, manufactures their drysuits with more care than other brands. The gluing on the interior of their trilaminate drysuits is hand done. The Pinnacle Evolution, by contrast uses machine gluing.