What the Future Holds

Been a while since I've posted, but not because I haven't been diving. During May I took a planned-at-the-last-minute trip to St. Croix for a week and had some fantastic shore dives at Cane Bay and the Frederiksted pier.

In July, I will be going first to south Florida to visit Kathleen and Gianni, our wonderful friends in Ft Lauterdale. We'll tour around some of the Florida Keys and maybe do some diving there as well as hang out at their beautiful villa in Plantation.

On July 6th I hop on a plane from Florida to Cozumel for a 6-day cave diving trip with Brad Reynolds. I've mentioned Brad before in this blog, I think, as a fellow underwater photographer with whom I've dove with several times in Aerolito de Paraiso. This will be my first time ever in Cozumel during the sweltering hot summer months. Though I'm not looking forward to the heat, I'm thinking ahead to exploring more of Aerolito.

Cave Diving seems to be a constant drain on my budget. True, diving with Brad in Cozumel costs next to nothing compared to most forms of diving, especially cave diving. But I keep upgrading my gear and to get the good stuff you gotta pay the bucks.

For this trip, I now have a *new* dive computer, the just released Suunto HelO2. With great thank-yous to my favourite east Caribbean Dive Shop Dive Experience of St. Croix, I now have this new top-of-the-line technical diving computer. Its main features include:

• Wireless tank pressure transmitter (one less hose to carry!)
  
• Deco and No-deco dive tables built in
  
• Up to 8 gas mixes, trimix or nitrox
  
• Ability to switch gas mix during the dive
  

It's overkill for most of the diving I will be doing, but next time I go on one of Connie LoRe's trips (more on that later) I'll be ready for the stage dives she leads.
I hope we get to visit Blue Abyss again.

After owning a Suunto Cobra dive computer for eight years and a Vyper for ten, I found the HelO2 to be somewhat confusing. It wasn't intuitive at all in how the menus are organized, at least not if you're expecting it to be like a Cobra. It took several consults with the instruction manual before I had gas mixes, time/date, PO2 setting, and even my personal dive profile adjustment set how I wanted it.

One nice feature on the HelO2 is the new settings for the personal profile adjustment. The Cobra and Vyper have P0, P1 and P2 settings, with P0 being the least conservative. However even on P0, the Suunto computers tend to be among the most conservative in the dive industry. That's good if you want to play it safe all the time, but not so good if you've got excellent air consumption and your computer won't give you the bottom time to match.

The HelO2 adds two new settings: P-1 and P-2. They are, as you'd guess, less conservative settings. The manual describes them as for "Ideal conditions, excellent physical fitness, highly experienced with a lot of dives in the near past." This, I like very much. To give you an idea on the difference: at a 60 foot profile you get 50 minutes on a P0 setting. P-1 gives you 54 minutes, and P-2 gives you 58 minutes. That's not a whole helluva lot but it is extra time to spend underwater. I'll take it.