August 4th, 2010 was a great day for another hookah test dive well beyond typical snorkeling depths.
I started the day with a bike ride with an old friend at 5am, met with my brother at Brownie’s Southport dive shop at 7:45, loaded the boat next door at Sundance Marine at 9am, and headed out to the Port Everglades inlet around 9:30.
Each week we intend to further validate the unprecedented efficiency and performance of the “VS” Variable Speed Surface Supplied Dive system by documenting the systems use in a wide range of scenarios/conditions. Our objective this week was to dive into deeper SCUBA territory. While this depth range is not the primary target for “hookah / hooka / SSA”, it is one of many criteria that does easily demonstrate the quantum leap Brownie’s has achieved in performance of battery-powered hookah dive systems.
Several local storms made the sea conditions a bit off of perfect, but still in the “fun” range. Our plan was to head directly to the famous wreck of the Mercedes and the third reef of Fort Lauderdale to test the refined controller programing of our patent-pending variable speed dive system. Thanks to Garmin and Furuno, we quickly located the dive site and deployed the anchor in 107-feet just seaward of the wreck and reef. The Garmin navigation system indicated that we were 295-feet from the wreck and provided a course heading to transfer to our wrist mounted dive compass. After less than ten-minutes, the VS Third Lung floating battery powered hookah dive system was deployed with a single 150-foot hookah hose and two regulators. We deployed a tag line from the boat to attach the Halcyon HDV-16 dive scooter and video camera. Mikkel geared up in Halcyon and SCUBAPRO scuba gear that included a DIR long-hose on his primary regulator. I wore a full Halcyon stainless back plate and harness with Brownie’s Egress mini SCUBA bailout system and low-pressure inflator hose.
The sea-current appeared moderate at the surface, upon entry; we discovered it was extremely difficult to swim against, even at depth. Mikkel had the advantage of the powerful HDV, while I wanted to complete the test dive in normal swim mode using my xl SCUBAPRO Jet fins with Halcyon spring heel straps; I did cheat a bit on the way down and grabbed a hand on the shroud of the HDV. We swam/motored into the current and kept the boat in sight for the entire descent to a level out depth of 80-feet just above the reef line. We performed a safety check and then elected the option discussed with the boat crew and went for a drift dive abandoning the course heading to the wreck.
The ocean current heading was nearly perfect and required minimal effort to keep aligned above the outer edge of the 3rd reef. After 5-minutes of 80-90 feet I descended to the sand in the 95-102 foot range and continued to swim moderately using the current as the main propulsion. most of the fin energy was directed to staying level and flying in, around and over the various bottom features. this area is very feature rich in terms of profile, but seems to grow more dead looking each year. A very significant temperature drop literally shocked us at this depth; we could visibly see the thermocline and my gauge reading started to plummet from 89-degrees above 80-feet to what felt like something in the 60’s.
I alternated between the two regulators multiple times at the max depth area of 95-102 feet. one of the regulators was our standard Third Lung hookah regulator incorporating Brownie’s unique center-bottom mount hose routing, the 2nd regulator was a modified SCUBAPRO G250 with a lighter valve-spring and adjustment set-point. The perceived work of breathing was identical between the 2 regulators at multiple depths including the maximum of 102-feet. The ergonomic comfort of the Third Lung regulator was clearly better due to inherent (bottom-up vs side-entry) hose routing.
At 15-minutes bottom time, we began a gradual ascent to 20-feet for a 5-minute safety stop. upon surfacing we noticed our boat heading toward us in the distance and drift-fishing boat only 100-meters away, rocking and rolling from the sea state; the Third Lung with super low center of gravity in the “boat tube” remained perfectly stable. While holding onto the Brownie, I took a few minutes to capture some video at the surface with our new super-compact HD-1080 video camera in 300-foot housing; an edit of the surface and the dive footage should be posted soon by Mikkel.
The Garmin navigation system indicated that we surfaced 1/2 mile north of the Mercedes wreck; drift dives are awesome; thanks to a great boat crew. Back at the factory, our electrical engineer Julius measured the battery condition and concluded that we had consumed 35% of the available energy in each of the Odyssey batteries after a total of 20-minutes bottom time and just over 5-minutes free flow time during set-up/deployment of the hookah. Stay tuned as we report on more hookah and long-range SCUBA dives between Bimini, Fort Lauderdale and the Florida Keyes and begin integrating these efforts with GUE Project Baseline.
Hookah Diving to 102 feet on battery power
what can i use directions and recipes plz
u guys might know where i could find this hookah i saw? i wanna get it for my older sister for christmas.