The last forum, Rebreather Forum 2.0, which I organized with rebreather builder Tracy Robinette, was held 16 years earlier in 1996, at a time when rebreathers were just being introduced to the sport diving market.

In his opening remarks, PADI CEO, Drew Richardson, proposed that the number one goal of RF3 was contributing to rebreather diving safety and reducing incidents.

Not only free divers

One of these concerns is a widely misunderstood phenomenon most frequently referred to as shallow water or hypoxic blackout, something that hitherto has typically been a problem encountered mainly by free divers.

 

The fact is that in the advent of a new wave of recreational rebreather divers and the industry trend of making rebreather diving more available, many manufacturers are envisioning their own consumer rebreathers in the short and mid-term. At the same time, several recreational diving instructors wait for the “approved” units to come out while others are “taking the plunge” on units like the Poseidon MKIV.

The ship’s design reflects how life at sea existed in a particular era, and personal effects that went down with them signs a personal signature to those that walked and worked the decks. Even vessels placed intentionally on the bottom as man-made reefs, often have glorious histories contained within their hulls that can be felt by the astute diver during a visit.

Spyrou and Verdier had been discussing diving the HMS Victoria since the summer of 2007. The impressive wreck is quite unusual in the sense that it stands up vertically rising up from 140m to 77m with her bow deeply embedded in the thick layer of sediment. Spyrou contacted ambassadors and officials from Cyprus and Lebanon to obtain all the necessary permissions. Soon he came in touch with Christian Francis, owner of Lebanon Divers who first located the wreck.

So what makes this area one of the best technical diving hotspots in the world? I personally am partial to our deep 300-foot walls adorned with ancient sponges and populated by immense lingcod and healthy schools of rockfish. But my real passion lies in the opportunity to explore such a selection of very different deep wrecks, few have seen. Many of these wrecks often attract technical divers from around the world for exploration, research, or just the challenge of facing our temperate environment.

The greatest majority of the readers of this magazine will have learned to dive with a regulator originating from the Aqualung, which the renowned Jacques Cousteau and Emile Gagnan invented in 1940. The regulator was the first commercial, generally available dive-system, and this promoted the later great expansion of sports diving everywhere. A

Who is Richard Pyle really? A biologist or a rebreather diver?

Excellent question, many people have asked me that. I am definitely a biologist. My whole life I have been interested in fishes, and I don’t know why but it always has been that way. I’ve had an aquarium since I was a little kid, so fishes have always come first. Scuba diving was a tool to get access to fishes.

Until recently, it was only open circuit scuba divers and a handful of semi-closed circuit rebreather divers who could apply these good principles to their equipment configuration and dive procedures. In this context Closed-Circuit Rebreather divers have been the black sheep of the family, as their units were dangerous and their procedures dodgy.

X-RAY MAG: You’re a structural engineer by training. Are you driven by innovation, looking for applications or projects for your inventions – or do you find solutions for specific projects?

Bill Stone:It was always the latter. It was the Pena Colorado expedition in 1984 that forced us to develop closed cycles systems because what we wanted to do was either going back to the Pena Colorado system or St. Augustine to continue.