With some of the dive right members gone off to Manchester to celebrate a birthday, we felt that our birthday had come early when we turned up to Chepstow this Saturday on VR Demo day.

We had already booked ourselves into try out the new Sentinel rebreather but we also got offer to try out the new underwater video system called “Veecam”.  This is usually used by the Police and Armed Forces, with a really small camera that was mounted on my mask along with a very robust and easy to use display screen/hard drive just slipping into my BCD pocket, you could easily forget that you had it on. Back on the surface after the dive, this was easily downloaded and displayed on the lap top with surprising good results, leaving us very impressed!

Then came our turn to try out the Sentinel rebreather. With good team work together on the surface, we were quickly put into the system (with a PADI staff member clicking away with his camera – to add to his own article for PADI HQ) and talked through the basics and what to watch out for (Red LED in your visual display meant trouble :o) so with the green LED clearly in our display, it was time to hit the water.

Descending was just like you would normally do on open circuit; however I had been told that using a rebreather/ closed circuit can play havoc with your buoyancy as you can’t fine turn it with your breathing rate. So we made our way down and on to the nearest training platform, with a quick check by the instructor I was given the all clear to swim around. Admittedly my buoyancy wasn’t a good as usual but nothing that couldn’t be fine tuned and amended immediately. All in all it was a lot easier than I expected. Whilst we were down there, I got shown how to go from closed circuit to open circuit (and back again) obviously this is wasting your precious gas but a necessary skill should the system ever fail. This was a little bit fiddly to begin with but once I knew which way to turn the value, all was well :o).

This was just a quick taster into the world of rebreathers, very interesting and leaving me with a thirst for more! Thank you to everyone at VR and NDAC for arranging a great day and experience!