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Diving British Columbia

Trip Report March 23/26, 2002

My second trip on the 116' Nautilus diving British Columbia confirmed it, to be the best diving I've done so far. Great friendly crew, excellent food, super comfortable accommodations and breathtaking scenery, makes the colder weather seem insignificant. Due to the colder waters, which definitely requires diving in a drysuit, and currents, British Columbia enjoys some of the most varied and richest marine life in the world.

This particular trip was named a Pseudo Tech trip by Dave Hancock, the organizer and btw, also the inventor of the Dive-Alert, primarily because of the deeper depths and longer bottom times involved. March typically enjoys the longest slack times, allowing for 2 hour bottom times, which is required with the deeper depths, due to decompression obligations.

Most of the 22 divers on the boat were Trimix certified. We had at least ten Closed Circuit, and four Dolphin Semi Closed Circuit Rebreather Divers, with the rest of the divers diving Open Circuit Doubles. Almost every make of Rebreather was represented, The Inspiration, CCR 2000, UT240, CCR 1000, KISS, Atlantis/Dolphin and the new Megaladon with Leon Scammerhorn the designer/owner diving it.

I would guess there was close to 50,000 dives of experience among us and the sharing of knowledge and experience was worth the trip alone. We did one morning and one evening dive and in between we were busy mixing gasses for our next dive. Many thanks to Mike Lever, the owner and captain of the Nautilus, for letting us bring Helium & Oxygen storage bottles on board.

We did five wall dives, no bottom, which were literally blanketed with marine life and 2 wreck dives down to 160'. Some of us planned the last wall dive to 300', which I was fortunate enough to accomplish on my doubles. I did all my other dives on my Dolphin with 20% Helium, average depth 160', with no problems. Visibility was from 30' to 60' and water temperature was 46 degrees. I was very warm in my Northern Diver Drysuit.

I've already signed up for next year's trip, March 12-16, 2003