After months of silence here we are again. God knows it was not laziness that kept me from blogging but having two super busy dive shops in high season and designing the latest and greatest in dive gear left me with zero free time.
But no complains the last year ended and the new year started fantastic for PROTEC and we had the pleasure of teaching and guiding some amazing people. In fact we must have broken some sort of record when we had 9 students in a cave course simultaneously with 3 Instructor candidates assisting. In any case the mornings were crazy with people every where so having a 250m2 dive shop really paid off. In the same time we had lots of divers just using our shop as a base camp for their own diving and so we were filling tanks daily from 3 pm till 1 am. We also received tons of great feedback because we do NOT charge extra for Nitrox 32% and divers that use our facility can have their own lockable lockers with independent charging station.
We were also more than happy about all the CCR divers that came to visit and they were very happy about their own dedicated room in our dives hop with a huge table for assembling and disassembling the units as well as an own storage and dry out place for loops and counter lungs. It was quite impressive to see up to 11 units there in the morning ranging from JJ, and ReVo to Meg, Kiss and Hammerhead.
One of the highlights was the big BBQ we had up on our brand new rooftop Terrace where we were more than 30 people from all over the world. Very special moments with very special people, thanks to you all for making this such a great place to work at.
Finally I have yet another great news, our new Sidemount System is finally done and ready for shipping.
I started designing sidemount equipment with the special attention on using it with drysuit as well as wetsuit and an intelligent weight system in 2009. I was offered this great opportunity by Eques a polish company who started right away to produce prototypes based on my ideas. Being a Sidemount Diver since 2005 I had the chance to have a look around and try out different things and simply wanted to take all the good things and great I ideas I have seen and put it in one simple design.
Things started off good but fast turned very ugly. Communication with Eques was bad due to a huge language barrier and as this project seemed to be very low on their agenda waiting for answers to my emails for weeks was not something unusual. This became more and more frustrating as I had so many people interested but simply had no support or information from Eques as to what was going on or when they can ship and so forth. Like this months and finally a year past without anything happening. Besides that there were many things I wanted to change on the original design but never received answers or was simply ignored even after sending several emails.
Finally when I went to Europe to teach some courses there and use the Eques sidemount system they first did not manage to send me the equipment to Mexico although it was pre ordered and paid for but then when they shipped it to Austria only days before I had to leave the order was not only incomplete as there was one unit missing but also not compatible with my hardware as they had cut an opening too big. After complaining and asking for a fast solution to the problem they did not even return my phone calls.
Long story short (and believe me the story is still much longer) but basically I was done with Eques and with creating Equipment for good.
But as it goes sometimes in life, shortly after I was put in touch with the owner of X-Deep another polish company which specialises in technical diving equipment. Together we were able to take my experience from the Eques system and his expertise in manufacturing and design a truly flexible system.
Of course there were some bumps in the road as Eques had patented all my ideas forcing us to redesign even the bits and pieces I liked to avoid a law suit. But nonetheless using the same ideas but with more experience and a better partner made it possible in pretty short time to absolutely revolutionise my first design.
We have streamlined trim weight pockets that enable the diver to be perfectly trimmed in any suit from wet to dry packing up to 16kg of weight easily. All parts of the webbing are 100% exchangeable allowing the diver to use anything from the thickest to the softest webbing. All parts are independent meaning changing one length will not effect the others which makes switching between divers or suits as easy as cooking water. The wing is detachable U/W making even a transition to No-mount Diving a thing of seconds. It is ergonomically designed providing enough lift for several aluminium tanks while still being small and streamlined to pass even the smallest restrictions. The Dump valve is in the centre reachable with both hands which makes it ideal for scootering but even for just swimming allows the diver to dump gas without changing his body orientation under water. The shape of the wing directs the lift to the lower end of the diver where it is needed to compensate for having the tanks much lower on the body thus causing heavy legs for most wetsuit divers. This fact and the special designed trim weight pockets allow the diver to hover motionless no matter what body composition the diver possesses nor what exposure protection (s)he uses.
We have the first big shipment on the way with many units pre sold and so we are happy and looking forward to facilitate the transition from backmount to sidemount for many more divers this year.