The Rebreather Decision

I have for some time been interested in the concept of closed circuit rebreathers. It started off as a kind of geek-out intellectual fascination. They’re really quite simple in principal (you breath through a loop rather than exhaling spent gas into the water, oxygen is injected to replace the oxygen you use and a chemical absorbant removes the respired CO2 from the gas) but as with some of the more challenging aspects of scuba diving, there ends up being a lot more to it than that. Recently, however, I realised that it was time to jump for real. I hope I’m making the right decision…

What it comes down to is that regular open circuit scuba gear (we tend to call it OC) is remarkably simple, well understood and pretty safe when it comes down to it. Rebreathers are expensive, complicated, introduce the same complex theory required of deep (technical) diving (and you need to literally breath that theory) with the ultimate result that they’re not very safe. A shedload of people have died on rebreathers. Plenty of them were muppets but lots of them knew what they were doing too. The most popular make in the world are refered to as the YBOD – yellow box of death. It’d be funny, if it wasn’t often true.

As far as benefits, there’s a lack of bubbles (good for photography etc), nice warm/humid breathing gas, extremely long bottom times (up to four hours sort of thing) and the ability to breath expensive mixes of gasses like trimix (has helium in it and enables you to dive 50-60 meters and beyond)  far more efficiently, and therefore cheaply, than open circuit. Even the regular boat dives that we like to do, diving with a good mix of nitrox (enriched oxygen air essentially) is often not practical because they can’t fill nitrox at the dive charter outfit near the pier. That means we dive near 40 meters on air, and that is not very good at all. It means poor bottom times before you run into decompression obligations and you suffer from fatique due to the nitrogen loading. A deep dive to 40 meters can really bugger up what you can do for the rest of the day too.

Something I keep asking myself, however, is how much of this is that well known male pursuit of feeble justification? That’s a good question and I’m not sure I know the answer. What I do know is that I’m as excite about this as anything else I’ve ever done so if we stick within the realms of acceptable safety – the only thing we have to lose is money. Lots of it… but it’s only money, that’s what it’s for.

All this is just in the nick of time because I’m at a cross roads where my next training is OC technical diving. I need to buy a load more gear for this, twin-set tanks, regulators wing, harness, stage bottles, HID torch and so on. Thousands of dollars of gear just to be able to do the training. My dive buddy and I were under the impression this was desirable in order to maybe,  just maybe, move onto rebreathers in 2010 after loads more exhaustive research and talking to people in the know and bag loads of technical diving training and experience. After all, neither of us is in a hurry to die. The big surprise to me has been in the last couple of days I’ve spoken to some experts who’ve disagreed with this approach. The timing is impecable too because it seems that rebreathers in general are on the cusp of the greatest shake up in their history.

The Open Revolution Apocalypse MK IV Sport mCCR Rebreather

It’s been pointed out to me, by ‘Rebreather Baz’  Australia’s foremost trainer, servicer, and all-round rebreather expert, that essentially we don’t need to do that OC training and that in fact it would be a waste of money. Baz reckons we should be spending our money on CCR specific training (which he happens to do, to be fair) and of course saving that money for CCR equipment. That was a bit of an eye opener. In another development I heard of and subsequently began researching a brand new rebreather made in Scotland called the Apocalypse Type IV Sports mCCR. This is a pretty stunning development. It ticks so many feature boxes that I wouldn’t have expected to be able to tick while managing to be half the cost of other rebreathers. Some of those features include CO2 monitoring, unbelievably low weight, built-in automatic bail-out (what happens when your rebreather packs up), insanely low work-of-breathing (it’s harder to suck/blow air in rebreathers than OC and this is a big deal) and more besides.

The catch is it’s only just in production but on the other hand these guys are active in the commercial rebreather area and have performed demonstrably more testing of the Apocalypse than any other rebreather on the market. I’ve been up to my eyeballs in what they’ve done and it’s impressive but no matter how technical I am, no matter how good at research I think I am – I haven’t seen one, and neither has anyone else.  Still, it appears to me that they’ve done a lot of this by genuine objective research rather than the much more usual approach of ripping off some previous unit which is what is seen a lot in the world of rebreathers. Not that this kind of evolution of critical life-saving equipment is a bad thing but I respect someone coming in looking at the issue from the ground up. Particularly if they’re good at it.

Naturally these upstarts are ruffling some feathers but having waded through just some of the thousands of posts about the subject on Rebreather World, and knowing first hand that there’s several people in my state who have placed orders sight-unseen, and a lot more worldwide to do the same, it’s clear there’s something going on here. This is an important product and an important company. Even if it turns out to be flawed, everyone is going to be asking why can’t rebreathers cost this much, why can’t they have CO2, why can’t they contain all your bailout gas on your back and not weigh 50kg?

It’s more than that though. The idea here is an affordable and safe rebreather for recreational diving. Something closer to the mass world of OC sports diving than the murky, opinionated and cultish world of technical diving. It’s brave, because this stuff is still dangerous and the companies involved have to put vast effort into their safety and training programs (you can’t just buy and dive) just to be able to defend themselves when people inevitably die. The guys behind Open Revolution rebreathers seem to be approaching it in an industrial-scientific way which is going to involve a lot of re-writing some of the rules and then spending vast amounts of effort patiently explaining your approach to everyone else.

What does this mean for me? Well, it means I’ve vetoed the idea of buying loads of technical gear. I’m going to continue to immerse myself in research, talk to the traditional rebreather community and wait until there’s Apoc units in the wild being dived but I now think there’s a reasonable possibility that I’ll have an Apoc on my back in 2009.  There’s just no point messing about with OC any more, at least as far as pursuing technical. I’ve got the gear and experience to do most recreational diving in most conditions on OC.

If I want more the path is CCR and the safety features in the Open Revolution gear, at least when it’s all working as advertised, are such that I can see taking the plunge happening a lot sooner than I believed just a few days ago. The trick, as ever, will be to maintain a level head – continue with the research and temper the excitement with superior judgement.

P.S. Amusingly my dive shop owner, knowing full well our interest in CCR, scratched his chin thoughtfully before declaring; “You know, of course, that for rebreather divers your account is strictly cash on the barrel?”