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The Cave – The Movie by: by Jakub Rehacek      
Wes Skiles and his producer Jill Heinerth were assembling a team of cave divers to work as an underwater film unit for a major Hollywood feature film – The Cave. The movie, produced by Lakeshore Entertainment and Screen Gems,follows a team of expert cave explorers and scientists who become trapped in an underground cave system in Transylvania.      
         
           
           
Aramdillo Sidemount by: Curt Bowen      
Side mounting may never be the same again with the new Armadillo rig. Thanks to the research and dedication of Curt Bowen and Brett Hemphill, the Armadillo is a reality and now commercially available.      
         
           
           
Armadillo - Side Mount Rig by: Brett Hemphill      
Side mount systems offer increased easy of handling and mobility with dives that require transports in thick jungles, dry cave sections or any other location that requires divers, sherpas or pack mules to tote cylinders over long distances. Remote dive locations seldom have double cylinders available for technical diving, but often have a large supply of single cylinders that can be easily converted into side mount tanks.      
         
           
           
Deep Wall Diving Bay Island Beach resort Roatan Honduras by: ADM      
During the second week, attention was placed on deep mixed gas training. The instructors were Tim O'Leary, NAUI Technical Operations and Bruce Wienke, Ph.D., LANL. The deep mixed gas-training week began Saturday night with candidates being briefed on gear configuration, deep stop RGBM tables that had been customized for the week's training, and team assignments. Each team member was required to configure his or her gear the same as those within the entire team. Personal choice was not an option in the team environment. Each dive team was supplied with the customized NAUI RGBM nitrox and trimix tables, by Bruce Wienke, that allowed for the week's exact dive profiles, including repetitive dives, gas mix and switches, NAUI gas management planner, trimix planner, and the trimix team planner.      
         
           
           
Diving the Moravian Karst by: Jitka Hyniova & Jakub Rehacek      
The world famous Macocha Abyss has a dry pit with a depth of 138.7 meters (458 feet), making it the deepest abyss in central Europe. Underground Punkva River briefly emerges from Punkevni Caves on the Macocha Abyss bottom to form two small lakes. The Abyss originated after a Devonian limestone ceiling (approximately 350-380 million years old) of a large underground dome collapsed and the enormous shaft opened to the skies. Macocha Abyss lies in the unique Moravian Karst and Punkevni Caves. It is one of four publicly accessible caves out of the more than 1,000 caves in the area.      
         
           
           
Drift Decompression by: Curt Bowen      
Deeper sites that require extended decompression many items are located in areas of strong currents, such as the Gulf Stream off the southeastern coast of the United States. Strong currents can turn an otherwise easy dive into a grueling experience, greatly increasing the diver's gas consumption rates.      
         
           
           
Dry Tortugas by: Linda Bowen & Steve May      
Located 70 miles west of Key West, the Dry Tortugas group is comprised of seven islands, of which three are significant. Garden Key is just south of the Park's center and is the site of Fort Jefferson. To the east of Garden Key is Bush Key, noted most for its large sea bird nesting site, designated as a sanctuary and prohibited to visit. Off to the west of Garden Key is Loggerhead Key, a coast guard lighthouse station.      
         
           
           
Exploration Beyond the Sump by: Jason Richards      
The Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia (TAG) area has long been known for its extensive collection of deep pits and world class dry caving. Some of these classics include Ellison's Cave, which has the deepest vertical pit in North America at 586 feet, Neversink Pit, featured in National Geographic and Camp's Gulf Cave, (see photo bottom page 77) which contains the largest single room in North America. This area is a hotbed of dry caving activity, with new caves being found every month.      
         
           
           
Extreme Shooters by: Dan MacMahon      
On June 17, 2005 my brother-in-law, Ricky Hampton, and I dived on a freighter resting in 425 feet of water approximately 150 miles off the coast of Tampa Bay, Florida. While this is certainly a technical dive, it would probably not have registered a blip on the radar but for the fact that a 403-pound Warsaw grouper was harvested by spear, making it probably the largest fish ever successfully speared and raised at such a depth.      
         
           
           
Fantastico by: Curt Bowen      
In the early hours of Saturday, March 13, 1993 a Spring storm of tremendous strength crashed into Florida’s West Coast. Labeled the “No Name Storm” it brought with it near hurricane force winds and tidal surges as high as 12 feet. The storm caused more than 500 million dollars in damages to properties along Florida’s Gulf Coast and killed at least 26 people.      
         
           
           
Fossil Diving on the Cooper River by: Curt Bowen      
catfish, This is what it must feel like to be a Catfish was running through my head as I lay on the bottom of the Cooper River in 6 to 17 inches of visibility in search of my pray. No, I was not looking for night crawlers, stink bait, a fisherman lures or any other foul thing Catfish love to eat. Sharks teeth was my quarry, not shinny white sharks teeth as most non-divers know of, but fossilized sharks teeth from the extinct fifty foot sea monster, Megladon Carcharodon.      
         
           
           
HID High Intensity Discharge by: Curt Bowen      
The hottest new product to hit the technical dive arena are handheld HID arc lights. The HID stands for High Intensity Discharge and while arc lamps have been around longer than light bulbs, new technology has made them safe and efficient. The first hand held HID lights were introduced about 4 years ago. These systems utilized automotive HID components, with large separate ballasts and high power requirements. The first company to use this latest technology for handheld lights was Sartek Industries, since then many others have followed their lead. The new technology produces high luminescence (it's bright), high color temperature (solar quality light, color 50001/4K), and high efficiency (uses very little power). The light produced by a HID arc lamp is a very cool, brilliant white light which makes it ideal for video and photography.      
         
           
           
High-Tech Diving in a Low-Tech Era by: Rob Polich      
Tech divers today can read of their peers latest accomplishments and discoveries in each issue of Advanced Diver Magazine. These articles are read with great anticipation and interest. It is within these articles that we discover the ingenuity of other divers and where they in turn earn our respect. However, you may be even more amazed looking backward toward the past at other diver's accomplishments. Without a doubt, one of those impressive stories is that of Max Gene Nohl, a Great Lakes tech diver who made a dive to 420 feet in Lake Michigan using a self-contained heliox re-breather of his own design on December 1, 1937.      
         
           
           
Methox! New Technology or just Wasted Gas by: ADM      
Bubba Beauregard thinks he's sitting on a goldmine. In a run-down dive shop deep in the Florida Everglades this onetime pig farmer has accomplished what many tech divers have been attempting for years: to create an inexpensive and (allegedly) safe breathing mixture, from a plentiful natural source. The gas is called METHOX and it is already creating quite a stink in the technical diving community. Stories of incredible bottom times, minuscule decompression obligations, and virtually unlimited maximum depth allowances prompted the editors of Advanced Diver to head down to the Everglades and find out the real story. What we discovered changed our view of tech diving forever.      
         
           
           
Neon Photography Shedding New Light on the Reef by: ADM      
Now available: a new frontier of underwater exploration and photography for night divers. Photographers can literally see the undersea world in a different light through the use of specialized lights used at night to stimulate fluorescence. Shine a blue light on most objects and one gets blue light back. Shine the right blue light on many corals and greens, yellows, oranges, or reds are seen. Fluorescence is an almost magical effect that transforms one color of light into another. NightSea is a new company in the dive industry, founded to build on underwater fluorescence research and offer lighting and photography products to the general dive community.      
         
           
           
One Hand Numbering by: Curt Bowen      
Decompression time, depth, cylinder pressure are all examples of underwater communications that require numbers. Many times a diver has only one hand available because his other hand is busy with extra equipment, cameras, jon line etc. A system was needed that allowed quick number communications between divers using only one hand. Below is the one hand number communication system use by many cave and wreck explorers.      
         
           
           
Recreational Wrecker by: ed Dilger      
To the inexperienced and unequipped diver however, these silenced, man-made structures can become a death trap. Many dangers abound on all shipwrecks, such as thousands of feet of fishing monofilament, lost shrimper nets, sharp twisted metal, collapsed decks, dangling electrical wires, and unstable walls. Many divers have perished from becoming entangled, trapped under weakened wreckage, or lost in the interior of shipwrecks.      
         
           
           
Roatan Express by: Curt Bowen      
Heading towards Tampa Bay from Honduras, the 180- foot freighter, Roatan Express, ran into rough seas during a severe, no-name storm, just off the Southwest tip of Florida. Carrying a cargo of 23 large container boxes of frozen foods, cars, and several flat bed trucks, the Roatan pushed slowly to the east and safety of the coast of Florida.      
         
           
           
Side Scan Sonar by: Curt Bowen      
Side scan sonars have long been one of the most sought after and effective tools for underwater searches. They can search large areas quickly, and "seeÓ what's on the bottom regardless of water visibility. Side scans actually appear to remove the water and give a clear picture of any object sitting on the bottom.      
         
           
           
Steam Mashines - Prism Topaz - Closed Circuit Mixed Gas Rebreather by: ADM      
The PRISM Topaz is a digitally controlled, constant PO2, modular, closed-circuit diving system. Its breathing loop consists of a closable mouthpiece assembly, with mushroom (check) valves, which ensure uni-directional flow. Dual, front-mounted counterlungs provide the diver with a flexible reservoir, equivalent to the maximum displacement of the diver's own lung volume. These counterlungs are fitted with both automatic and manual gas addition systems and a variable volume control valve (used upon ascent to vent excess expanding gas volume orto purge the loop). A radial flow scrubber canister is mounted vertically on a backplate, attached to the integrated BC, between twin supply cylinders (one each, oxygen and diluent). An optional cowling may be fitted.      
         
           
           
Video Gear Box part one by: Jeff Carson      
Ask yourself the question: Why do I go diving? Assuming that this article has found its way into the correct magazine, you are probably a technical scuba diver. Technical scuba diving has many facets including cave diving, wreck diving, deep diving, etc. For the people engaged in these specialties, every one of them has the same common thread...we would love to be able to relive many of those dives again and again. One answer to the question, "Why do I go diving", is to enjoy the underwater world by seeing things that most other people don't get to see. If you can agree with me so far, that we go diving to see cool stuff, then it makes sense that after the dive is over, it might be a lot of fun to sit back on the couch and see the entire dive again, and again and...well, you see where this is going.      
         
           
           
VR3 Mixed Gas Dive Computer by: ADM      
The VR3 is designed as a multi-gas, multi-mode decompression computer. It is available in a variety of configurations from a simple air and nitrox unit through to a full, mixed gas open and closed circuit system. The basic options are:      
         
           
           
Warm Mineral Springs by: Curt Bowen      
Warm Mineral Springs Survey Project      
         
           
           
Wes Skiles - Capturing Nature by: Wes Skiles      
North Florida's rivers, and springs are the canvas that I choose to focus my effort. Born and raised here, I feel fortunate to have grown up in the land of mysterious waters. The first time I pulled back the bushes and saw a spring I knew these magical places would be a permanent part of my life. Our area offers one of the greatest natural wonders on earth. A giant, three-dimensional karst terrain that produces a renewable resource of the finest water on earth. I can think of no place on the planet more worthy of my attention and love than my own backyard.      
         
           
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