NAVED and hard hat divers in Brownstone Quarry Ct.

[luis]

We just had our vintage dive event in Brownstone Quarry Connecticut. It was a great time.

The banner worked great and it drew a lot of interest! We had a lot of great response. I talked to several of people that have and occasionally dive their double hose regulators, but several where not aware of our group and the availability of reproduction parts, etc.

I got to dive the Navy Mk-5 again.

Also dove a Scubapro Visionaire mask, which got to be one of the weirdest full face masks I have ever tried. There is an article about them on the latest HDS magazine. The glass lens doubles as the demand valve diaphragm. It is probably the easiest breathing demand regulator I have ever tried.

Some pictures below:






This shot was not my idea.






You can almost see the NAVED banner in the background.



Dave, myself, Pete, and Dan.



I bet Rob would like this triples and the Voit 50 Fathoms.



It was great diving this triples.





Visionaire Mask



Scubapro Visionaire Mask



The Mistral in the picture looks almost as real as the one on the front.



Those are duck feet on my hand…they make a nice display, but they are not going to get much use. I went back to my Jetfins after one dive.




A couple of shots I took of another hard hat diver. Dave is standing near NAVED banner.










Dave, Pete, and Dan will probably have more pictures soon.

[duckbill]

Thanks for sharing, Luis. That looks like it was a lot of fun.

[luis]

It was a lot of fun!

Brownstone Quarry is a great location for a vintage equipment dive event. The visibility is decent and the water temperature above the thermocline was comfortable. The diving is like other quarries…there are your sunken cars, sunken boats, dive training platforms at several different depths, etc. There is a thermocline at about 20 ft and the maximum depth is about 90ft in this area.

Some of the best diving is in the shallow areas where there are plenty of fish and some cool areas with a lot of fish nests and the fish hanging around there.

The facilities are comfortable and convenient to the surface supplied diving and Scuba diving.

The quarry also has a number of other non-diving activities such as zip lines, wake board tow winch, and other water sports, etc.


The Northeast Diving Equipment Group (NEDEG) people are great.
www.hardhatdivers.org/

Bob has a great collection of hard hats and other vintage diving gear. It is just great that they preserve and share all this diving gear.

In addition to the Mk-5 they had several Ultra light helmets, Kirby Morgan Band Mask, The Scubapro Visionaire, a shallow water open bottom helmet together with a vintage hand pump, Scott Hydro Pack, etc.

I hope in the future to cordite more vintage equipment dives with them. The hard hats are definitely a main attraction, but most of them also have and /or dive double hose scuba regulators and some of them where not aware of our group and all the reproduction parts available for our equipment.


It was also neat when at least a couple of the general public divers saw the Phoenix, they recognized what it was and ask my opinion about it. They had no idea of my involvement with it. It sure looks like the interest on the Phoenix RAM double hose, all other double hose diving, and vintage equipment diving has a good potential for growth.