This year will see the first season of the truly user friendly breed of rebreathers. Easy to set up, operate and dive with, but will this be another fad? Let me start by saying I am not a technical diver and I am approaching this from a purely recreational point of view. To become a tech diver you pass through the ranks of recreational diving and I suspect the number of technical divers closely reflects as a percentage the amount of recreational divers. With the amount of scuba divers remaining pretty static for the last few years, some give up, some start – just like life! I often blog about how we can get more people into diving and a few manufacturers now think they have the key. The recreational rebreather.
According to them it is going to inspire a whole new breed of diver. Lighter equipment, smaller than scuba, less noisy. I don’t wish to sound sceptical but if these people weren’t inspired by scuba is the world of rebreathers really going to catch their imagination? Surely we will just be reselling potential scuba divers into rebreathers? How many will come into store to buy a rebreather hobby? I see people coming in for scuba and being upsold rebreather. A while back my colleague did a blog about the new Hollis Rebreather which is worth a read if you are unfamiliar with them. This new breed of rebreather will be modular, non technical, you just insert this into there, get a green light, dive, follow the computer’s instruction.
Is this just a natural progression of technology ? An analogy would be modern cars do a lot for us that we take for granted, anti lock brakes for instance, is scuba becoming the old technology, like traditional brakes? Do anti lock brakes make more people buy cars? I suspect not, more probably more people trade up to a vehicle with this option. Will the growth in rebreathers just be a trade up from scuba? Let us not forget people don’t take up scuba diving to learn how they use the equipment rather they learn it to facilitate going underwater which is the point of their new sport. Are rebreathers in fact a replacement for scuba as the choice for facilitating recreational underwater time? I suspect it may be, but I also think it will take much longer than we expect. Maybe ten to twenty years? Maybe open circuit scuba gear will become collectable like brass helmets on auction websites? To answer the question in the title.. No I don’t think it will rejuvenate diving, I think it is just the next step in underwater breathing technology.
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