Which rebreather has the most kilometres of exploration under its lungs? AP inspiration?
Good guess but no cigar..
Hello everyone, we are back once again with the rockstar over to my side, mr Michael Menduno from
InDepth Newsletter, our InDepth Blog. We are going to be discussing for the youtube channel,
some great stories, little teasers, just so as we don't give away the whole thing. You can find
all the full stories at Indepth.blog when they release this coming Thursday,
but we're just gonna give you some teasers for now. If you do like this video, please be sure
to hit that LIKE button. If you want to hear the answers to some of these amazing questions
that Michael's going to be asking, stay tuned! Michael, what have you got for me today? So nico,
uh, can you guess which rebreather has the most kilometres of exploration under its lungs? I..
I know this one! AP inspiration? Good guess, but no cigar. I love it, the KISS? The KISS! Good,
both of these have been around for a while, but no it's not it's not the KISS, and I'll tell you
it's not GUE's JJ-CCR either. That was gonna be my next guess... Uh.. Let's go with.. Okay, they made
a movie about it! The Meg? The Megalodon, it's not the Meg either. Interestingly, it's it's not even
a closed circuit rebreather. It's the halcyon RB-80, passive edition, semi-close rebreather.
Yep, yep, it goes back to the late 90s.. the late 1990s. This was developed by
Dr Colley in Europe, and adopted by the WKPP, and it's really had a tremendous exploration record.
We estimate about 160 kilometres of exploration new cave passage has been
done on this rebreather - about 100 miles for you imperialists -and quite remarkable. So this story
goes into it. Until now, it's been a fairly small group of users, a couple of hundred GUE users,
who've been trained on the unit, and now they've developed a semi; a side-mount version: the RBK,
which is not only being used extensively in Mexico by CNDAQ and others, but some of the other groups
are now using it as a bailout rebreather, such as karst underwater research. Really interesting.
Amazing. All right Michael, I know you've got more for me, hit me! What else you got?
We got adventure! Adventure in this issue, uh, two really cool stories. One, the life and times of a
West Coast Photogrammetrist. This is a story about Keez Leverenz and uh.. Some explanation: they were
doing "photogramic" imaging of a mystery shipwreck in the Red Sea called the Almirante Barroso.
I know this one! Keez helped me out on this one. If you guys want to go and watch a little bit
of footage on the Almirante Barroso, the top 10 video of the Red Sea Wrecks is above. We featured
it in there. Cool, put a link on it. Yeah, so he talks about some of the challenges of grabbing
these images, from a wreck that's at 75 meters under the Red Sea. So we got a second, pretty
fun adventure story, one of our regular writers, Andrea Murdoch Alpini, our Italian explorer (and
romantic explorer I should say). So he uh.. You know they're locked down in Italy, he was just,
you know, getting fed up to the max, and he decided to take social distancing
to the extreme, and go on a road trip in his "cave van"
to drive over to Slovenia, and do some solo Slovenian cave diving, and video the whole thing.
Now I must say that GUE does NOT SANCTION solo diving as you know, and others don't as well.
However, uh, this was something that Andrea did & documented & talked about, so really fun story.
Okay awesome, well if it's self-adventure and adventure you.. you take what you can in
COVID times, but side note, I will repeat: WE DO NOT CONDONE SOLO (CAVE) DIVING AT
GLOBAL UNDERWATER EXPLORERS, just making that clear. Exactly, keep us out of trouble here.
So you'll remember, about a couple issues ago, we ran a really interesting story about
some new models that look at pulmonary oxygen toxicity. This is uh.. pulmonary toxicity is
from long-term exposure to hyperbaric oxygen. Your lungs kinda get fried,
have problems etc etc. So uh, we read there's a couple new models, one by uh Ran Irelli,
an Israeli researcher, who's developed a new model to predict the onslaught of pulmonary tox,
as well as Barbara Schreikoff from the U.S navy. So we thought it would be interesting to take
these models and apply them to some actual dives. We have our our great science writer Riley Fogarty
doing this. So we pulled out two big dives to look at, one Massimo Badoni's dive on the SS
Brandenburg, a dive to about 195 meters, 15-20 minutes bottom time, and then about seven hours
of decompression. So that was big dive number one. Big dive number two, a little shallower,
Andy Pitkin with Kur at Wikiwatchee Springs, 124 meter dive, about a two hour bottom time,
followed by 10 hours of decompression. So we use these to use the calculations of the
model to predict, "Are these guys going to get some pulmonary Ox-Tox or what?".
Yeah... I love the way how in in this community, 124 meters is considered "shallow". Right? Anyway,
it wouldn't be an InDepth issue if you didn't have some opinion pieces for me - a
tech diver with an opinion. Exactly, how.. how unique is that? Yeah right? Who'd've thought?
We have two two pieces actually, really interesting. This time we have Mark Powell,
who you know, he's a TDI Instructor Examiner, long time tech instructor, and the author of
"Deco for Divers", which is a big standard in the in the community, um decompression theory.
So he wrote a piece, uh really interesting, "Training, practice, experience & judgment", and
kind of looking at the the combination, you know, do you always need training? You got a new DPV, is
it really worth picking a course for it? Can you just learn to do it learn from your friend? Etc.
So he talks about this, um quite interesting piece, and then we have a special treat,
um.. You know it's really hard to objectively compare and contrast technical training
between agencies, and agencies you know, they're not real enthused having people contrasting,
and you know, a lot of it comes down to the instructor as well. So it turns out a former
instructor of mine, a cave instructor, Chris Brock who's with the NSS CDS (the cave diving section),
he's a cave diving instructor and on their training committee. He ended up taking cave one,
GUE's cave 1 and cave 2 class. The circumstances were a little unique. He was assisting
one of our great instructors, Meredith Tanguay, who was taking her instructor exam for cave
2. So she needed some, you know.. in the midst of pandemic here, you got to make sure the class
isn't going to cancel at the last minute, because otherwise she's out her IE. So she.. Chris was on
standby to be able to come into her Cave 2 class and take it if needed and, sure enough, a couple
days before the class she had a cancellation and so Chris uh, went in. So you can imagine I
was very excited to get his view of, you know, a perspective on our Cave 1 and Cave 2 class,
from an informed knowledgeable person. So it's a really interesting piece. Most definitely. That
well, that's.. You've got one last thing which, uh, I've seen a snippet of, that I quite like.
The look of um.. something.. something "Zen"?? I got two things for you, two things. So
we're in the middle of a global pandemic, the industry's suffering, there's no travel,
dive stores... they're really finding a hard time to to make do right?
(though people are doing some local diving). So who in their right mind
would open a dive centre in the middle of a global pandemic? A tech diver!? More than that, a GUE
Trimix breathing tech instructor and divers, uh three of them actually, a trio, and they've opened
uh.. yes, wait for the name, uh... what do you think they called their dive centre?
Zen! The Zen diving company, perfect for our crazy times. So uh, this is in southern California,
and so we kind of go in, and talk to them, and uh, and look at the new dive centre,
and all it's pretty interesting, and they're... they're doing some really innovative things. So
we have a piece on that, and last, uh, we have some sponsored content, uh from one of our great
sponsors: Dive Soft, and it's a "white paper" really on fault tolerant rebreathers. You know
basically dive soft has two completely independent sets of electronics running in parallel, talking
to each other, so if you lose a solenoid, you lose cells, you lose your computer, there's another one
right, working right there to take it, so you can lose basically a whole rebreather, you know,
short of losing your loop or something like that, and you have a backup right there, so uh,
it's quite innovative, I think they're certainly one of the most, you know, more innovative, uh,
rebreather companies on the planet. So uh, that's in the issue too. I think it'll be pretty good.
So we are talking solo cave diving, we are talking rebreathers, we are talking opening up of new dive
centres, we are talking "five feet of fury" with Meredith Tanguay, we're talking rebreather that's
had the longest exploration mileage, we're talking lots of stuff. Guys, basically, this is just a
tiny snippet. You guys all said to us "we want the episodes with Michael Menduno to be shorter,
to be tighter". Guess what, weird thing, we do listen. So here's your episode: it's shorter,
it's literally 50% shorter than it normally is. I'm going to wrap this up so we don't actually
blow that out the water, but Michael, thank you for taking the time to speak to us as always.
If you do want to read the new issue of InDepth, Michael, when is it out? Where can people find it?
It'll be out this Thursday, February 4th, go to indepth.blog, come and subscribe and then we'll
push the news stories out to you via email. It's free and painless and delivers "maximum geek".
That's the one guys - "delivering maximum geek", I love that - so as always, if you liked the video,
please hit the like button, share the video, hit the subscribe button, do follow us on
all socials (Instagram, Linkedin, Facebook) we're everywhere, Global Underwater Explorers.
I'm Nico Lurot from Youtube, and I will see you guys very soon. Michael, thank you so much. Booyah