At the end of June, Jason Isley and Simon Enderby from Malaysia came to visit Malapascua Island. It wasn’t the first time for either of them; but it was the first time with Evolution and they were here to get a new and different type of experience, diving with a closed circuit rebreather.
Simon and Jason are some of the members of Scubazoo, an underwater filming and photography company based in Kota Kinabalu. In their hunt for ever better and closer shark footage they decided that rebreathers would be a good step forward, and they chose Evolution and the Pelagian rebreather to achieve their goals.
Although you may see rebreathers as being technical or complex, and only for deep diving, this is not strictly true. The maximum depth the guys did on the class with Matt was 26m…they just stayed there a very long time! Even with nitrox 36{3c584785206271acba0b48c760be4725f0625fa591b4a52f771ab721d5a102df} we can only stay about 1hr, but on the rebreather the team stayed at Monad shoal with the sharks for 2hrs, and still surfaced with well over 100 bar in their 3litre tanks! Enough gas to do it all over again.
However before being able to dive the rebreather with the sharks, Simon and Jason had to undergo some rigorous training with Matt. They spent plenty of time in the classroom studying theory; then they had to learn and practice the assembly and checking of the rebreather units. And of course there were numerous shallow dives to practice skills on the unit to ensure that if anything went wrong it was easily and calmly dealt with.
Once the hard work was all done, Jason, Simon and Matt headed out to Monad shoal 7 days in a row at 5am, and were able to get some fantastic encounters with the famous thresher sharks of Malapascua. The advantages of having no bubbles become clear when you get up close to these magnificent creatures. The sharks came in very close to the cameramen and stayed close, as they were getting cleaned, allowing some fantastic photos and video to be taken. Watch this space for the video to come soon.
Congratulations to Jason and Simon and we look forward to welcoming you back for more closed circuit rebreather diving soon! Click the link to see what Subazoo is all about
