Ah, yes, the old regulator freeze-up. I followed my buddy, who was now furiously bubbling away, up to the surface. At 38 degrees, the water didn’t seem quite cold enough to cause such a freeze-up, and yet, there we were, swimming back to the beach on the surface. So much for that nudibranch series. It was the third time this winter that a buddy’s regulator has frozen – twice underwater and once after we’d surfaced.
Let’s face it, some regs just can’t handle a little temperature. My first regulator, a Dacor Pacer 900, could take anything … depth, cold, exertion, you name it. But when Dacor evaporated, so did their parts, and I switched to a Poseidon Odin – supposedly a high-performance, cold-water reg. What a joke. Forget cold water – this regulator had so many design flaws as to be a poor choice in any conditions. Next came a Sherwood Blizzard, a regulator supposedly made specifically for cold water. It froze on a semi-regular basis.
Later on, I met a gentleman who was a scientific diver in the Antarctic and who kept meticulous records on the regulator freezes his team had suffered over hundreds of dives. He also considered the Blizzard to be unreliable, but said that the Magnum, another Sherwood reg, performed better than any other they used. And he was right – that reg never froze on me.
Time moves on, though, and over the last four years, I’ve been using an AquaLung Titan LX. And it may be the best cold-water reg I’ve ever used. Even in 29-degree water, and with air temps in the teens, it performs perfectly every time. It’s so consistent that no matter how cold it is, I never even bother to wonder whether it’s going to have problems or not. I can’t speak to how well it breathes on deep dives – the deepest I’ve taken it is 107 feet – but if you’re in the market for a cold-water reg, I highly recommend it.
While we’re on the subject of dive equipment, dive buddies and their combination with cold water, I’ve also made two dives this winter where I’ve had to wrestle my buddies out of their fins at the end of the dive. Their fingers were too numb to push those little plastic release buckles. Why, oh why, oh why, in this day and age of spring straps – one of the cleanest, simplest, and best innovations in years – would anyone still have plastic buckles on their fins? Spring straps, unlike their plastic counterparts, won’t break at the worst possible moment, and will make donning/doffing your fins incredibly easy, even with numbed fingers. Who knows how many divers could have been spared the humiliation of crawling about in the shallows with their gear on, waiting for some good Samaritan (i.e., their buddy) to come over and unbuckle their fins, if only they’d made this one little change.
And the photo below? It’s the one shot I got off of those nudibranchs at Pierce Island before having to surface. It really would have made a great series.
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