A chat with a new diver made me look at my old gear differently

I was cleaning my gear in the yard yesterday when my neighbor's kid, who just got his ADCI cert, came over to ask about my old Kirby Morgan hat. He said, 'That thing looks like a museum piece, how do you even see out of it?' I told him about the old voice cans and how we used to hand signal everything, no coms. It hit me that he's never worked a job without a full video feed topside. Makes you wonder what basics we're losing. Anyone else feel like the new tech changes how you train the green guys?

3 comments

3 Comments

miles5811mo ago

Man, trying to explain hand signals to a new diver makes me feel like a dinosaur. I mean, I still fumble with the radio sometimes.

elizabeth2201mo ago

Ugh, it's like that with everything now. New tech comes out and suddenly the old way feels ancient, even if it worked fine. We're all just trying to keep up.

iris_jones891mo ago

And honestly the thing about hand signals is they actually work better than a radio in so many situations. Underwater radios are finicky and expensive and half the time they just cut out anyway. Meanwhile you can be thirty feet down with zero visibility and still get a message across with a simple hand tap on your tank. New divers might think it's outdated but there's a reason we've kept these signals for decades. I'd take a good hand signal over glitching electronics any day when I'm trying to tell someone their tank is almost empty or they missed a cool sea turtle.