SEARCH
Archive |
Tags
Regulator SUB-GEAR CAYMAN
Appeared in DIVER July 2010
FIRST, SOME HISTORY. Herr Seemann started a diving equipment company that made stuff, commissioned stuff to be made, and rebadged stuff that was already made.
When he retired, he sold the company to an ex-boss of Scubapro, who continued to run it under the same banner. Recently the US conglomerate that has a lot of brands under the grouping Johnson Outdoors, and includes Scubapro, acquired the company. After playing around with different derivations of the original brand name (you can imagine how hazardous that might have been!) it has changed it to Sub Gear. We'll start noticing this label sitting alongside its sister Scubapro brand in dive stores. Although the label may have changed, the people involved in the company remain the same, but this is a range of equipment we have not had access to previously in this country. The Cayman regulator is one of the first examples of Sub Gear equipment to be sent to me for review. It's a tough diaphragm-style regulator at a mid-level price. First Stage The first stage is a robust-looking lump of metal featuring a full inventory of ports, two delivering high-pressure and four medium-pressure air. It has an exposed pressure-adjusting spring protected by a tough-looking orange plastic cap. There were no problems routeing hoses from this vertical barrel and there was plenty of space between ports to allow the fitting of the transmitter for a Galileo computer. Second Stage This is very straightforward, in that there is no manual control other than the venturi adjustment, which is formatted in the regular Scubapro way with "pre-dive" and "dive" settings. This is designed to discourage exponential and uncontrolled air-flows when you first enter the water. Purge The soft purge button at the front of the second stage is massive, and cannot be mistaken. It presses on the demand lever to allow for a progressive and controlled flow of air. Comfort Needing to do some extended times on the giant wreck of the Vandenberg, a former satellite-tracking ship purposely sunk off Key West in Florida, and wanting to get to the bottom, I equipped myself with a couple of tanks, twinned up but independent from each other. I had the Cayman on one, and what is probably the world's best performing warmwater regulator on the other. I was surprised to find that, not only was the Cayman just as comfortable in my mouth, thanks to a firm mouthpiece, but at a depth close to 40m it was virtually indistinguishable from the other reg. This was true even when I suffered a bit of stress. I was swimming through an opening in the wheelhouse when an integrated-weight pocket got snagged and released. Because I was wearing two aluminium cylinders, I was using quite a lot of weight, and at this moment I became 8kg less buoyant. Worse, the offending weight-pocket dropped through a crack in the deck. I could see it three decks below. I dumped all my compensating air and swam back out through the opening to find a way in, three decks down. Luckily, the weight-pocket had landed near a porthole, and I was able to recover it easily. Breathing off the Cayman at this time, and quite heavily at that, I never noticed any shortfall in the air supply. Comparable regulators to consider: Apeks XTX40, £300 Cressi Ellipse Titanium, £262 Oceanic Delta DX4, £255
SPECS
|
Click on any thumbnail photo to enlarge it and use the slideshow
