An Introduction To Scuba Diving Gear

Today, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about scuba gear and what we use in scuba diving and perhaps what to look out for, so a general introduction really to scuba diving equipment. Firstly, you need to bear in mind that when we're diving, water conducts heat about twenty times better than air. So, you tend to get cold quite quickly so we have a load of suits that we wear to insulate us from the cold.

I'll show you some of the things that we've got. That's a full length wetsuit. More often than not, we use wetsuits for scuba diving.

People who dive regularly in the UK may even move to a dry suit which is a slightly more complicated but warmer way of doing things. So, that's the kind of suit that we wear. Very often to supplement that, we have hoods and gloves, boots, we're prone to losing a lot of heat from our head and our hands, so we have hoods, various different boots and gloves, so a whole load of thermal protection to keep us warm basically, okay.

In addition to that, we're looking at BCD's, Buoyancy Compensation Devices. Hereby at Wimbledon, we stock the Scubapro range pretty extensively there, probably the world's biggest manufacturer of scuba diving equipment. This is one of their better BCD's.

Basically, this is the thing that holds the tank there on your back, allows you to adjust your buoyancy, and also gives you somewhere to clip all your quick man on to. So really, it's kind of the basis of all the equipment that we use. Tank goes on the back there, regs on top of the tank, and this hose that you can see here connects up to the tank and we can use this for putting air in and then letting air out.

Imagine just a little bit like a life jacket. On the back of that, we have a tank. This is one of the tanks that we commonly use at the school.

This is the steel 12-liter tank, will contain about 230 times atmospheric pressure in the tank, so without getting too technical, a load of gas is in there, about 2 ½ thousand liters of gas. So, it enables us to stay down for somewhere like, something like 30 to 45 minutes underwater, okay. Attached to the tank, we have a set of regulators.

Again, these are Scubapro. We have a first stage which screws into the tank, reduces the pressure in the tank down to a certain level and then it feeds the second stage here which is what we breathe off of and you can see we have a main one there and we have an octopus there which is the emergency one that we give to our body, should they need them. Okay.

Also attached to the regulators, we have a pressure gauge. It tells us how much pressure we've got from the tank and we have hoses for inflating that BCD that we showed you a moment ago, so a really important piece of equipment and something that people, when they're going to be diving regularly, buy fairly early on in that career normally. Obviously with all of this equipment, we need something to propel us through the water.

With all that, you're not going to get very much just swimming with your feet. So normally, we use fins, various different types of fins. These are Cressi, another one of the makes that we stock.

But you can see that's an open heel type fin, so we wear the boot to keep us nice and warm and that would enable us to move, walk down the beach where diving on the short based site and the boot just slips in there and the heel strap adjusts accordingly. So, that's that. Masks, obviously you can't see underwater without a mask - pink, your favourite color.

So, that's the kind of thing that we're looking out. For that, it pays to have a good mask, choose something that really fits you well rather than just buying anything, so spend some time with a scuba store, just your local dive center, just running through what really fits you and what works for you, and very often, we'll be using a snorkel with that as well - again, your favourite color. It goes on the left hand side of the mask, okay.

When we go down diving, we're under