My Scuba Accessories_ Recreational Dive Gear Edition PLUS Eezy-Cut GIVEAWAY.mp4

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Divers Ready. My name's James. It is so great to see all of your smiling faces. If you're new to this channel, welcome. I'm a professional dive instructor and digital content creator, and we make films like this where we're celebrating hitting 10,000 subscribers on this channel by giving you the rundown of my personal selections of scuba diving accessories. So if you haven't done so already, make your next dive on that subscribe button, click the little bell icon, and that way you'll never miss any of our awesome content. To celebrate passing the 10,000 subscriber threshold, the good people at EasyCut have given us five of their trilobite cutting tools to give away to five lucky subscribers. At the end of this video, I'll be telling you how you can enter the contest to win one of these, so stay tuned for that. But today I thought I'd answer one question that I get asked a lot. Well, actually not really one question, but a whole bunch of questions. James, what mask do you use? James, what fins do you use? What cutting device do you recommend? And so on and so forth. I get those questions a lot through Facebook, by emails and so on, and I can sit there and type out a whole answer or so on, or I could just send people a link to a video that I've already made. So this video is as much for you guys to give you a rundown on what I use as it is for me to have an easy answer to some of the questions that I get asked all the time. Three quick rules before we get started regarding this video. Number one, my definition of accessory for the purposes of this video is anything that I go diving with on a regular basis that doesn't comprise the actual SCUBA unit. So yes, every dive I use a mask, so in that sense it's not really an accessory, it's an essential, but it's not part of the SCUBA unit. So that's my definition of accessory. Rule number two is I'm not going to include thermal protection. You're big boys and girls, you can choose your own thermal protection appropriate to the environment that you're diving. In addition to that, all of my selections are for home-based diving here in South Florida on a recreational level. So I'm not including my tech gear, I'm not including my cold water gear, and I'm not including my travel specific gear. Rule number three is this is not a sponsored video. This is not sponsored by Easy Cut or any of the other brands I'm going to mention or talk about today. I've paid full retail price for all of the equipment I'm going to show you. It is gear that I use day in, day out. Nothing is brand new off of a retail shelf with the label still on it. This is stuff that's been beat to hell, time and tested by me. So know that you can trust that these are honest reviews that have in no way been influenced by any kind of sponsors. This is an unsponsored video. These are my personal selections. That being said, I will put a link to every product that I mention in the description of this video below. Yes, they are affiliate links. Yes, if you click on those links and make purchases, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. And I thank you in advance for your support of this channel. So whenever I pack for a SCUBA trip, whether it's a morning dive here in Miami or a week on a liveaboard, I always start from the ground up when I'm packing to make sure I don't miss anything. So we're going to carry that philosophy through in this video and start with my choice of recreational dive fins. These are the Mares Avanti Quattros. These pretty much have been fins I've had with me my entire diving career. My first pair of Avanti Quattros were actually handed down to me by my open water SCUBA instructor. He was like, I don't need these anymore. Here, you have them. And I rocked those fins all the way through my dive master course. I did my dive master in Indonesia. And immediately afterwards, I was freelancing at a dive shop in Thailand. And these fins were stolen from me out of the staff gear room. And I went out the very next day and bought the exact same pair, same color, same size. And those are the fins I'm holding right now. So I've literally had a pair of Avanti Quattros from open water to advanced tech instructor. Why do I like these fins for recreational diving? In short, they're a perfect design. There's a reason that Mares have sold a million pairs of these fins since the 70s with only a very few tweaks to their basic design. They are the perfect weight for recreational diving in warm water. They're the perfect stiffness. They're pretty much standard issue for dive masters all across the Caribbean for getting that accelerated thrust and chasing down cruise ship divers that are trying to get away from them. They're just all around a kick-ass design. There's something along the lines of like a Fender Stratocaster where that design just hasn't changed in decades because they got it right the first time. The only thing I've done to these fins is when I bought them, they came with the old school rubber straps. And I've swapped them out for the bungees, which if you buy these fins today, come as standard anyway. And you can see from all the scratches and the ding marks and the rust dents and stuff, these fins have been very well used and they're still going strong. And I just love them. Even if I'm doing a shallow reef dive on a sunny day in fantastic viz, I always have a dive torch with me. My choice for a recreational dive torch is this one. It's the Tovetech Fusion 530. This comes in a whole range up to sort of a big primary light, but there's a number of features that I like about this light for recreational diving. Number one, it works both in terms of a beam and a spotlight. Number two, it has three different modes, a couple of different brightness levels and a strobe. So it doubles as an emergency light if you're ever blown off a dive and they need to come and find you. You have a strobe with you at all times. I also like the fact that it's a user-changeable, rechargeable battery and it has a really, really good burn time. So I don't need to worry about recharging this every single dive. As you can see from the way it's been dinged up, the solid aluminium body has taken a beating and is still going strong. And the light is still nice and bright because it's LED technology. So highly recommend this torch. It clips off onto one of my chest D-rings, it's secured with a bungee and it's just always on me every single dive. And then when I go to tech dive, I up to a much brighter primary light and this becomes my backup. Regular viewers of this channel will know that I'm a huge fan of Shearwater computers, so it won't come as a surprise to any of you that my recreational dive computer of choice is the Shearwater Petrel. So yes, one year I will have to upgrade from the Shearwater Petrel to the Perdix, but for now, let me tell you why I think that the Petrel is the perfect recreational dive computer. Number one, large, easy to read screen, all the information I need in colour, none of the information I don't need when I'm on a recreational dive. Number two, easy user interface. It's a two button system. So scroll and select. That's it. I'm of the belief that the less buttons a computer has, the better a computer is. And that's proven by the Shearwater Petrel. And the third reason is user changeable battery. It's not rechargeable. It's not going to drop charge on you. And you can change the battery in a Petrel with a coin. It's that simple. So for me, that is the ultimate recreational diving computer, as well as, of course, having massive technical capabilities. My former boss brought these reels back from a trip to the UK, to the islands where we were working, and he gave me one as a birthday present and said that it was the best reel he'd ever used. He wasn't wrong. Now, you're not going to find a link to this in the description of the video below because they're only available in the UK, and I don't have that kind of access, I'm afraid. But this is the Buddy Pocket Reel from AP Diving. Things I like about this reel are the high-vis floating line. You get 40 meters of it in this tiny housing. So for recreational diving, that's plenty good enough to launch a DSMB. It's compact. It's an enclosed housing, which means the line very, very rarely jams. And once you put a single-ender bolt snap on one end of the line, there's no chance of you losing it on the inside of the mechanism there. And the thumb break and the ergonomics of that, that it's click-to-release, stop-to-break, is just highly user-friendly. And it's just a reel that I've really got the hung of. You can see, again, all the wear marks on it and the amount of scratches and beating that this reel has taken. But for a compact recreational reel, it's not a ton of line, it's just what you need. And that's the perfect tool for the job. Next up, SMB. This is a six-foot SMB from Dive Alert, my particular favorite. As you know, I'm kind of crazy about my SMBs. I did make a whole video just dedicated to this one accessory. I do believe it's an essential piece of kit. So I really like the Dive Alert SMB for a number of reasons. It does everything you need from an SMB, but it doesn't come from a big brand scuba manufacturer. You don't need to spend a lot of money on an SMB, you just need to have one with you. And the Dive Alert SMB has a really attractive price point and all the bells and whistles and features that you could possibly want. When it comes to safety sausages, go big or go home. So when it comes to cutting devices for scuba diving, the days of wearing an eight-inch blade on the inside of your calf muscle are long gone. And I still see divers strapping those knives onto the inside of their legs and trying to pull off that kind of retro look. That's all well and good, that's your personal choice, but do know that the boat crew is laughing at you behind your back. These days we tend to opt for something more modern, like the Trilobite from Easy Cut. This is a very simple cutting tool, it's nice and compact, it has two blades, it's designed to cut monofilament, it'll cut through hoses, it'll cut through webbing, it'll cut through wetsuit if you need to get someone out of their suit in an emergency. Just a really nice cutting tool. So I always have one of these on me, small compact, airline approved, so you can take that with you on your foreign dive trips as well, but that is my go-to cutting device. Just make sure that when you have a cutting device on you, you can always reach it with both hands. So even though on a tech dive I'll have one of these mounted on my computer strap, because I can't reach that with my left hand, I'll have another one somewhere else that I can reach with my left hand. One of the very first videos that we made for this channel was about how to buy a mask, because I believe that buying a well-fitting mask is essential to scuba diving happiness. Conversely, an ill-fitting mask will ruin all your scuba dives, and I want you guys to have happy dives. So let me tell you what my mask is, but I'm going to preface it by saying there is no such thing as the best mask. I struggle to recommend a mask because this mask, which is the Atomics Frameless 2, I think they call it, fits me incredibly well. It is my go-to mask, I use it all the time. It fits my face exceptionally well, it's got super soft silicon, and the glass is ultra clear, and I get all the colors as photo realistic as possible. But it might not be the best mask for you. So if you haven't seen it already, I'll link that video up above there somewhere, and you can check that out so you can find the best mask for you. But people ask me all the time what mask I dive, it's the Atomics Frameless 2 Ultra Clear. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, that is the rundown of all the essential accessories I take on every recreational dive I do here in South Florida. As I said before, all of the details for those products will be linked down below. They are affiliate links, and I thank you for your support. Now, if you would like a chance, or several chances, to win one of five EasyCut trilobite tools, all you have to do is scroll down to the very bottom of this description, click on the link that says enter contest here, and that will take you to a page where you simply follow the steps, and you'll be entered for a chance to win. I think we're doing the drawing for this contest on Valentine's Day, actually, the 14th of February. So good luck to everyone who enters. And if you don't want to enter the contest, or you're not feeling lucky, the link is also in the description below. So you can just pick one of these up, I guess. Ladies and gentlemen, don't forget to subscribe if you haven't done already. And thank you so much to the 10,000 people who have already subscribed to our channel. It really means the world to us. You know how it works over here. I'll put some other videos you can watch, or not. I mean, it's your life. Do what you want, I guess. Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, this was your video for this week from Divers Ready. Dive safe. Dive often.