Captain Steve Juarez Maui Diving Log

Tech Week Maui was fun and exciting but some what reminiscent of my days at Boot Camp. Robin Jacoway a TDI Instructor Trainer for Technical Diving International (TDI)and the owner of Deepoutdoors flew out to Maui and stayed up at my house for the week to teach and certify Neal, Tyler and myself for TDI Advanced Nitrox, Decompression Procedures, and Extended Range & Trimix. We started each day at 7:00am and finished about 10:00pm each night with 2 dives each day and then all the classroom and TDI PowerPoint presentations and yes tests it made for some long days. The wreck of the Carthaginian was great for doing many of the drills and to hone our technical diving skills. Todd Wynn from North Shore Explorers had given me some coordinates for a PB4Y-1 Navy Bomber that ditched June 26^th 1944 off Olowalu Maui and is laying upside down on the bottom in 190’ of water which we did a 20/40 trimix dive on 1/20/09. We programmed the coordinates into our GPS and as the boat ran over those coordinates we dropped a small sand anchor with 300’ of line and a fender for a surface float. Robin was diving his Revo Rebreather and Neal, Tyler and I were all diving doubles with 20/40 trimix and two stage tanks, one with 36% nitrox and the other with pure O2 for decompression. The day turned out to be perfect, flat calm and no current just a little hazy and a little overcast with pods of Humpback whales providing a reverberating song for our dive. The dive went according to plan and the wreck was amazing with black corral trees growing out of the rims of the landing gear wheels laying flat against the bottom of the wings. A 50 caliber machine gun sticking out of the rear turrent pointed towards the surface with schools of fish darting in and out of the wreck with the plan calling for 25 minutes bottom time our dive was way to short and with all the decompression our total dive time ran 78 minutes. As I ascend to my numerous deco stops I could reflect on what I had seen and I knew I would have to make more dives on this wreck and next time I want to bring down the HD video camera and film this amazing piece of history. We are planning our next Tech week for May so if you’re interested in getting certified for technical diving give us a call or shoot us an Email. We will be bringing in some of Deepoutdoors technical harness systems, back plates and bladders for divers interested in buying the best in Technical Dive gear and we have quite a few sets of twin steel tanks with isolation manifolds and stage tanks for doing decompression dives. Many thanks toRobin Jacoway for coming out and teaching us Yahoos the right way to do these dives.

Captain Steve Juarez

Gallery Album: Technical Diving Maui