All About Scooter Diving

DPV Diving – What’s It All About?

We’ve been lucky at Tech Asia. Right from the beginning, we’ve had forward-thinking divers who saw DPVs not just as tools for the Florida cave pioneers, but as something that could be applied in the ocean with great purpose—and massive amounts of technical diving fun!

This was back when the more-or-less homebuilt Gavin scooters were the only game in town. They were based on the back end of a commercially available Mako recreational scooter, beefed up using parts from Radio Shack and the local hardware store. They worked—and they worked well. Any depth, any payload, they would get you around. To order one, you had to contact George Irvine III in the States, and if he liked you and was happy with your diving, he’d make you one…

Nowadays, most people have transitioned to the beautifully engineered and far more sophisticated Suex DPVs, but in the end, what you do with them is the same. In tech diving, there comes a point where a DPV becomes essential. It might be because you’re diving deeper than you used to, and the collection of tanks you have to take becomes nearly impossible to swim with for any real distance. And what’s the point of going all the way to 100m if you can’t move around once you get there?

Maybe it’s a wreck dive—for the same kind of reasons. If your shipwreck is 200m long, like the HMS Hermes, it’s an awful lot of finning to get around. Or in caves, which—even in the Philippines—can extend thousands of meters. What always happens is that once you’ve had a DPV in your hands on a dive where it’s a necessity, you get so hooked that you start taking it on every other dive anyway!

Really, for us, they’re perfect for turning unachievable swim dives into straightforward reality. It’s not even a matter of finding out how far you can go—it’s about what you can do with a dive site, especially when conditions are adverse. Take Secret Reef, which sits out in the main channel at 60m and can have very strong current—the reason, of course, it’s so alive. Using a DPV there means you can always position yourself exactly where you want to be, instead of hiding behind a rock with nowhere to go until it’s time to ascend. People spend a lot of money for these dives—it only makes sense to do whatever you can to get the best out of it.

A number of our favorite sites are also just that little bit too far offshore to swim back to the shallow reef for your ascent. That problem disappears with a scooter—and suddenly, you’ve got two dives in one. Even on a shallow dive, if you come across a big group of other people spoiling the show, you can just drive off somewhere else for ten minutes and come back later when they’re gone!

Training for Scooters

Training for DPV use can go from a simple half-day orientation to a full certification for use at the technical levels you’re qualified for. It depends on your goals. There’s plenty to think about and practice: how to communicate, navigate, avoid silting or damaging the reef; what to do if it floods while attached to you or if the motor sticks on; how to share gas while towing or ascending with someone whose scooter isn’t working; and how to manage it during decompression. All sorts of valuable things to learn.

And for video divers, DPVs make tremendously stable camera platforms, so it’s worth exploring that under supervision too.

Next time you’re with us, have a chat! (or contact us) We’ll show you our rental fleet. It might just change your diving forever…!