First published in 2005
Much to my dismay, Rob Davie died during a dive in the Red Sea on the weekend of 22/23 April 2006.We are all shocked Rob passed away. I wish Sheryl Davie all strength with this loss!
As he sent me the information below while exercising his great love ‘diving’, I want to leave this page as a tribute to Rob and a warning to all divers to be careful.
Rob Davie sent me pictures from his “expedition inspiration” used during a trainings dive on the “Oro Verde”, Grand Cayman Island. He rebuild the standard unit to be used with 7 liter cylinders.
The unit is essentially factory Inspiration at this point, except with an extended “factory-look” fibreglass case built to contain 7 liter cylinders. It has stainless-steel military latches, and room for a comm box and a light battery. The Auto-Air has been removed, and an Apeks TX-100 second stage on a 7 foot hose has been added. The wing at present is a Dive Rite dual-bladder unit on one of their stainless back-plates. I call it an Expedition Inspiration, due to the extra features added for safety at depth. Soon to be added are an M&J manifold, and a Block B Revision Hammer-Head control unit.
The training was conducted in the waters around Grand Cayman Island from 21 to 27 Mar 2004. The training was at the ab initio level, the diluent was air, and the max depth was restricted to 130 fsw. The longest dive was 2 hours and 10 minutes.
Therebreathersite was founded by Jan Willem Bech in 1999. After a diving career of many years, he decided to start technical diving in 1999. He immediately noticed that at that time there was almost no website that contained the history of closed breathing systems. The start for the website led to a huge collection that offered about 1,300 pages of information until 2019. In 2019, a fresh start was made with the website now freely available online for everyone. Therebreathersite is a source of information for divers, researchers, technicians and students. I hope you enjoy browsing the content!