I recently spent a great week diving in DR. I stayed in Santo Domingo, which proved to be a good location for ocean diving and cave diving. Both the ocean and caves sites were between the city and airport only a 25 minute ride with traffic.

Unlike our caves in Florida, the DR caves are beautifully decorated. Ocean dives consist of wall dives with a few wrecks. This is not a place to venture out on your own. The ocean diving requires a boat charter and the caves are on private property in housing areas. Denis Bourret at Golden Arrow can take care of all your diving needs and help you find a place to stay. I wouldn’t recommend renting a car, the traffic laws are non existent, so I don’t think a week is long enough to get comfortable with the traffic.

On this trip I had to carry 4 rebreather heads, my rebreather and personal gear, plus 3 regulators. I also had to take a Jetsam booster pump for the oxygen fills on the rebreather. I packed it all in two 50 pound bags, a small carry on and my backpack that had my laptop, IPad and clothes. Good thing Dominican Republic is a warm place, I didn’t need much in the way of clothes.

Lamar

I just got back from Bonaire where Pete and I taught an O/W Sidemount course and TDI O/W sidemount instructor program at Buddy Dive. During this we tested the Nomad on single sidemount applications, more to come on this. Don’t be surprised when you see people shore diving the Hilma Hooker on sidemount.

I was also testing the dive functions on the Nitek Q. After a few setbacks on the compass chip, we now in the final stages getting our Workbench software updated. This is one of the final steps before we can release. I know it’s late but it will be worth it.

Aside from teaching and a little down time, we were scoping out Bonaire for a Tech Tour site for next year. It will be a great spot for one. Bonaire has some excellent tech diving and we’re ready to return.

Lamar