Diving AVELO Changes Everything: A story from the field

Written by Anna McNay

Hello and greetings. My name is Anna McNay, and I have been fortunate enough to work as a scuba instructor for Dive with Harmony for the past year. Harmony and Dillon took me on a transformative journey, starting from being an Open Water Diver and a fifth-grade teacher in Maui, and enabled me to share my love for teaching and my passion for marine life with the world through their work. Over the course of the year, I completed approximately 500 dives, with around 200 of those being on Avelo.

I often get asked, “What is it like to dive the Avelo System?”

My first dive with the Avelo System felt like becoming a fish. I was sleek and streamlined, free from the drag of a BCD. The absence of compressible air space, replaced by water as weight for achieving neutral buoyancy, allowed me to experience diving purely for the sake of the experience itself, rather than solely for the purpose of observing underwater creatures. During my Recreational Avelo Diver certification dives with Harmony, I even performed flips and handstands underwater. It was as if a weight had been lifted off my back, quite literally.

Initially, having learned, taught, and guided using standard scuba for my first 150 dives, I failed to comprehend the reasons for switching to Avelo. I held the mindset of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

But here’s the thing: standard scuba is “broke.” We burden ourselves with excessive lead weights to compensate for the air we consume throughout a dive. Additionally, we inflate our BCDs to counterbalance depth changes. This leads to unstable neutral buoyancy, which is a major cause of dive accidents.

During my first year as a teacher, I lost count of the number of times people struggled to achieve perfect neutral buoyancy by repeatedly using their inflator button during a dive. The drastic changes brought by the presence of compressible airspace on their backs made it challenging for them. Consequently, their air consumption rate was much higher than necessary since their lungs had to work overtime to manage the air bubble. Furthermore, there were instances when divers panicked underwater and instinctively reached for their low-pressure inflator button. Alternatively, some divers forgot to release air from their BCDs during ascent, causing them to uncontrollably ascend and float upwards. In simple terms, Avelo offers a significantly safer alternative to standard scuba.

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