by Rod Abbotson Course Director 69259
I was asked to help with this project after Rohan Cadzow had to leave the project for personal reasons…a bit odd as it was set up originally to beat my local record of 144m here in Aqaba. But there were many other reasons now to get involved as this has turned into a big promotion for diving in Jordan and technical diving here in particular. The media needed feeding and sponsors need to see a return on their investments.
The Dive Aqaba Tec team joined up with Seastar Aqaba Tech and the rest of the 166.6 team member to complete the dive successfully on 29th July. George Ionita had already sponsored a trip for Mark Ellyatt (World record holder for the deepest scuba dive at 313m) to Jordan so he joined in with the team to get everything organised and train everyone up during the week.
Rod Abbotson & Mark Ellyatt reached the target depth of 167m using Pelagian DCCCRs and George Ionita also on a Pelagian DCCCR provided deep support down to 112m. Duncan Baillie & Jake Link provided deep trimix support at 78m and 60m while Thaer Juqman (Seastar Diving) supported on tec rig at 50m. The rest of the team provided all important shallow water support and set up the decompression trapeze from 15m to the surface at the top of the down line and surface support and coordination along with Huw Lovell (Tec Deep Inst- Dive Aqaba). The entire dive was planned using Decocheck software and in water Shearwater computers were used. Mark & I used the computers as back up and ran with the run time on our slates which ended up as 3 hours 17 mins.
In the evening a promotional event was held at the Black Pearl bar at the Kempinski Hotel in Aqaba and the following day a large clean up dive effort was conducted by the team with children from the SOS Village joining in for the beach clean up.
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