The Tanks Came Rolling In

New 80 cuft cylinders

With the holiday season upcoming, and what we expect to be a busy start to 2017, our first upgrade of equipment was getting some new cylinders in stock. We were operating with around 20 cylinders of our own, and needing to rent the remainder from a local shop. This is an all-to-common scenario on the island, however, and when the high-season rolls in there is a shortage of available rental cylinders. Rather than fight this battle, we invested in 30 new 80 cuft/18liter aluminum cylinders of our own.

On the morning of December 24 I left the island and headed to Cancun. With Mexico a country heavily dominated by Catholicism I was a bit surprised our ScubaPro wholesaler was operating on Christmas Eve, but they were. And those shiney new bottles above were my Christmas gift to our our future guests.

I didn’t have any time to waste, however, as the bottles needed to have some sort of identifying marking on them in order to get filled, or perhaps I should say returned to me after filling. So I spent my Christmas Day painting scuba cylinders. Yes, really.

Believe it or not but the local Mega grocery center was open and they actually sold paint. For the record, it turned out awful. So awful in fact I won’t even show a photo of it. Lol!

But it get get me through January with constant full tanks while I got my old cylinders sanded of the old paint and into Cozumel Scuba Repair for hydro’s and visual inspection. Above you can see the old cylinders before we got them cleaned up. My paint job looked much the same, only with a dull yellow color. If took Captain Felipe and I many hours over many days to sand and scrape off both the old orange and new yellow paints. (Edit: I’m happy to report as of mid-January all cylinders owned by salty Endeavors have been hydro’d and visually inspected.)

Here our cylinders with company banding in place. Do those look good or what?! Why the bright yellow band you may ask? We’ll go into that in detail in an upcoming blog. Stay tuned…