February 2013    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 28, No. 2   What's this?

The DEMA Dive Show

a slightly irreverent review

from the February, 2013 issue of Undercurrent  

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Last month, John Bantin reported on the range of gear, good and bad, that he saw at the Dive Equipment and Marketing Association (DEMA) show in Las Vegas in November. I'll give you a slightly different take.

By my calculation, to make one complete tour of the DEMA floor, I traversed 2.38 miles of aisles, past an endless number of booths hawking every last thing a dive store might consider selling. I found bad underwater art, aromatic inhalers to "ease the quese," and waterproof iPad covers. I've always like the bright Rum Reggae batik shirts from Indonesia that get displayed each year, but it's hard for me to figure out what kind of diver wears the Goth look that Surface Interval Clothing peddles. Scuba do-rags appear every year, but the only divers I've ever seen wearing a do-rag are aging, bulging men trying to look youthful and hip, but they're fooling no one. There's hardly a funky dive resort that doesn't have a three-inch ring hanging on an overhead string that you try to launch in an arc in order to catch a hook screwed into a wall in its bar. Anyone can make one, but I'll be damned if Mellow Militia was trying to sell them for $29.95....