Sea Scooter

The sea scooter, to most people, will no doubt remind them of scuba scenes with James Bond or the all in black world of the technical diver. These DPVs or diver propulsion vehicles are a rarity. This may be because they’re extremely expensive. If you are a water enthusiast who would love to fly around effortlessly underwater without extra propulsion of a drift dive current, this is the toy for you. These are now widely available at many high street stores.

This Sea scooter could be treated as your own personal water propeller, similar to water sports like scuba diving and snorkelling. The scooter is a luminous yellow colour with a black trim and weighs approximately 6kg and stands just over half a meter tall. If you are a gadget fanatic, you will have great fun using your own personal water propeller but a bit of fiddling will be needed first.

At first, you will have to do a little bit of messing and fiddling around with the sea scooter before taking it beneath the waves. It may take a while to figure out how to remove the nose cone but with a little patience and time this is actually quite simple to do. Once the cone has been removed, there is a hollow seal-tight vessel; this is the buoyancy control chamber and assorted weights can be put in here to make the unit neutrally buoyant. Don’t worry, this is a bit of hit and miss as buoyancy changes during descent.

The next step is the inner nose cone. To get at this, you will need a foot pump; this is supplied with the scooter. Once you start pumping, air into the inner chamber, the lid will pop up, giving you access to the battery compartment. It is the next stage of preparation which may be a bit scary for the novice. Charging the battery can take between four and six hours and this is the scary bit, it comes with a warning of possible explosive gas release.

Once the scooter has been charged and reassembled, you are ready to dive. The sea scooter can dive to a respectable 20m, ideally suited to explore a shallow tropical reef, for example. When you have flicked the master switch on, you have to hold down the trigger to help fire the scooter up. The sea scooter has a maximum speed of 2mph. This may seem quite slow but when considering you may want to admire all the marine life the speed is sufficient.

The advantage of owning powered underwater propulsion means not having to use lots of energy kicking your legs around. By using less physical effort, air consumption is greatly reduced. The sea scooters standard battery life is only 40 minutes. If your battery does run out then the scooter can become a cumbersome dead weight, so always check on your battery allowance.

The Sea scooter has really impressed a lot of people with its manoeuvrability with the aqua-dynamic design and handles acting as an effective aqua-plane. It has easy steering and ascent or descent runs very smooth, with doing all the manoeuvres you would wish it to do and can even tow you around a tight turning curve with ease.