Dive Torch review by Ben Reymenants – Underwater Light Dude

I destroy things.

Not because I like to, just because my job poses high demands towards equipment.

As a ccr cave instructor trainer, I live like a coal-miner; most of the week in the outback and every day underground. If there’s one thing I could afford to be picky about, it would be the dive torch I’m carrying.

Having logged over a 1000 cave dives and having consumed a sizeable resume of canister lights, you start to notice a pattern in failures, handicaps and not in the least, practicality. If a light doesn’t sit well or is clumsy to run, it becomes a nuisance, an unnecessary stressor in an already hostile environment. Moving parts, twisting cables and o-rings, charging issues, airport drama’s.. Enough to write a novel.

I was asked to test two dive torch prototypes. They endured short of a 1000 overhead dives, one of them kept my world bright during a long 700-foot dive, 5 times they went past the 500-foot mark, exposed to near freezing mines in finland, 50 degrees and above in Egypts’ desert. In short, properly abused. They looked like transmission pods that had been dragged by a whale for half a century.

I finally managed to partially flood one light by smashing it into the cave wall at 300feet of depth. I could see water trickling past the crack in the screen. But the light kept working. They were ready for crash test investigation and were sent back to the lab. Damien Siviero made final adjustments to the prototype in Australia and a few months later, Bobby Franklin assembled the first models back in the States. By simply eliminating failure points, UWLD came up with possibly the most simple array of underwater lights on the planet, yet managed to compact serious state of the art technology in a small black delrin box, literally sealed off from the technical diver who typically wants to pry everything open. Through-the-hull-charging, thermal security,Piezo technology, NSA compliance, ultralight, modular and sexy.