Ocean Reef Visit – Jacki and Ricky go to Italy!
Ricky and I just visited the Ocean Reef Headquarters in Genoa, Italy for business and training.
The Ocean Reef compound is rather large, as we found on our first day. We were taken for a tour of the factory and the rest of the facilities. We first visited the Research and Development Areas, the show rooms, the servicing stations and the office areas. It’s really nice to see where and how things are made.
One of main aims for the visit, was to get trained in servicing of the Integrated Dive Masks (IDM), regulators and underwater communication systems, and this took four full days of training.
We spent some time learning about the products first of course, how they are made, the design, very interesting from an engineering point of view. This was of course followed by hand-on servicing.
But we also had to be trained to actually use the IDM and other Ocean Reef Products in their indoor pool. Ricky has had training and experience with the IDM already, but for me it was my first time. Guess what, it was quite fun! Thankfully, the pool is a heated indoor one, if not, I would have died.
I really enjoyed it. Being able to breath through your nose instead of your mouth will be something many divers might actually prefer. My favourite part was the MRT or Modified Rhyme Test. This is a communications test. What happens is that one person will say a word at a time, and we would record what we heard. It is to train our hearing and pronunciation while using the Ocean Reef communication systems. “Did you say MARK, BARK, PARK, LARK? or… FARK?”
We were trained to service the entire integrated mask system including the 2nd stage and mask.
The Second stage is designed to deliver a higher volume of air because the air has to be delivered into the mask rather than the mouth directly. After four days of work, we can now proudly say that ADA is now an International Training Center for Ocean Reef products. We will be launching our full face mask training and servicing in Singapore in 2016, so look out for it!
