Why I Started Carrying a Second Mask After One Morning on a Charter

Cal's mask strap snapped in his hands on the bench of a charter boat out of Tavernier. Morning trip, boat on a mooring, first dive still twenty minutes off. Nobody aboard had a spare strap. The mate found one eventually and Cal made the second dive, but he sat out the first one watching the rest of us roll off the swim step.

I had been diving fourteen years at that point, around four hundred logged dives, and I had never carried a second mask. It had never come up. That morning it came up on somebody else's face, which is the cheapest way to learn a lesson, provided you are willing to take it.

I ordered the EXP Vision Pano 3 that same week. Three windows instead of one, tempered glass, a silicone skirt, an adjustable strap with buckle closures. Nothing on it is fancy and that suited me. It has been in my bag about ten months now, fifteen dives on it, and it is still not my main mask. That is the whole idea.

Let me be plain about what this is. My everyday mask is a Cressi Matrix with about a hundred and eighty dives on it, and the EXP Vision has not replaced it. The Pano sits in the mesh duffle in a small hard case I bought separately, because the mask ships with itself and nothing else. It comes out for shallow sand hunts and if my own strap or lens gives trouble.

Understand where I dive. I am 61, I hunt lost metal in the sand at public swim beaches and around docks where it is allowed, and my face is in the water the entire time. Most of the hunting is shallower than my usual dives. If a strap lets go out there I am not a short swim from a bench and a dry towel. A spare in the bag is the difference between finishing the morning and packing up.

Fifteen dives on it, all of them shallow sand hunts, and it has never gone on a charter dive. That is not a knock on it. That is what a spare does.

First thing I did with it was scrub both sides of the glass with plain toothpaste, the way I do any new lens, and rinse it clean. Never a flame. Then I set the strap at the carport before it ever saw water, across the crown of the head and above the ears, snug and not tight, and I have not moved it since. Tight straps are what cause leaks in the first place.

The factory anti-fog coating on it did not last. It was fine for the first handful of dives and then it was gone, and I went back to a drop of mild dish soap and a fresh water rinse like every other mask I own. I would rather tell you that than have you find out the hard way. The listing also warns against jumping into the water wearing it and against dropping it, so I never jump in wearing it. I walk in from the beach, and out of the water it gets laid lens up on a towel.

Where the Pano earns its place is the sand. All fifteen of my dives on it have been daylight hunts in ten to twenty feet, kneeling on the bottom with the detector in one hand and a scoop in the other, and the side windows are the reason I reach for it there. A single window gives you a tunnel. The three windows let me catch a shape at the edge without turning my whole head, and when you are working a grid over a swim beach that adds up over an hour.

The listing calls it a hundred and eighty degree view. That is the seller's number and I am not going to repeat it as fact, because I have not measured it and neither has anyone I know. What I can tell you is that I see more of the bottom beside me than I do through the two lenses on my regular mask, and on a sand flat that is the only part of the claim that matters to me.

Two honest faults. There is more air inside it than in my Matrix, so it takes more clearing when I come up or when I smile wrong, and it feels a little heavier on the face. Neither is a deal breaker at ten to twenty feet. I would not want it as my only mask at sixty, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It has never gone on a charter dive.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

Buy the spare before you need it, and buy it plain. Three windows, tempered glass, a skirt that seals, buckles you can work with cold hands. You do not have to spend a lot to keep a second mask in the bag, and the EXP Vision is proof of that. It is not the mask I dive, and I have said so twice now. What it is, is the reason I do not sit on a bench while the rest of the boat goes over the side. Scrub it with toothpaste, set the strap at home, keep it in a hard case in the duffle, then forget about it until the morning it matters.