Most of the time accessing dive sites is straightforward. You giant stride from a boat. You back roll off a zodiac, you waddle (inelegantly) through the surf and submerge. Usually, you gear up near the water and get in. Sometimes you do a little bit of a walk to get to the water’s edge. When that happens, your back aches and you ready yourself to submerge as fast as possible, forehead beaded with sweat, patience depleting at a steady freefall.

We won’t even talk about the sites that require an actual hike because, unless you’re an expedition cave junkie with a team to help you haul your heavy gear, you’re not going to be backpacking that 35-pound-heavy aluminum 80 on a one-mile hike—not unless there’s a pot of gold at the end of the trail.

When it comes to the weight of dive gear and the quantity of equipment required for diving, I’ll admit, the scuba gear industry has some work to do.

Until recently, I thought locations off the beaten path were all but inaccessible. Long hike to a mountain lake? No diving. Remote island with no dive shop? No diving, right?

Wrong. Blu3’s backpack-sized tankless dive system changes everything.

Related Reading: The Best Scuba Diving Accessories in 2022

I Tried Tankless Diving and Here’s How It Went

The day after DEMA 2022, the Blu3 team, David Golubev and Blake Carmichael, invited Scuba Diving magazine and PADI Club to join them on a paddle and dive trip at Rainbow Springs State Park. Not only would we get an opportunity to experience LIVE Watersports’ hardy paddleboards, but we’d get to try Blu3’s innovative tankless diving systems—the Nomad and the Nemo.

Though I’d never seen tankless dive gear in action, the benefit of this system—so small it fitted in a backpack—was obvious. It was light and portable. Not only would it give people access to hard-to-reach bodies of water but it would also serve as “a gateway drug to scuba diving” given you don’t need a scuba certification to try it.

A Day of Firsts

A merry band of water rats, we arrived with naught but wetsuits, fins, weights, and mask and snorkel. Most of the group would board the Rainbow River Water Taxi. Once they’d reached their “put in” point, they’d enter the water and either snorkel back, or dive back using the Nemo, equipped with a 10-foot-long hose. Only two of us would get the chance to try both the paddleboards and the Nomad—Blu3’s system equipped with a 40-foot hose.

I waved goodbye to my team aboard the water taxi and turned to Blake.

“Right, how does the work?”

Related Reading: A Year-Round Guide to the Best Diving in Florida

The short of it was: board the paddleboard, sit and enjoy the ride. Blake would be doing all the work ferrying me up the river, right up until the Nomad and I were to join forces and dive back.

I tried my best not to think about the extra ten pounds I’d put on over the course of my last two travel assignments, and returned his easy smile, jokingly saying he’d made a poor choice in picking me instead of my smaller counterpart, Ariella, who had boarded another paddleboard just across from us.

Fortunately, a core selling point of the LIVE paddleboard is that it is virtually untippable. Both Blake and I as well as our Nomad companion were just fine.

As we (Blake) rowed, I took in the surrounding Florida environs, still so new to me just five months after leaving the Pacific Northwest. Instead of fir trees, an overcast sky, and pickle-green water, Florida’s river’s sparkled in the sunlight, clear as glass. Long spotted fish with avian beaks—I’d later learn were called gar—moved calmly below the surface, and tropical foliage, ferns and mangroves, spilled into the water

When we hit the turnaround point, Ari and I geared up. The entire process took a minute. Blake handed me a weight belt stacked with hot pink one-pound slugs and then showed me how to put the Nomad’s harness on. I clipped my GoPro to the D-Ring on the weight belt, positioned my mask on my face, and slipped into the welcome cool.

As I waited for Ari to join me with her Nomad, I decided to test my own out. I flipped the switch on the regulator, turning it on, and took a breath. If I’d been on land I would have jumped! The system came to life with a purr and gave me the breath of air I’d requested. I watched it floating in the water next to me, shuddering each time I inhaled—so familiar and yet so strange too. It’s not often scuba gear leaves me feeling somewhat out of my element, but when it does, it’s a welcome feeling—a challenge for my brain, a new adventure.

Unless you’re a diver yourself, you won’t notice anything out of the ordinary. If you are a diver, you’ll feel the difference in breathing, more visceral on this system than SCUBA.

The beauty of the way the Nomad and Nemo breathe, has to do with the fact that ease of breathing is correlated with battery life. The harder it gets to pull a breath of air, the lower the battery life. In this way, you don’t ever really have the excuse of saying, “What, I ran out of air? But I had no idea…” You’d know. Blu3 explains it better in their FAQ.

As a safety precaution, it’s recommended anyone diving with a Nomad or a Nemo, carry a small Spare Air with them. These tanks are light and easy to sling and Blu3 has even provided instructions for doing as much using their own harness. The best thing about the Spare Air canisters is that with the help of a small adapter, they can be filled from your own scuba tank.

Once Ari joined me, we bungeed our long, trailing hoses into neatly packed loops, creating somewhat shorter tethers. If it got deeper than 15 feet we’d pop to the surface and let out some more hose.

Though Ari and I had never before dived together we were a good match in the water, moving at the same speed, writers’ eyes devouring the underwater scenery, frog-kick our scull of choice.

It didn’t take long to get used to the feeling of diving with no more gear than a weight belt. It was liberating. I stretched my arms out as though I was a bird and skimmed through the long grass to either side of me.

The river had carved out a clear channel and as we enjoyed the drift back, I couldn’t help but reach for my GoPro. This experience needed capturing.

Related Reading: 10 Tips for Taking Great Videos Underwater

Ari was a good subject for the camera, her white fins and red slug weights standing out against the green-blue backdrop and her long ponytail, segmented as it was, made her look like a blonde version of Lara Croft, her adventurous personality a perfect match. An avid freediver, I was curious to know what she thought of this system—how did it feel to her, already so used to luxuriating in the lack of dive gear.

Before long Blake and another diver joined us. They explored with even more confidence than we did, looking as natural as the native fish curious enough to follow our meandering—small schools of bluegill and the occasional grumpy looking largemouth bass.

Ari and I swayed with the river grasses, and we dipped into larger, deeper basins. At one point we saw water gushing out of huge hole, perhaps even a cavern. After at least 45 minutes in the water I began to feel the cold, my 2/3 mm wetsuit no match for the 72 degree water. On top of that breathing was getting harder—my Nomad’s battery life was drawing down.

I decided to call it quits and signaled to Ari that I was cold. She gave me the okay and we both returned to the surface to find our team’s paddleboards just behind us, easily able to follow the bobbing blue Nomads with the bright red dive flags atop them.

David was still busy taking photographs with his drone and the rest of my team waiting for us on shore.

“How was it?” a colleague asked as I clambered back on board the dock.

It took a second for me to think of a response.

“It’s like scuba but it’s also not. It’s a gamechanger.”

I have no doubt that one day I’ll come across these systems in dive shops world over. I’ll watch a bachelorette party or a family rent a half-dozen. I’ll maybe even glimpse them experiencing their first dive, their astonishment at the existence of a world they never knew existed until now.

Need to Know:

The dive site: Rainbow River Springs State Park.

Water temperature: 72 degrees, pretty much year-round.

Average depth: 10 to 20 feet.

What do Blu3’s tankless diving systems cost? The Nemo starts at $1,099, and the Nomad at $1,999.

What other accessories will you need: Fins, Mask, Snorkel, and Weight Belt. We recommend Bright Weights as they’re easy to adjust. 1.1lb slugs can be popped in and out at the drop of a hat.