All text and pictures in this article are © Copyrighted by
Bert Dodde

Introduction

On april 8th 2001, professional diver, inventor and helmet producer Ben Miller from Harper, Texas, passed away while he was on holiday in Peru with his wife Jan St. Anne. This was a great loss to the diving industry. Within DWEG plans were made to arrange a memorial rally for Ben. We talked to Jan about it and guess what she said: "if you're going to organise a memorial rally for Ben, I want to be there!". We never counted on that, since Texas and The Netherlands are quite a distance apart!

You can imagine we all felt very excited about the idea of Jan coming over to us. We made proper arrangements on our side and Jan arranged flight tickets and someone to look after the animals on the BenJani ranch. In the original plan, the rally was ment to be held on april 8th 2002. Because most of us had problems getting a day off, we decided to move to sunday april 14th.

But Jan came over a few days before so we had the opportunity to show this girl a good time! It was her first trip to Holland and we showed her some nice places like, ofcourse, Amsterdam, the tulip fields, the Floriade and Antwerp. Jan, Monique and Karin posing with an old fishing boat.

The big day

Finally, the big day arrived! The weather was great and we dived the Miller 400 and other modern diving helmets like the Aquadyne, Swindell, Kirby 27 .

Safety first! We got a safety instruction prior to the dive and a debriefing at the end of the day. Rob (left) explaining the features of the Kirby 27 an Kees all there is to know about DDH#1 (Dutch Diving helmet # 1). Another one of our good customs is that the owner of the equipment is to go down first. 
Have you arranged safety procedures within your working equipment group?

As you can see, Jan loved it!

A big advantage of the Miller diving helmet is that the diver 
can put it on and take it off, without the tender's help.

First divers in the water! From left to right: Rob, Kees and Bert.
We normally use this specific location when underwater photos are to be made. 
Not so long back, video shots were taken here when we contributed to a program on national TV.
We are not only interested in standard equipment! What about this rig! Sandra is about to go down in an East German MEDI double hose regulator rig. MEDI produced diving helmets as well.

Continue to part 2 of the Ben Miller Memorial Rally