Roatan Tec Center x Lost Venture Club Mid Summer Collection
Established in 2007 and formerly known as Caribbean Sidemount Diving, the shop did a short stint as the Roatan Tec Team before Roatan Tec Center was born. Founded by Monty, a Canadian commercial dive welder with a skull tramp stamp and a fondness for Nickelback. He was a early pioneer of Sidemount in the Caribbean. I showed up on the island in 2012 as a DiveMaster in training and within the year blew my savings and worked my way up to Tech Instructor. The next few years we built up an epic Tec team, sweet talked more and more people out of their money and eventually RTC grew out of its scrappy beginnings in the Coconut Tree compressor room.
Towards the end of my time at RTC I wanted to make a play on our logo. Unofficially sponsored by Salva Vida beer (1 of only 2 beers you can reliably get on island) we made a super small run of tees. Our 100 meter dive edition was initially to honor the few who dared venture that deep with us, but the word got out and more and more people wanted in so we folded.
So we came up with a collection. Despite my best efforts for breaking the mold by wearing a yellow mask, Black on Black is of the official color of Tec divers. So to stay true to our roots I got together with my local screen printer Joe, whipped up a rad black metallic like blend and hammed out a small batch of shirts and hoodies, they look un real! I now want everything I own to be in that black BUT I also wanted more color! We only a had a few shirts left to screen and I thought a blend of our traditional sea foam green with that black could look cool. Joe cleaned and reset the screens applied the ink and I was like.. "fuck this isn't going to look good" but Joe nailed it. They are perfect!
No collection is complete with out a few accessories. From stickers to sunnies we went all out setting up with Knockaround & Feild Notes. Two companies who's products we used every day for the last 6+ years.
First off stickers! Plus even the most hard core Tec diver can't resist a sticker. In honor of the shop that let us hide in their compressor room as our office, we reworked the Coconut Tree Divers Logo and added it to the sticker pack along with our re imaged logo by the awesome @olinevod and we tossed in a LVC to top it off.
We hooked up with Knockaround to bring in Black On Black editions of polarized, and non polarized for you cheep kids, sunglasses. I went thru a ton of sunnies over the years and none held up like my fleet of Knockarounds. I became known for my rotating pair of brightly colored sunnies and when you live in the water you never leave home with out shades. I routinely wear-them with me in the water and toss them in a pocket on dives, just drop them in the water bucket with the cameras after and your good to go! I can't say their bullet proof but they are impact proof and most importantly...They make you look cool!
Back in late 2012 I got my hands on a pack of Field Notes Expedition Edition. I read they had put the books thru a battery of test to show how durable they where but tests are different then reality. At the time I was doing DM training in Central America and the mix between sun, salt and humidity shortened the life of everything from a phone to the people but I needed a new option for a log book. I left them in the sun for days, took them on a ton of dives shoving them in sand and mud, rarely if ever cleaning them but the pages never tore and the ink never ran. 7 years later my Expedition note books like used but 100% intact. Field Notes was not playing around when they made the Expedition Edition, they are crazy durable!
Everyone wants to be a Tec diver and if your not then fuck it just look like one.
Tramp stamp not included.
This collection represent our "soft-launch" and we never expected to be able to bring so many brands we are passion it about to parallel our pipe dream. We got so much coming down the road its hard to give spoilers but theres a new ocean on the horizon.