North Florida cave diver, Woody Jasper, first invented the Explorer Reel around 1980. As cave explorations were becoming longer, deeper, and more extensive a reel was needed that could help an explorer make some serious penetrations into a virgin cave system. Less likely to entangle than other reels on the market, Woody’s original reel was made of aluminum and a PVC spool. The side-handle style of the reel lent itself to exploration because it could easily switch from hand to hand while laying out line.
Twenty years later, sidewinder-style reels were popularized in the technical diving community when DIR aficionados began using them for paying out line in deep caves at high speed on a DPV. Our Sidewinder series of reels are designed to be anti-jam by using precision machine tolerances between the frame and the spool making it nearly impossible for the line to slip between the spool and the handle.
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