Today I got a little present at work in the form of two UPS boxes from California Digital Diving – our Aquatica housing and it’s various accessories have arrived! One box held the housing and the handles. The other (much larger) box contained the dome port, port shade/protector, strobe, sync cord, strobe arms, and various replacement parts, screws, etc.

Unfortunately, what none of the boxes contained was a readable manual. The Aquatica housing came with a very polite note from Aquatica saying that they had not yet printed the manuals, but if I send in the warranty card they’ll send me one when they’re available. The strobe manual was only in Japanese. I was able to figure some things out from the pictures, but I’m not sure enough of anything to risk dunking it in water just yet:

Other than inserting batteries and setting off a few test flashes, I didn’t try to do anything to the strobe. It has various exposed connectors that I imagine need to have things plugged into them before you get it wet. I do like that it makes a distinctive noise when it’s charging up, and has a light that switches from green to pale red to bright red depending on how charged it is. I tucked the strobe back into one of the boxes and started putting together the housing.

First, I attached the handles to the housing. Easy.

Then, I tackled the dome port and shade. This was a little trickier. The dome sits down on a ledge inside the shade, but it didn’t seem very secure, and had no obvious way to attach it. I did notice about a zillion teeny-tiny, headless screws that came as replacement parts with the shade. I looked closer at the shade and noticed it had similar screws set into its circumfernece in four spots – however, there were no matching holes in the plastic of the dome port base. I finally took a big hint from the tiny screwdriver (I forget what they’re called – the hexagonal-ended, L-shaped thingies) taped into the paper wrapping around the dome port, and just started screwing. The screws ate easily through the plastic at the base of the dome port, until they were halfway lodged in the dome port with the remaining half still in the shade. I shook it around a bit by the shade to make sure it was in there solidly, and it seemed to have worked.

To give it a “dry run,” so to speak, you’re supposed to fill it with paper towels (instead of an expensive camera) and soak the whole thing in the bathtub overnight. So I filled it up and snapped these pictures – the dome port does some funny things to the camera flash!

The whole contraption is now happily sitting in the bathtub – hopefully when I check it tomorrow morning, its innards will be nice and dry!