DIR, NAUI TEC - Gear configs

[nereas]

So the more I look around different sites, and the more research I do into various subjects, the more I keep running into gear configurations talking about DIR and NAUI TEC configs. Was even able to find a site that talked about NAUI TEC configs and how hoses are routed and such. Basically, at least for me, not being able to physically look at the configs and see how things are routed, connected, etc, it all became very confusing very quickly.

Basically, I was looking at these different configurations to see about streamlining and standardizations. My normal dive buddy knows my config, and I know his (including the little quirk of his dive computer being on his right side) extremely well. I just hate having hoses hanging out and items drooping off of me when I'm diving, and kinda looking to streamline my profile some. I guess normally people don't start looking at things like this until they start thinking tech diving and such. Guess it's just this little bad habit I have of wanting to learn everything I can about things I do.

So, basically what I'm asking is multi-faceted. 1) What the heck is DIR? 2) Anyone got a simple (going to have to Barney Fife this one) description or link for the gear setups required for these? (Pictures help, as I'm more visually oriented than descriptive when it comes to learning).

Thanks ahead of time.

With your 0 - 24 dives, if that is true, then the main thing for you to do is decide when to move onto a BPW. Eventually most really good divers do, now, since BPs are now weight integrated with weight plates.

The normal progression is typically first from a rental jacket BC, to a back-inflation wing B/C, and ultimately to a BPW.

NAUI should have trained you not to have anything dangling from your gear, under the "C" for "clips" of the ABCD dive-prep mnemonic.

If you were trained by PADI then you probably still need to "Put Another Dollar In" (called "peak performance buoyancy") before they will clean you up so that you don't still look like a scorpion fish with gear dangling everywhere and dragging your console.

Don't get all worried about the "streamlining" debate, which is code for currents within caves. If you never dive a cave, then streamlining is unlikely to be a significant issue.

If you buy a DPV, then streamlining is nice, but again not critical to anything, unless you are racing against your buddies with their DPVs.

More important is that your gear be balanced, and that your trim be good, so that you hover horizontally in the water.

As important as your balance and trim, your weighting is also quite important. You should be wearing as little weight as you need for the conditions of your dive. Excess weight is a hazard.

When you take care of trim and balance and weighting, then streamlining will take care of itself naturally.

DIR has been hijacked by GUE to coin their own version of cave diving. This phrase has fallen out of favor except for an unpopular group who are ultra-conformist and anti-individualist in their methods.

"Hogarthian" is what most people call their configuration today, when they do not want to be sullied by "DIR."

Hogarthian means a BPW, a minimalistic configuration of your own choosing, nothing dangling, everything within easy reach, redundancy as necessary determined by the dive, horizontal trim, balance left and right, DIN, etc.

Aim for hogarthian. And then you will be a better diver.

NAUI Tech is for those who want to tackle caves or SCRs or deco. If you want to become a tech diver, that is where you would go.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

With your 0 - 24 dives, if that is true, then the main thing for you to do is decide when to move onto a BPW. Eventually most really good divers do, now, since BPs are now weight integrated with weight plates.

The normal progression is typically first from a rental jacket BC, to a back-inflation wing B/C, and ultimately to a BPW.

NAUI should have trained you not to have anything dangling from your gear, under the "C" for "clips" of the ABCD dive-prep mnemonic.

If you were trained by PADI then you probably still need to "Put Another Dollar In" (called "peak performance buoyancy") before they will clean you up so that you don't still look like a scorpion fish with gear dangling everywhere and dragging your console.

Don't get all worried about the "streamlining" debate, which is code for currents within caves. If you never dive a cave, then streamlining is unlikely to be a significant issue.

If you buy a DPV, then streamlining is nice, but again not critical to anything, unless you are racing against your buddies with their DPVs.

More important is that your gear be balanced, and that your trim be good, so that you hover horizontally in the water.

As important as your balance and trim, your weighting is also quite important. You should be wearing as little weight as you need for the conditions of your dive. Excess weight is a hazard.

When you take care of trim and balance and weighting, then streamlining will take care of itself naturally.

DIR has been hijacked by GUE to coin their own version of cave diving. This phrase has fallen out of favor except for an unpopular group who are ultra-conformist and anti-individualist in their methods.

"Hogarthian" is what most people call their configuration today, when they do not want to be sullied by "DIR."

Hogarthian means a BPW, a minimalistic configuration of your own choosing, nothing dangling, everything within easy reach, redundancy as necessary determined by the dive, horizontal trim, balance left and right, DIN, etc.

Aim for hogarthian. And then you will be a better diver.

NAUI Tech is for those who want to tackle caves or SCRs or deco. If you want to become a tech diver, that is where you would go.

Good grief ... more pearls of wisdom from our resident Minister of Misinformation ...

People don't "migrate" from one style of BCD to another as their skills improve ... they typically purchase what they're familiar with. Most start with a jacket-style because that's what they used for OW class, and that's what the dive shop tells them they need. Depending on where you dive, and the type of diving you do, that may be all you will ever need.

Good divers are not defined by the type of gear they wear ... they're defined by their mental approach to diving, and by their devotion to continuously improving their skills. It has nothing to do with agencies, or gear. It has to do with dive planning and management, good awareness and communication skills, good buoyancy control, and attention to how your gear is arranged so as to suit the type of dive for which it is being used.

There is little to distinguish NAUI Tech (open circuit) from GUE DIR from the standpoint of gear configuration ... they're virtually identical. NAUI Tech is a bit less rigid, since it does not build the gear configuration as part of a "holistic" approach to diving as GUE does ... but from the gear perspective, they're functionally the same thing.

And it's not just for cave diving ... we don't have caves here in the Pacific Northwest. We have deep wrecks and walls. The configuration in question ... whether DIR or NAUI Tech ... perfectly suits our needs for doing dives beyond recreational limits.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[nereas]

... NAUI Tech is a bit less rigid, since it does not build the gear configuration as ... GUE does ...

My point exactly, thanks for confirming this much.

And you're right, that there are no caves in the PNW. Since you are not diving in the WKPP, then it makes little sense that you would be diving GUE-DIR.

GUE-DIR is cave oriented, and a mismatch for open water shipwreck diving.

And if you are not diving deep shipwrecks either, then any tech config makes little sense either for you. Although if you were diving wrecks, then NAUI Tech would make more sense for you in the PNW.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

And if you are not diving deep shipwrecks either, then any tech config makes little sense either for you. Although if you were diving wrecks, then NAUI Tech would make more sense for you in the PNW.

Not necessarily ... on either point.

I was diving walls last week that went down to well over 300 feet. But I was constrained to recreational depths by the gear I was using. Since we were in the middle of nowhere, it made little sense to bring a tech rig ... getting a T-bottle of helium in there would've been problematic.

For the first time in my life I was wondering how much it would cost me to transition to a rebreather.

Moral of the story is that your optimal choice of configuration is going to depend on three things ...

- Your training
- Your objectives
- Your circumstances

I enjoy diving the way I do ... but in some circumstances I have to accept that it won't be the optimal solution. That's going to be true no matter what program you choose, or what configuration you end up diving.

Also, I think NAUI Tech is a great program ... but I didn't choose it because I wanted to do a particular style of diving. I chose it because I connected with an instructor I felt I could really learn from ... and that's what he happened to teach. If he'd been a TDI or IANTD instructor, I'd have been trained through those programs ... because just like with recreational diving, finding an instructor who you can really hear, understand, and learn from is the first priority.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[TSandM]

And you're right, that there are no caves in the PNW. Since you are not diving in the WKPP, then it makes little sense that you would be diving GUE-DIR.

GUE-DIR is cave oriented, and a mismatch for open water shipwreck diving.

And if you are not diving deep shipwrecks either, then any tech config makes little sense either for you. Although if you were diving wrecks, then NAUI Tech would make more sense for you in the PNW.

I'm sorry; I'm usually polite, but this is absolute hogwash. There are a BUNCH of people diving deep and challenging shipwrecks in the PNW using the DIR equipment configuration and DIR procedures, and doing it safely and having tons of fun in the process.

Once you get into technical diving -- obligatory decompression or overhead environments, or both -- you need technical gear. The DIR technical setup works fine in both environments; it's not really different from the NTEC setup. Almost anyone who dives doubles dives a BP/W, and most dive a simple harness. Most technical divers use a canister light of some sort, and almost anyone who dives OC in an overhead environment uses some kind of long hose. The only thing that is DIFFERENT about the DIR configuration is the lack of individual prerogative in setting it up.

And, although I won't argue that you NEED a BP/W/long hose configuration for simple, recreational open water diving, I DO think "donate the primary" is the safest approach (my opinion) and it requires a longer primary hose. I DO think that standardizing gear between buddies adds to safety (or decreases stress in emergencies, which I think is the same thing). I DO think that strong personal diving skills make anybody's dive more fun, and I think a strong team-oriented approach adds to safety AND fun.

So, if you define "tech setup" as a BP/W/long hose, I think it's a perfectly useful gear configuration for recreational diving, whether in the PNW or elsewhere. And it has the signal virtue of being immediately adaptable to more aggressive diving, should one eventually decide to pursue it, which is something you can't say about most of the gear configurations people start out with.

One of the things I love about GUE . . . If you are completely happy diving within recreational limits, they're cool with that. But unlike my original training, which strongly implied that decompression or overhead environments were the province of a small group of very aberrant divers, DIR simply says there's a spectrum of diving, and you can be anywhere on it that you want to be. The transitions are seamless.

 

[nereas]

I'm sorry; I'm usually polite, but this is absolute hogwash. There are a BUNCH of people diving deep and challenging shipwrecks in the PNW using the DIR equipment configuration and DIR procedures, and doing it safely and having tons of fun in the process.

Once you get into technical diving -- obligatory decompression or overhead environments, or both -- you need technical gear. The DIR technical setup works fine in both environments; it's not really different from the NTEC setup. Almost anyone who dives doubles dives a BP/W, and most dive a simple harness. Most technical divers use a canister light of some sort, and almost anyone who dives OC in an overhead environment uses some kind of long hose. The only thing that is DIFFERENT about the DIR configuration is the lack of individual prerogative in setting it up.

And, although I won't argue that you NEED a BP/W/long hose configuration for simple, recreational open water diving, I DO think "donate the primary" is the safest approach (my opinion) and it requires a longer primary hose. I DO think that standardizing gear between buddies adds to safety (or decreases stress in emergencies, which I think is the same thing). I DO think that strong personal diving skills make anybody's dive more fun, and I think a strong team-oriented approach adds to safety AND fun.

So, if you define "tech setup" as a BP/W/long hose, I think it's a perfectly useful gear configuration for recreational diving, whether in the PNW or elsewhere. And it has the signal virtue of being immediately adaptable to more aggressive diving, should one eventually decide to pursue it, which is something you can't say about most of the gear configurations people start out with.

One of the things I love about GUE . . . If you are completely happy diving within recreational limits, they're cool with that. But unlike my original training, which strongly implied that decompression or overhead environments were the province of a small group of very aberrant divers, DIR simply says there's a spectrum of diving, and you can be anywhere on it that you want to be. The transitions are seamless.

You might need a snorkel sometime, when you are in the open water. So just make sure you have one somewhere, in a cargo pocket or someplace on your person. GUE-DIR does not emphasize that, since GUE consists of cave protocols, and in caves a snorkel would never be needed since you are never out at sea.

And I sure would not depend on GUE's "deco on the fly." Most of the people whom I know ended up in the hyperbaric recompression chambre were using this when they got hit. They always blame themselves by saying "something must be wrong with me because deco on the fly should have worked."

But it does not work, at least not very well.

And since a 3 person "team" can quickly end up as a cluster, you might want to practice solo tech diving, with all its independent redundancy (2 computers), in case you end up alone and separated from your GUE buddies.

I love you dearly TSM. And so I sure would not want to see you injured by GUE's failures for open water tech diving.

 

[vshearer]

Nereas,

I took you off my "ignore" list as I find your posts quite entertaining.

 

[nereas]

Not necessarily ... on either point.

I was diving walls last week that went down to well over 300 feet. But I was constrained to recreational depths by the gear I was using. Since we were in the middle of nowhere, it made little sense to bring a tech rig ... getting a T-bottle of helium in there would've been problematic.

For the first time in my life I was wondering how much it would cost me to transition to a rebreather.

Moral of the story is that your optimal choice of configuration is going to depend on three things ...

- Your training
- Your objectives
- Your circumstances

I enjoy diving the way I do ... but in some circumstances I have to accept that it won't be the optimal solution. That's going to be true no matter what program you choose, or what configuration you end up diving.

Also, I think NAUI Tech is a great program ... but I didn't choose it because I wanted to do a particular style of diving. I chose it because I connected with an instructor I felt I could really learn from ... and that's what he happened to teach. If he'd been a TDI or IANTD instructor, I'd have been trained through those programs ... because just like with recreational diving, finding an instructor who you can really hear, understand, and learn from is the first priority.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

The best diver on this Earth whom I know is AG, and even he broke away from GUE. That simply says it all.

 

[nereas]

Nereas,

I took you off my "ignore" list as I find your posts quite entertaining.

Good man!

Warning: you will be required to think for yourself now, however, when you read them. Thinking for yourself could be hazardous if you are not used to it.

 

[vshearer]

I enjoy diving the way I do ... but in some circumstances I have to accept that it won't be the optimal solution. That's going to be true no matter what program you choose, or what configuration you end up diving.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

I have just recently started to understand this.