PfcAJ
Contributor
I mean stopping movement. If you *cant* stop without kicking yer flippers (especially at the tech level) your skills aren't up to snuff. Everything you do in the water should be your choice. OW divers should strive for that, too.What do you mean by stopping? If you mean maintaining your position in the water - I'd say it was important. If you mean you can do it without moving a fin then I think it's over the top. As a side note - I find being head down much better for looking at stuff than being in trim.
I often backfin slightly when doing shutdown drills. I don't disturb silt, and I don't lose anyone, or lose the line. It's perfectly functional.
I don't want to get into willy waving - but I've done a fair bit of deco in my time, and a couple of hours of deco is not that uncommon. I manage without the buffer when I chose to do so. As do most people. If you need the "buffer" I'd argue that you are not ready for technical diving.
What does it add? How is it safer? And what makes you think you know more than they did? I don't like GI... I think he was a despicable man who should be ashamed of himself. But I'll never know as much as he did. I'll never be able to think about doing the dives he did. And I wouldn't dream of saying I knew better than the founders of DIR.
As a side note - and not meaning to be pedantic. But on which open water course are you doing shut down drills in trim, mid-water whilst not moving your fins?
Why do you backfin? Just...stop. Then you don't have to do anything! Your flippers have nothing to do with twisting knobs. Remove them from the equation.
"I don't want to get into willy waving"...proceeds to willy wave....
I can deco upside down and backwards dude. It makes it easier to deco when flat. Why make my life harder?
What makes me think I know more than they did? Weve had time to accumulate knowledge since then. All kinds of stuff went on during the gensis of DIR that doesn't fly today.
Not sure if by "open water" you mean like an entry scuba class or an open ocean decompression class, but on a t2 course if your flippers are goin' when they don't need to be goin' it'll be brought up. It's not pretty when someone's fins are moving and they're moving toward the team, away from the team, up, down, in a circle, etc. All you gotta do is take your feet out of gear and stop moving.