Is a Pony Bottle too complicated for a beginner?

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My feeling is a beginner should not be using a pony. A key point of recreational (no stop) diving is that in an emergency you can ascend to the surface without any decompression / safety stop and have a less than 1 % chance of DCI. You should be able to swim the 60 or 90 ft to the surface without requiring a breath. I learnt to use a pony when I was doing SSI advanced (40 m) and going inside wrecks, caverns etc. My club now requires me to carry one on all dives over 20m because of covid - no air sharing. Dives of less than 20 and it is assumed we can swim to surface if out of air. I was on a dive where an elderly diver was learning to dive using 2 small side mount tanks because he had a bad back and found a larger back mounted single tank painful. I do not know what went wrong (I suspect he turned off both tank valves) but he was in considerable difficulty wriggling on the bottom when the guide got him going again on his octopus. As a beginner avoid complications.
 
The other thing divers need to understand when they decide to carry a pony is that it is NOT part of your available gas plan. It's for when stuff hits the fan and you have no other option. You still dive as if you were not carrying it.
Cylinders used to extend dive time are an entirely different matter. Usually they are referred to as stages or larger primary cylinders and an understanding of the risks of having more gas. They are part of the gas plan. Using a pony improperly to extend bottom time, especially on deeper dives, has the potential to put an untrained diver into deco. For which they may not have the gas to use.
Another misconception is that you can hand the pony off to an OOA diver. WRONG. That's your gas. The emergency reserve for an OOA diver is on your back (unless you're diving sidemount) that you planned to have for that situation.
If in the course of the assist your main starts to get lower than you like, you go on the pony and let the victim have the gas in main. Handing off a pony to a diver who is likely stressed because of the screwup they made (unless the gear suddenly failed) is risking losing control of them. They may never have used one before and now you've handed them something they don't know how to carry or where, now much gas they are actually getting, and wondering why you aren't responding like they were trained to expect.
It's like a lot of things where just because you can do something, doesn't mean it's a good idea to do that.
 
There is, within recreational diving limits and situations, really only one reason to carry a pony:

When there is a reasonable chance that you will be unable to safely and completely carry out an air sharing scenario with your buddy at any point during your dive plan.


What drives that "reasonable" chance is of course rather varriable, from an un-reliable or simply unknown buddies to diving conditions that might render a long duration close quarters contact difficult (high current on a drift dive for example)

However, as a beginer, it's going to be a lot better on to try to avoid getting to more complex situations such as those mentioned anyway.


One "non" reason to carry a pony is because you are not very good at managing your own air supply. If you can't manage a primary supply, then adding a (small) secondary one is not going to help, it's going to hinder!

The fact the OP says they are checking their SPG very often is GOOD. As a beginer you haven't yet got the feel or experience for how fast you use your air, and you are also going to have a much more variable consumption because your buoyancy and trim will be less refined, and because you are not yet "at home" underwater. I'd say by around OW dive number 20, you should really be mostly "at home" ie not be worrying or thinking continuously about the fact you are under water, and you should by this point be able to start to estimate your consumption. Try it, look at your spg, and think, i'll look in 5min, and i think it will show a reading of "x" and do that and see ho close you are! You'l also start to have a back-catalogue of dives to look up, to say "ah yes, i did a similar dive and i used "x" amount of pressure in "y" minutes". At this point, you need to be very conservative with your basic dive planning,to give yourself room to make some small mistakes, to give your self confidence that a small error is not going to spiral out of control.

Do not use the fact you are carrying an extra cylinder to cloud your judgement or change your conservative planning at this stage of your experience.

So would i recommend a pony to a beginner, no, not really. Far better to increase your plan conservatism and to end the dive or "Go shallow" with a higher reserve air volume in your backgas. There are plenty of really good beginner dives where you drop under say 100 bar, you are already "back at the boat" because you turned the dive conservatively, but you can spend another 20 min just staying at say 5m in close proximity to the boat. Here's if you suddenly notice "oops, i'm down to 50 bar" then there is no drama, simply surface.

In a big nutshell, that's it.

As far as I know, all dive training agencies teach reg donation with one's buddy as the primary way to deal with an out-of-air situation. They do not teach using a pony bottle (making a pony bottle a standard gear item for even the newest diver). I suppose they could choose to do that. But they don't. Each year, thousands of newly minted divers rely on the method they were taught. If drowning from failure of this method were common, dive agencies would not teach it. We can criticize dive agencies--none are perfect--but by and large their training works for most divers.

The only reason to carry ANY item of gear is because it is likely to be needed. Some divers find they are all too frequently effectively diving solo due to their inability to secure a reliable buddy. Those divers might need a pony bottle (and I would suggest further training in the specialty known as solo diving). The OP has only a couple of dives under his belt. He has no idea if he "needs" a pony bottle. Right now, he simply seeks "peace of mind." Every one of us wanted more of that when we were new. I suggest giving the way we were trained a chance before deciding something more is needed.
 
If slinging a 19 cu ft pony cost nothing and weighed nothing a lot more people would carry a pony. The reality is it costs 400-500 dollars new and it weighs 12.5 pounds full.

Because of that it is not part of standard training until one gets to the solo course.

Do I need to have the slung pony? Well probably not. But I have no trusted buddy, am diving with instabuddies, and as one wise Scubaboard member told me, he trusts his buddy a lot more when he is carrying redundant air.
 
If slinging a 19 cu ft pony cost nothing and weighed nothing a lot more people would carry a pony. The reality is it costs 400-500 dollars new and it weighs 12.5 pounds full.

Because of that it is not part of standard training until one gets to the solo course.

Do I need to have the slung pony? Well probably not. But I have no trusted buddy, am diving with instabuddies, and as one wise Scubaboard member told me, he trusts his buddy a lot more when he is carrying redundant air.
Not true as far as training goes. I require a redundant gas supply in my AOW class. I also teach workshops for use of them.
As far as cost goes 13 or 19 cu ft cylinder $125, pony reg first stage from Piranha 70 bucks, gauge 15 for button gauge, second stage and hose 75. Total 285. Oh rigging for the bottle 20 bucks.
 
Not true as far as training goes. I require a redundant gas supply in my AOW class. I also teach workshops for use of them.

I think that is great. Too bad you teach in the opposite side of Pennsylvania from where I train at Dutch Springs. I'd be interested in training with you.
 
My feeling is a beginner should not be using a pony. A key point of recreational (no stop) diving is that in an emergency you can ascend to the surface without any decompression / safety stop and have a less than 1 % chance of DCI. You should be able to swim the 60 or 90 ft to the surface without requiring a breath. I learnt to use a pony when I was doing SSI advanced (40 m) and going inside wrecks, caverns etc. My club now requires me to carry one on all dives over 20m because of covid - no air sharing. Dives of less than 20 and it is assumed we can swim to surface if out of air. I was on a dive where an elderly diver was learning to dive using 2 small side mount tanks because he had a bad back and found a larger back mounted single tank painful. I do not know what went wrong (I suspect he turned off both tank valves) but he was in considerable difficulty wriggling on the bottom when the guide got him going again on his octopus. As a beginner avoid complications.
In theory you should be able to rely on your buddy but the truth is that many of us dive with insta buddies and you can’t rely on those.
 
In theory you should be able to rely on your buddy but the truth is that many of us dive with insta buddies and you can’t rely on those.

True in general for “many of us,” but the OP doesn’t know or hasn’t enlightened us as to what his buddy situation is.
 
I am going to vote for holding off for awhile. Become competent with the basic rig overtime. Shops will happily sell you all sorts of stuff, not all of it will be useful. When you are competent with the basic set up, add one new thing at a time so you don’t make diving too complicated. After a while you will get a feel for the things you want and the things you need, (not necessarily the same things)
 
Divers being self reliant, and diving with friends, makes sense to me. A 19 disappears at my side. On land it's hard to tell if it is full, it is so light, though true, it likely weighs 12.5 lb. Sidemounted and the reg on a necklace makes sense to me, but I've used a necklace for awhile and normally dive sidemount.

A pony seems a good safety upgrade to the standard OW kit, given the logistic difficulties of small doubles and sidemount. Now, if you are overwhelmed by just the single tank, maybe hold off on the pony, but stay close to a good buddy who is not overwhelmed and is themselves self reliant.

There are other good safety upgrades, like better weighting, weight distribution, buoyancy control, trim control, and breathing. But for gear, its a good upgrade.
 
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