Vayu:
What can motivate a statement such as this? I really have to disagree and refuse to see DIR diving as something that needs to be preached. This would imply faith and thinking divers generally don't take things on faith alone. There has been and will continue to be specialized types of diving that happen on the exploration end of things. You won't find me doing any of it. It requires an extreme personality to be doing true exploring and all divers doing it take extreme measures. I believe the original poster wants to find the best method of doing it and he thinks some DIR affiliated divers have that knowledge. Maybe they do or maybe they don't. In either case I believe it is a good thing to ask a question and a bad thing to tell divers with questions that they need to go someplace else. Our goal in this forum is to help people become safer divers and I believe a little respect is in order.
I had abandoned this thread because well, you can't teach pigs to sign. But, this is the second example of political correctness gone completely awry in this thread. It was just an analogy, and, a rather good one. Get over it. It was rather good because it was accurate in a twisted sort of way. I dive with three of the five GUE cave instructors (the last word in GUE DIR). There are only five folks, this is a very small part of the diving community. Not take classes from them, load up tanks and go do fun dives. So, when I gave their answer on sidemount it really was the complete position. If you don't like the answer, head over to the hogarthian section and ask. Of course, the current "hogarthian" diving has about as much in common with DIR as Muslims do with Catholics. They both involve diving, but that is about where the similarity stops.
Now, do I think I would be taking abnormal risks doing a sidemount dive in a stable system if I was only swimming a single stage. Not really. But, the exploring/ fun dives I do tend to be more than that. So, for dives at the level I am discussing, yes, it is too much unnecessary risk. For less experienced cave divers I would consider even basic sidemount dives an unnecessary risk. And, if it is just a fun cave dive, caves where you can get the much better thought out backmount system will always be my preference. Yes there are some squirrly caves around the world that require sidemount. Unfortunately, most of the people that live near these caves don't have the experience to dive them in what I would consider a safe manner.
I think it was Lamont that summed it up really well, the most risk adverse of the more agressive divers. There was a recent incident where the diver is doing just fine thanks to the risk parania of his teammates. A similar incident happened to the personal preference crowd a few years ago and the body count went up.
DIR can teach you how to do insane dives with minimum risk if you want to put a great deal of time and money into learning how. Otherwise, there are lots of shortcuts. Feel free to take them. Alternatively, keep the dives really simple like the majority of the diving public does. Those of us that actually understand DIR (it isn't about the gear) prefer the long route even if it is just to move the risk decimal one more place on the simple dives.
