Do you dive Side-Mount or Side Slung??

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Wayne at DiveSeekers

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I'm a Fish!
With this whole Side-Mount craze, I teach it myself (started before the craze), I think I see more divers actually using Side Slung over Side-Mount! I look around at our local water hole Dutch Springs, just got back from Cave Country in Florida and I am constantly seeing diver in "Side-Mount" but to me it's NOT! If you look at the diver the bottles are hanging below the chest/waist line, which causes a lot of drag and this is what I refer to as Side-Slung. To me, Side-Mount the bottles should be down below the arm pit, in line with the divers body.

Where is this coming from? Are divers just trying to figure things out on their own? If yes, divers should be taking a quality class. Is it just poor Instruction? Am I just crazy and the only one noticing this? Curious to hear everyone's take on this, especially after the corrugated hose/inflator thread.
 
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I've done both. Partly from not knowing better, just not needing to use the bungee's for a simple shallow dive (side slung worked) but more because I could not get a bungee system to work the way I wanted it to. I've switched to Lamar's ring system and so far I like it.

At :30 of this video you can see side slung
[video=youtube;G_t_eduPzOQ]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_t_eduPzOQ&list=UU5zvhnU0XYpf_cadpYJYkhQ& index=2[/video]

At 2:00 I'm sorta in between the two. To be fair to myself, I was using a harness system on a 3/2mm that was fitted for a drysuit with winter undergarments.
[video=youtube;19Ax6Wim4FA]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19Ax6Wim4FA&list=UU5zvhnU0XYpf_cadpYJYkhQ& index=15[/video]

At 2:00 of this video I was having so much fun I just plum forgot to bungee at all! It's pretty hard on hoses and SPG's though so I won't do that again.
[video=youtube;dI3u99FsPVI]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI3u99FsPVI&list=UU5zvhnU0XYpf_cadpYJYkhQ& index=16[/video]


What's wrong with figuring it out yourself?
 
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Where is this coming from?

Given the influx of zero-to-hero sidemount instructors... where the zero-to-hero process takes as little as 2 days... I have a firm notion of where I think it comes from...:shakehead:

Given that some of these zero-to-hero sidemount instructor courses are run by instructor trainers, who just got off their own zero-to-hero course.... I'm even more firm in my notion...
 
I find this thread very interesting as I'm taking the "figuring it out yourself" path ATM. I view my self more as a minimalist and there fore find myself paying more attention to the tiny things, I think a majority of the " side-slug" might not be so tedious. And I do agree with the OP in that quality training shouldn't be overlooked or underestimated. Just my .02 :)


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With this whole Side-Mount craze, I teach it myself (started before the craze), I think I see more divers actually using Side Slung over Side-Mount! I look around at our local water hole Dutch Springs, just got back from Cave Country in Florida and I am constantly seeing diver in "Side-Mount" but to me it's NOT! If you look at the diver the bottles are hanging below the chest/waist line, which causes a lot of drag and this is what I refer to as Side-Slung. To me, Side-Mount the bottles should be down below the arm pit, in line with the divers body.

Where is this coming from? Are divers just trying to figure things out on their own? If yes, divers should be taking a quality class. Is it just poor Instruction? Am I just crazy and the only one noticing this? Curious to hear everyone's take on this, especially after the corrugated hose/inflator thread.
In European and UK caving with a "Martin Farr" style harness (A precursor to Razor type harnesses now popular) everyone "stage mounts" - what you call side slung. They are half-crawling, half-swimming through muddy caves water. Its pretty normal in the sump diving universe (which has very little in common with FL or MX cave diving). Only with the advent of actual <sidemount> rigs (mostly from FL) have people started "side mounting" with the tanks up behind the armpit. Seems like only in the past year have people started talking about the differences and why something like the Farr harness (or Razor) with large steel tanks ends up not looking like a Steve Bogaerts video at all.
 
One of the biggest issues I see here in the Philippines is the use of butt plates designed for steel tanks being used with aluminium tanks, the nett result is very long leash connections from the butt plate to the tank band which leads to tanks at 45+ degrees once they drop in pressure a little – adding heave sealed diaphragm regs to the equation just brings the 45+ degree tilt on a little earlier.

In theory there’s nothing wrong with this for most forms of diving but it always such a waste of the streamlining advantage of sidemount when anyone just lets their tanks rise up like that. I had an interesting discussion with a friend recently who was explaining he had a student who was responsible for estimating the amount of drag on military ships – he estimated tanks at around 30° above trim would result in around 3 times the resistance as tanks perfectly in trim while tanks at near vertical would result in around 9 times the drag – pretty big numbers? It’s interesting how this could impact rule of thirds if diving in strong flow/current.

I'd say if the tanks are in trim it's sidemount, anything else is just modified side-slung to be honest, and that includes the use of deco tanks in tech sidemount - it's not hard to get them in trim if it's set up correctly.

And now the big whinge....

Almost anytime you see a sidemount diver here in the Philippines they are using a bad choice in harness (usually due to investing too much $$$ in the harness and saving on a cheap or no course) or they have it configured in the least efficient set-up possible – This is main down to two causes IMO – Either A, No training or B, $hity instructors, plus the fact there’s also a $hity instructor hero to zero instructor guide - a picture says a 1,000 words afterall - (in just?) one day you could look this good!?

Oh dear style sidemount.jpg

Luckily a few of us still teaching with PADI have managed to retain the distinctive sidemount specialities we were teaching long before it was as popular. I’m a big fan of PADI in many areas but the way they are pushing the sidemount course here in SE Asia, along with the fact there seems to be a never ending line of instructors ready to cast aside their jacket BCD (or even keep it and re-use it as a technical sidemount harness) and become highly experienced sidemount divers and instructors within just 24 hours of giving their credit card details, is rather annoying.

Whinge over :)
 
I&#8217;m a big fan of PADI in many areas but the way they are pushing the sidemount course here in SE Asia, along with the fact there seems to be a never ending line of instructors ready to cast aside their jacket BCD (or even keep it and re-use it as a technical sidemount harness) and become highly experienced sidemount divers and instructors within just 24 hours of giving their credit card details, is rather annoying.

This makes me wonder... is the zero-to-hero sidemount instructor/instructor-trainer thing restricted to Asia? It's very evident here. Is a similar market-flood happening in other regions?
 
I know here in the UK where "sidemount" was "invented", if you're diving sumps you're mainly clipping a cylinder or 2 to yourself, legging it through a sump and then carrying on walking to the other side, works well and was mentioned above... I guess that's actually side-slung, mainly for utility purposes.

The recent craze of sidemount (the Woody Jasper version) has been seen as a cash cow by training agencies and i do think they're taking it as a literal term, mounting tanks on the sides. With no emphasis placed on profile or trim or having a clean configuration, which saddens me :(

[video=youtube;biKSFMF3Vv4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biKSFMF3Vv4[/video]

^ Sort of thing makes me cringe.

Devon there is a lot of "zero-to-hero" instructors in the UK, who i think just take it as face value and go from there. There are also quite a few good instructors trained by Steve Martin and Garry Dallas thankfully. I think as the hype around sidemount diving dies down, pursuing training in sidemount will be the same as any form of diving, do research and find the best instructors for the job.

On another note, i know a couple of people who self taught themselves sidemount, and they do a good job of it. Also with the amount of videos online from people such as Steve Bogaerts, Steve Martin, Lamar Hires, Brian Kakuk etc. as well as their websites, people can get a general idea of what "true" sidemount should look like.
 
Everyone has to start somewhere. How did sidemount diving begin, anyway? Did one favored diver go up on a mountain for 40 days and 40 nights, and come down with tablets on which the guidelines for sidemount rigging were inscribed, and from that holy moment, the truth and the light of sidemount were known? Of course not. Early sidemount divers probably looked side slung as well.
Where is this coming from? Are divers just trying to figure things out on their own? If yes, divers should be taking a quality class. Is it just poor Instruction? Am I just crazy and the only one noticing this?
I suspect it is a combination of both. Sidemount remains an area where there is still a lot of experimentation and gear tweaking going on. That is a (VERY) good thing - people are actually learning a lot by trial and error, by testing configurations and finding out what works. That is exciting because that is where innovation comes from.
DaleC:
What's wrong with figuring it out yourself?
YES!!!! I am not saying that the only way to learn is through figuring it out for yourself. But, that is a valuable developmental tool which seems to be increasingly underappreciated.

I have a good friend / dive buddy / fellow instructor who was diving 'sidemount' long before most, using a Ranger. He started side slung and gradually tweaked his rig to improve it. As for the instruction, I doubt that sidemount instruction is vastly different from general (OW) scuba instruction. I see pretty horrific examples of trim among supposedly very experienced (at least in their own minds, related to number of dives and years of teaching and self-proclaimed skill) instructors with OW classes. Why should SM be any different?

When I first heard about sidemount, my initial impression was, 'Hey, I will just clip on my deco bottles, one on each side, and dive them.' I could have become a side slung diver very easily. I see more than a few people doing that. What is interesting is that they feel they are very streamlined in doing so. Frankly, I did not really notice how unstreamlined my deco bottles were until after I started diving a 'proper' sidemount configuration (presuming there is such a thing). There is nothing wrong with people going through that phase. There are a couple of people posting in this thread who did something like that - set up a sidemount rig using existing (non-sidemount) equipment and used it as a starting point. to refine their gear set-up. Fortunately, before I slipped down the side slung slope, I had the benefit of multiple tutorials from an early sidemount diver, long before I ever took a class. And, I continue to learn about sidemount every time I am in the water with diving that way, because every dive is a training dive - of course, that is true for backmount doubles, backmount singles, deco dives, recreational dives, teaching dives, etc.
Karl_H:
Almost anytime you see a sidemount diver here in the Philippines they are using a bad choice in harness (usually due to investing too much $$$ in the harness and saving on a cheap or no course)
I am curious - what types of harnesses do you see being used by these divers?
 
I picked up on what a couple of people said here about British sump divers. I think side slung partly comes about when you need a hard attachment point for walking cylinders before refinement for swimming takes precedence. An interesting way to see the progression.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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