Doubles Wing Recommendation

[inquis]

And no one ever talks about this issue, therefore I will have to bring it up at the next club dive.

It's a good topic to discuss. It's even better to test your ideas in the water. Deflate your wing to simulate a failure. Can you get off the bottom when wetsuit buoyancy is at a minimum? If you have a cramp and can't kick well, are you in trouble?

 

[Roy_W]

as when in a drysuit.)

You've got to be kidding. That's the kind of thing that sounds good on the Internet and will turn into a complete CF while you're trying to manage an emergency during a real dive. The most likely outcome is that you and your buddy lose your grip on each other in the middle of the ascent, and then you go plummeting back towards the bottom (hope you're not on a vertical wall) while your buddy (with an over-inflated wing) rockets to the surface.

Every diver on the team needs to have a balanced rig and manage their own buoyancy at all times. It's smart to dive with a buddy, but you can't rely on a buddy for redundant buoyancy. Keep it simple instead of trying to introduce convolutions to address problems that shouldn't exist in the first place or are purely the result of not buying the correct gear. (There is a procedure for rescuing an unconscious diver by kind of riding them up, and using their wing for both of you, but that's a separate issue and not really relevant here.)

Some very interesting responses from @Nick_Radov , @inquisit and @L13 , thanks guys, that's really got me thinking..

I spoke with my wife about this morning during breakfast and she came back with an answer that surprised me.. She said if your wing fails take of your gear and ride up with me on my octopus..... Ok it's not a great solution but I suppose that it would be the equivalant of "ditching all your weight"... Obviously we are talking last resort here....

I had never given a thought either about the SMB, in my club everyone has an smb on every dive, even though we dont use them very often, we do do the drills occasionaly though. I suppose that the SMB fully inflated would help a fair bit when nothing else was available..

We have new dry suits coming in 2 weeks, this will give us some better redundancy..

I am still surpised that no one has ever mentioned this in the club though, usually they are quite safety conscious. And even recently we did our CMAS 3 Star course and again this was never mentionned, we did however do a lot of recovering unconscious divers drills from 40m..

 

[rob.mwpropane]

No matter how many times this topic comes up and I think about it the best answer is always the simplest. Having a redundant form of buoyancy (drysuit / wing combo) makes the most sense. I never want a buoyancy failure to turn into an emergency. I want something in place that's ready to use right then and there. Something I've been using throughout the dive that I use on every dive. Something that's 2nd nature.

There are other options, but they're all cumbersome. Fun to read about, but in the end a ds / wing is the simplest answer to a situation that I wouldn't want to complicate. I can't think of any situation where any of the other options would make a failure easier to work through. And chances are when shtf there will be other things to deal with the way dominos start to fall.