All very easy when you're dealing with a panicking diver who needs gas NOW.
GUE JJ configuration
- Thread starter wetb4igetinthewater
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I agree, easy in that sense as well as when it’s slow and easy.
1) Go diving on a popular south coast uk wreck like the Aeolian Sky.
2) Look at the level of training, skills and gear of many of the people there, fresh off their PADI AOW certs
3) Think about what happens when they've lost their buddy, are out of gas and find you.
That's what I thought about anyway.
Absolutely. Would simply reach down to the LH bailout, pull out the regulator and stuff it in their mouth. Then flag down a passing bubble blower and give the bailout thief to them and continue the dive**.
In reality the PADI-ists tend to come in pairs and don’t stay down very long to bother rebreather divers.
** Of course I’d rescue them it there was no other choice.
Exactly. Easy peezy lemon squeezy. Whereas if your only spare reg was on a long hose that was under your loop and couldn't easily be donated, while they were in a full panic, it could easily end really badly. Why take two well engineered and reliable systems (modern rebreathers plus OC bailout) and munge them together into a Frankenbreather configuration that eliminates the basic safety aspects of both systems and introduces a single point of failure that can wreck everything (the shonky LOLA flexible manifold)? DIR this is not.
Remember, you cannot possibly have an opinion on that configuration unless you’re trained upon it. People with immeasurable experience have designed that system so we don’t have to think about it.
I'm not a CCR diver yet, but the way GUE does the long hose seems bizarre to me considering that there's no such thing as primary donate on a rebreather. The out of gas diver is already going to have to get a regulator from somewhere other than what they're used to from OC (the donor's mouth), so it might as well be somewhere easily accessible. And yeah, I recognize it would take several failures to get to this point, but do you really want to make an emergency situation harder in the name of standardization? Seems like a bad tradeoff in my opinion.
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When you are in the paradigm of a "Team" then everyone is on a rebreather. In order for you to have to share gas with a buddy who's on a rebreather you have a lot of stuff to go wrong first.
OOA diver has to have something wrong with his *not being gender biased, especially since my primary CCR buddy is a woman....* loop that causes him to bailout, let's say he's on a BOV and that failure was a caustic cocktail so he has to go to his long hose. After that caustic cocktail cause him to bailout to his longhose, now he has to have a catastrophic OC failure.
As the teammate, he will have signaled you while this was going on but you should also be observant enough to be noticing this and most of the time while this is going on you'll probably have switched to your long hose as a precaution and waiting for this to stabilize. If you are wicked deep or for whatever reason really don't want to switch to OC you'll unclip the long hose and get it on top of the loop so you are ready to donate. While your teammate is resolving the situation you are not fully ready to donate. Keeping in mind that this whole process takes maybe 5-10 seconds.
If the OOA diver is on a DSV or the failure is not a caustic cocktail, then they will switch to their long hose by default. If they stabilize on their long hose then they are now essentially on a set of doubles and the normal faults would have to happen for you to have to actually air share which are extraordinarily small.
By using a manifolded set of doubles as their bailout you get all of the benefits of diving a twinset when it comes to failure modes, particularly the ability to use all of your gas on an individual regulator set. This is very important in understanding the rationale behind why they are doing what they're doing.
It is also very important to realize that while GUE has popularized this configuration and it certainly comes from what the WKPP was doing with the RB80's, those were most definitely not on mixed teams and other agencies/mfg's have used similar configurations over the last 15 years. Just really useful to remember that while we are talking about the GUE JJ configuration it needs to be treated like a Q-tip vs cotton swab discussion.
All the above makes some sense so long as the GUE CCR diver is, as you say, diving on a team with other divers using the same rig. But in practice this does not happen at all, at least not in the UK: I have dived on OC with people with GUE CCRs, I have dived on a stock JJ with people with GUE CCRs, and I have dived with people on GUE CCRs on boats where everyone else was on OC and quite a few were on single cylinders. Especially in the last case a diver must consider the possibility that they will encounter a properly OOG and panicking diver, and if the long hose is clipped off and under the loop that is not going to be a lot of fun. You might argue that the GUE divers in these circumstances should not be there with these specialised bits of equipment and that they should save them for proper team diving, but that ain't going to happen and I can tell you that it was not even discussed in the GUE CCR course I did.
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