Originally Posted by captain View Post
OK Boulderjohn I'll bite. What is with this obsession with being horizontal.
What is this obsession with how someone else dives?
I can explain the reference to me. It has nothing to do with how I dive. In another thread captain made a comment about the obsession some divers have with being horizontal. It was a bit off topic, and I suggested it would make a good thread on its own. Hence this thread, which I didn't even look at until now.
I am going to take a somewhat irreverent look at my own practices.
Although I tried to stay in good trim throughout my diving years and was fairly decent at it, things changed when I started taking technical diving classes. Then it became an obsession. Drop your knees, and you'll heard about it. Don't ever make the mistake of dropping your knees down to 179 degrees while you are on camera, or you will be mocked in front of the rest of the class during the film session. Keep that in mind when you are carrying both an AL 80 and an AL 40 under your left arm during filming.
At one point in our early training, we joked that the reason for the obsession was that it would be so much easier to hold your depth and position during deco stops if you didn't have to be 100% horizontal that the course would become too easy and there would not be as much prestige associated with those certifications.
A buddy and I did a dive last autumn on a deep sink hole, and we found a rock shelf with beautiful gypsum crystals scattered in the silt. We spent most of the dive examining them. Later, on the surface, we talked about how much easier it would have been to explore that area if we had not felt compelled to be perfectly horizontal, straining our necks to see what was inches above our heads. We felt had to dive that way even though we had no instructor watching us at the time. He had become that eerie voice that guides bipolar people like the Son of Sam.
This all served me well when I got my cave certification. I am not sure I could have maneuvered through some of those tiny silty passages as well as I did without that obsessive training.
So, getting that perfect horizontal trim at every second of a dive has been a focus of my tech training, perhaps only so that I can do it when I really need to. Once you are with a group that has been trained the same way, peer pressure takes over. (Look at them. They have good trim. Is my trim that good? Gee, I hope so.) Maybe some day I will get that nagging voice out of my head.
Maybe.
eyebrow: that much). What it avoids is needing to vent all my DS air to descend and then refilling my DS to take off the squeeze. Another thing it avoids is my descending and then having to ascend when a buddy can't descend. I have no problem going down so I watch to see my buddy is under way and then quickly drop down to join them. Sounds kooky but then again I don't ascend vertically either and haven't used my LP inflator to dump air in a long long time.
