The answer to your question is that I don't have much formal training. Your implication was obvious, that because I don't, my opinion doesn't have merit. I respect your opinion because you have more experience than I do, but with that said, I don't think I need a ton of experience to understand that having more situational awareness in an equipment casualty scenario is important. And to have more situational awareness, it's important to be comfortable with the setup. That may mean I look at alternative setups or I end up simply adjusting the standard setup as I've mentioned a couple times until it works well for my body and comfort level.
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
And then need to find the footnotes to translate "Adventure Diver" into PADI speak; is that Advanced Open Water?
My selective quote was copied from the PADI website Rescue Diver page for "prerequisites". One would have thought that would be accurate. Maybe they do a speciality course on understanding their website?
Adventure Diver is any 3 of the 5 dives need for AOW. But to qualify as the Rescue Diver prerequisite, one of the dives has to be Underwater Navigation.
Prerequisites: Adventure Diver/Junior Adventure Diver (or qualifying certification) with completed Underwater Navigation Dive; EFR Primary and Secondary Care training (or qualifying training) within 24 months
It's just a matter of choosing a balance between comfort and streamlined/unobtrusive. Given that, at the most, a diver may breathe from the backup for a few minutes each dive, and that the vast majority of the time the backup should be as unobtrusive as possible so it doesn't interfere with long hose deployment or anything else, I would say choose the shortest hose you can get away with "comfortably." I suppose I could replace my standard 22-inch backup hose with a 23-inch hose or even a 24-inch hose to improve comfort, but on the balance, the slight tugging for the few minutes when the backup reg may be in my mouth doesn't bother me enough. Others may be bothered enough to get a custom-length hose. Totally an individual thing.
You don't understand that it's a system, by modifying the individual pieces you effect the functioning of the whole. You're making
modifications to remove one perceived drawback while introducing many others. Others that would be much more obvious to you if you had training on the system.
It's important the gear configuration properly balances multi considerations that are sometimes in opposition to each other, "comfort" is pretty far down that list when taken into the context of a bungeed second stage.
Just turn your body and the reality is when you're in trim your ability to look left and right is already fairly limited. You start adding hoods and and breathing loops etc it becomes even more limited.
You don't need to restrict your head turning. You get the right length of hose for your configuration and body size so you can fully turn to the left.
You could even use a 90 degree elbow on the short-hose reg, but you'd quickly realise there's limitations to that too (don't use an Omniswivel as they can and do fail). Elbows are a definite no-no for decompression/bottom/bailout stages as they don't neatly stow away.
Similar threads
