Negative entry vs Using a downline

[PfcAJ]

Likewise, when you start driving around with a bunch of bottles you realize very quickly that DIR stage slinging is suboptimal and cuts into your range by adding significant drag. The solution is SM rigging if you're doing lots of scootering with either several deco/stage bottles or BO bottles, but DIR doesn't really accomodate that well. And the whole SPG on the left hip thing goes out the window when you're having to look back at 150-300fpm while the gauge is under three tanks. You run it over or under your arm, maybe on an even shorter hose, so you can see it right under your nose.

That's interesting. Seems to me that if there is anything DIR is really good at its going far with a bunch of scuba tanks. Between Chips Hole, Cathedral, Wakulla-Leon, Doux De Coly, and Source de Vis, the MCEP stuff, etc etc, I think its been shown to be quite good at going a long ways.

Also, the technique to see the gauge isn't to look back through all the bottles. You unclip and look at it, the same way you do without the scooter or the tanks. No more than 2 on the chest, btw. 3 gets ridiculous. Move the 3rd (or 4th of 5th) to a leash so it rides kinda behind the tanks between the legs. This works really well even in small-ish cave if you have some helium in the tanks.

Fwiw, on big multi-stage dives, the back gas ends up being completely in reserve anyway.

 

[danvolker]

Another application for scooters....One of the very best reefs off of Palm beach County--if not THE Best, is Pauls Reef....it is close to the middle between Boynton and Palm beach...a fairly long boat run from either inlet, so quite pristine--not heavily dived on....
Now there is a long wall of corals and sea fans most divers drift along from a very pretty starting point, and when they reach the end of it, most are almost out of air, or had to go up before the end.....For those with a scooter, there are a series of coral Islands beginning about 75 yards after the wall ends, and each is around 30 to 40 yards in diameter....each have amazing growth on them, and are unique oasis type outcrops of life, amidst a sea of sand between each one.....Each one is not really big enough to do an entire dive on if you are shooting wide angle...granted, if you are a macro shooter, you would pick one at a time and get the boat drop on top of each.....But with wide angle or 50 mm stuff, there would be a strong incentive for many divers to hit several of these in the hour you have. A scooter allows this running between coral islands, swimming can work, but will waste lots of air and precious bottom time.

 

[DaleC]

mea culpa Split lip

Of course you may use a reel. As Bob said, we just rarely see that here. I usually have seen people shoot from <100.

 

[T.C.]

To be clear, TC, you need some dpv experience before pontificating about DPVs. At least enough to know what kind of scooter you were using. Has nothing to do with dir. It has to do with knowing what you're talking about.

To be clear, PFcAJ, you need to lose the "I'm so great, only DIR divers can match me" attitude. At least enough to accept that other divers can do what you do... Just would find it incredibly boring.

There are plenty of rec. divers who would make you look like a new OW diver. Too bad you're too stuck up to realize it.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

Getting back to the premise of the original post ... I just came off a 3-day liveaboard trip where doing "blue water" descents and ascents was not only not done ... it was expressly forbidden. There were some sites where the boat would drop divers about 50 feet from the wall ... you surface swim to the wall and descend ... the boat's in over 400 feet of water, and if you drop there you ain't going to have a very enjoyable dive. There were other sites where doing a direct ascent to the surface from as shallow as 40 feet could have the current pushing you through a pass and out the other side, where the boat could have difficulties finding you ... or you could run into a ferry or log raft. Cheng and I did an ascent from safety stop depth, through a kelp forest, on one dive and ascended less than 10 feet from a moving wall of logs that were being towed by a tug that had passed us nearly five minutes before we ascended. Had we come up from 20 feet, we'd have ascended into them ... which wouldn't have been any fun at all.

All of our dives, depending on the site, were either descend/ascend on a line or descend/ascend on the rock structure. No free descents or ascents were allowed ... for safety sake.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[rivers]

As for not confusing. I respectfully disagree. Take a new diver, extremely task loaded and trying to remember and manage many skills and suggest two completely different systems of donating regs. Something I would not do. Again, not looking at it from my perspective (I get it) but from the new divers perspective. Substitute rusty/occasional vacation diver and I feel the same. I would say most posters here don't fall into that category so it's easy to forget how overwhelmed new divers can get by what we consider run of the mill.

The biggest hurdle in using a longhose is not the configuration itself as much as getting used to removing the primary reg from your mouth in times of stress. Without familiarity and comfort in this skill the longhose becomes potentially dangerous because the donator becomes instinctively protective and will balk at giving it away. You have to train past that instinct. Insta buddies don't usually do training dives before doing operational dives. What they know, is based on what they were taught, which rarely is primary donate.

What about hose trapping? Do we explain that to the other diver or not because they are not wearing the rig. But then, aren't we encouraging poor behavior by allowing people to dive with people with systems they don't understand. One dir tenent being, everybody is on the same page.

So, we could say that doesn't matter because you are donating and the taker doesn't care where the reg comes from but there are also times when the taker needs to just locate and take the reg - hence why mainstream agencies teach the triangle and dir divers practice low/no vis donation. Any mainstream diver, properly trained, should be able to access any similarly configured divers reg without communicating with that diver... but not a hog rig. The diver will instinctively go for the bungee'd B/U unless that response is drilled/trained out of them.

New divers also don't complain about things they are uncomfortable with because they are already so uncomfortable. Where would they start. They just nod and say fine and do "trust me" dives.

...downline

-

This is where I have to respectfully disagree. I'm currently in the middle of my DM training (and I am in open water with my twinset, hog rigged). I've assisted in OW a few times so far, and in each class, every trainee has done an OOG drill with me donating to them. Before we even get in the water, I go over my kit piece by piece, explaining how things work and how they are different, etc. We then go through a dry run of how it works with a diver primary donating. I also make sure to explain to(and show) the trainees that if they are ever diving with someone who is hoglooped, that they must make sure they see that diver doing a modified s-drill as the last thing they want is that long hose to be trapped on anything. None of them have had any questions besides why I rig myself the way i do. My answer: "It's my preferred way to dive". They signal OOG, and a reg is shoved in front of their face. They grab it, purge, and shove in their gob. When it comes to them donating, they do as they are taught. they "present" themselves for their OOG buddy to take the octo from the golden triangle.
It's not a complicated system. I figured it out when I had less than 50 dives.
At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how someone's kit is configured. As long as it's appropriate for the dive (for example, planning a 35m dive with 10-15 deco and showing up with a single 10l isn't the wisest of choices, and I would refuse to the do the dive), the diver is comfortable and competent in it, and they can explain it to their buddy/team well, just get on with diving. I see every manner of configuration in my club (it is a BSAC club after all), and none of us have ever had an issue diving with each other. And we usually have a blast.

And if there isn't a shotline, we'll most likely end up diving the HMS Seabed. Sea dives are sometime few and far between, so it wouldn't go down very well if we missed the wreck.

 

[Dr. Lecter]

That's interesting. Seems to me that if there is anything DIR is really good at its going far with a bunch of scuba tanks. Between Chips Hole, Cathedral, Wakulla-Leon, Doux De Coly, and Source de Vis, the MCEP stuff, etc etc, I think its been shown to be quite good at going a long ways.

Also, the technique to see the gauge isn't to look back through all the bottles. You unclip and look at it, the same way you do without the scooter or the tanks. No more than 2 on the chest, btw. 3 gets ridiculous. Move the 3rd (or 4th of 5th) to a leash so it rides kinda behind the tanks between the legs. This works really well even in small-ish cave if you have some helium in the tanks.

Fwiw, on big multi-stage dives, the back gas ends up being completely in reserve anyway.

The DIR slinging/leashing approach is probably optimal for the kind of team-based huge scooter cave penetrations for which they're famous, but I notice you're not arguing against my point that if you have 1-3 bottles and no more, there's a lower drag way of carrying your stage/deco/BO gas (SM). A butt plate and some ring bungies wouldn't be much good if you needed to carry a bunch of stuff on a leash, so DIR rejects it in its attempt to use one scalable system for all dives.

Which is probably a great compromise for divers who might be doing that kind of diving at least some of the time, but that doesn't make their approach optimal if you're, say, a solo CCR scooter diver who wants to carry 3 BO bottles in as low-drag a manner as possible.

Personally, I find 3 bottles on the left side doable as long as at least one of them is a 40, though two 40s and an 80 is much easier. Since moving to CCR and no longer worrying about the long hose, I put deep and lean deco BO left and O2 BO right, all side-mounted. DIR I am not.

 

[PfcAJ]

To be clear, PFcAJ, you need to lose the "I'm so great, only DIR divers can match me" attitude. At least enough to accept that other divers can do what you do... Just would find it incredibly boring.

There are plenty of rec. divers who would make you look like a new OW diver. Too bad you're too stuck up to realize it.

I never said "I'm so great and only DIR divers can match me" or anything even remotely close to it. I did say that you don't know what you're talking about (DPVs) and so have others in this thread. I don't have some special abilities, and I'm quite average, really. There are plenty of better divers than me.

You seem to think you've got me figured out and know what I think and why I think it, but you're off by more than a bit.

 

[T.C.]

TC, Why do you engage in this big drawn out argument with us on scooters then....

Because of the arrogant presumption that only the DIR divers are good enough and equipped to use a DPV.

Its typical DIR BS.

What if you heard about some mind blowing Nudibranchs that were in 4 different spots on a 400 foot long ship, sitting at 135 feet deep.

I wouldn't dive it. It's below my personal limits. And since I don't do deco, there's no way I could hit more than one per dive.

 

[PfcAJ]

Because of the arrogant presumption that only the DIR divers are good enough and equipped to use a DPV.

Its typical DIR BS.


I wouldn't dive it. It's below my personal limits. And since I don't do deco, there's no way I could hit more than one per dive.

The only person in this thread who has said anything about DIR divers being the only ones good enough to use scooters is YOU.