SeaJay
Contributor
Okay... Hold up a second here.
For those of you who have had your local LDS look at you bizarrely when you ask for a longer hose, tell them that they need to go back and reread their PADI Advanced Open Water manual. Sure, they teach "short hose primary, long(er) octo" in BASIC Open Water, but anyone at the Advanced level or higher should be familiar with the "long hose primary, short(er) octo" configuration. I believe it's on page eight.
If your local LDS looks at you strangely, it only shows that they weren't paying attention in their Advanced Open Water class - and should not have gone on to Rescue, Divemaster, Assistant Instructor, Instructor, or (God forbid) higher.
What's happened here is the dive equivalent of you bringing your Acura TL into the local oil change shop, and they look at you and say, "It's missing two cylinders, and it don' need no oil change," because it's not a Chevy 350. Apparently they weren't paying attention on Day 2 of shop class, and definitely do not need to be running a shop.
Now for some helpful information: A long hose regulator is a good thing - it makes donation and the out of gas (air) emergency much easier to handle. It was borne of overhead environments; If your buddy has an emergency while you are in a wreck or cavern, you may need to leave the area through a hole or opening that's too tight to swim through side-by-side. Thus, you would need enough hose for the two of you to leave in a single file... Hence, five, six, or seven foot hoses.
...So why want the long hose on your primary regulator? Well...
1. A panicked buddy grabs the one in your mouth anyway, so you might as well train to do it that way.
2. It's easier (and cleaner and more streamlined) to have a long hose primary routed correctly than to have a long hose backup (and it's called a BACKUP in this configuration, not an OCTOPUS) coiled up and stuffed somewhere.
3. You know exactly where your donor reg is at all times - in your mouth. Deployment is much faster this way.
4. Your buddy needs gas (air) faster than you do - he needs it NOW. Best to give him the one that works (you know 'cause you're breathing it) and switch to the other yourself. Firstly, you're the calm one and have the chance to switch without a problem. Secondly, if there is a problem (like your backup doesn't work) you have the time and calmness to signal "share air."
5. Later in your diving, if you decide that you want to dive a variety of different gasses (air, nitrox, trimix, triox) and you have a bunch of different gasses with you on your dive, you are sure that the gas you're donating is safe to breathe at the depth you are at... See, not all gasses are safe to be breathed at all depths - and the last thing you'd want to do is accidentally give your buddy a gas to breathe that isn't safe! So... To solve the problem simply, you just give him the one you've got in your mouth (or he takes it anyway). Additional problems averted.
6. Typically, a diver has "the good reg" as his primary... The "backup" or "octo" is typically a lower performance regulator or the same regulator, detuned to prevent freeflow. If you are donating to a diver that's OOA, you definitely want to give HIM "the good reg." After all, you have the calmness and peace of mind to be able to take the backup and then fiddle around with the levers and knobs to bring your reg "up to par" with your primary.
In all, donating the primary on a long hose is a great idea - and if learned early on (with some good benefit), it can be a skill that can last a lifetime of diving - and is one less thing to have to unlearn and relearn if you decide to take your diving "to the next level" in terms of anything deemed "technical."
There's a variety of ways that people have managed to employ the long hose primary/short hose backup... The best I know is the Hogarthian method, which was adopted by the Global Underwater Explorers in a system that they call "DIR." There's two really cool things about the way they do it - one is that, routed properly, the hoses are actually MORE streamlined than the "short primary, long octo" method that you were taught in your Open Water class. The second really cool thing is that, done correctly, a donating diver can hand off his primary to an OOA buddy and then reach down with his teeth and grab his backup with no hands. This becomes especially graceful (and simple) when a diver's hands are full of catch bags, lights, reels, spools, lift bags, marker buoys, etc.
There's a variety of ways to learn the "long hose" method that DIR preaches... But the best way I know of is to find an expert in that area and ask them to help you.
In the meantime, you might be interested in a exerpt from the DIR III video that includes information about regulators and their configurations: http://www.deepsouthdivers.org/DIR3-3.wmv
If you're interested in looking at this system more, you can view the entire video at http://www.deepsouthdivers.org/homeDIR3.html
For those of you who have had your local LDS look at you bizarrely when you ask for a longer hose, tell them that they need to go back and reread their PADI Advanced Open Water manual. Sure, they teach "short hose primary, long(er) octo" in BASIC Open Water, but anyone at the Advanced level or higher should be familiar with the "long hose primary, short(er) octo" configuration. I believe it's on page eight.
If your local LDS looks at you strangely, it only shows that they weren't paying attention in their Advanced Open Water class - and should not have gone on to Rescue, Divemaster, Assistant Instructor, Instructor, or (God forbid) higher.
What's happened here is the dive equivalent of you bringing your Acura TL into the local oil change shop, and they look at you and say, "It's missing two cylinders, and it don' need no oil change," because it's not a Chevy 350. Apparently they weren't paying attention on Day 2 of shop class, and definitely do not need to be running a shop.
Now for some helpful information: A long hose regulator is a good thing - it makes donation and the out of gas (air) emergency much easier to handle. It was borne of overhead environments; If your buddy has an emergency while you are in a wreck or cavern, you may need to leave the area through a hole or opening that's too tight to swim through side-by-side. Thus, you would need enough hose for the two of you to leave in a single file... Hence, five, six, or seven foot hoses.
...So why want the long hose on your primary regulator? Well...
1. A panicked buddy grabs the one in your mouth anyway, so you might as well train to do it that way.
2. It's easier (and cleaner and more streamlined) to have a long hose primary routed correctly than to have a long hose backup (and it's called a BACKUP in this configuration, not an OCTOPUS) coiled up and stuffed somewhere.
3. You know exactly where your donor reg is at all times - in your mouth. Deployment is much faster this way.
4. Your buddy needs gas (air) faster than you do - he needs it NOW. Best to give him the one that works (you know 'cause you're breathing it) and switch to the other yourself. Firstly, you're the calm one and have the chance to switch without a problem. Secondly, if there is a problem (like your backup doesn't work) you have the time and calmness to signal "share air."
5. Later in your diving, if you decide that you want to dive a variety of different gasses (air, nitrox, trimix, triox) and you have a bunch of different gasses with you on your dive, you are sure that the gas you're donating is safe to breathe at the depth you are at... See, not all gasses are safe to be breathed at all depths - and the last thing you'd want to do is accidentally give your buddy a gas to breathe that isn't safe! So... To solve the problem simply, you just give him the one you've got in your mouth (or he takes it anyway). Additional problems averted.
6. Typically, a diver has "the good reg" as his primary... The "backup" or "octo" is typically a lower performance regulator or the same regulator, detuned to prevent freeflow. If you are donating to a diver that's OOA, you definitely want to give HIM "the good reg." After all, you have the calmness and peace of mind to be able to take the backup and then fiddle around with the levers and knobs to bring your reg "up to par" with your primary.
In all, donating the primary on a long hose is a great idea - and if learned early on (with some good benefit), it can be a skill that can last a lifetime of diving - and is one less thing to have to unlearn and relearn if you decide to take your diving "to the next level" in terms of anything deemed "technical."
There's a variety of ways that people have managed to employ the long hose primary/short hose backup... The best I know is the Hogarthian method, which was adopted by the Global Underwater Explorers in a system that they call "DIR." There's two really cool things about the way they do it - one is that, routed properly, the hoses are actually MORE streamlined than the "short primary, long octo" method that you were taught in your Open Water class. The second really cool thing is that, done correctly, a donating diver can hand off his primary to an OOA buddy and then reach down with his teeth and grab his backup with no hands. This becomes especially graceful (and simple) when a diver's hands are full of catch bags, lights, reels, spools, lift bags, marker buoys, etc.
There's a variety of ways to learn the "long hose" method that DIR preaches... But the best way I know of is to find an expert in that area and ask them to help you.
In the meantime, you might be interested in a exerpt from the DIR III video that includes information about regulators and their configurations: http://www.deepsouthdivers.org/DIR3-3.wmv
If you're interested in looking at this system more, you can view the entire video at http://www.deepsouthdivers.org/homeDIR3.html
