MSilvia:
Nairobi huh? You'll definately want to get down to the Mombasa area for some dives on the coast.
Nairobi is roughly 300 miles from the coast. I don't know what the roads in Kenya are like, but if this was its neighbor Tanzania, the road into Daar Es Salaam is "so-so" by US Standards and I'd figure that that drive would take 7+ hours each way.
As such, I'd say that it looks beyond practical 'weekend' time budget trips, so I'd personally not bother to take my own full set of dive gear to Nairobi, unless I'm actually thinking about flying out to the Seychelles, Maldives, those islands off of Tanzania (whose name escapes me at the moment), etc.
A BP/W is a BackPlate/Wing type of BCD... Lots of folks here have taken that advice and been happy with it, and very few who've tried it say they don't like it.
Unfortunately, most people who say that
they didn't like it get shouted down here on SB.
I'm one of those who've tried it and "don't like it".
When I've mentioned this in the past on Scubaboard, I've been told that its all myth or improper weighting or other "hogwash" excuses.
Thanks, but I'm a Mechanical Engineer who's now in my 4th decade of diving and I actually took the effort to do the buoyancy/ballast vector force analysis. There are issues.
In a nutshell, a Wing is fine while horizontal underwater, but when vertical (such as at the surface), the BP/W's rear buoyancy bias becomes a small imbalance. When used with the 'floaty' AL80 that one finds at most tropical resorts, this imbalance grows. And in my case, I also have the extra mass of my Nikonos UW camera system weighting down in front, which causes this imbalance torque to grow yet again.
This imbalance is nothing insurmountable for a short surface float, but I've experienced dives where the chase boat lost us and we were floating for a half hour, and in 2-3ft seas, its nice to have your nose more than 1/4" clear of the water. This is when a 'slight tendency' thus becomes a safety problem.
I don't dispute that a BP/W is the correct configuration that is need for heavy steel doubles for tech/cave diving. However, I am concerned that the highly vocal SB Wing Fan Club (SBWFC) subscribes to the opinion that effectively argues that it makes sense to buy the tech gear on Day 1 because "everyone" will eventually become a technical diver wearing doubles and thus need it. Thanks, but tech isn't even 20% of the diving public, let alone 80%, to financially justify such an approach.
Yes, I'm ready to go back to a Jacket. Only problem is that I need the SBWFC guys to put their money where their mouth is, to pony up $500 to buy my current Wing setup so that I won't catch
as much grief from my wife about the money I wasted on it.
Finally, I don't dispute that there's some lousy Jacket designs out there. But these are mostly designs from more a decade ago. And the fact that the "taco" problem exists with some Wings with single tanks illustrates that no system is perfect.
-hh
