Opinions on new divers with technical setups?

[Zef]

I know I wanna move into tech diving eventually. I’m under 20 dives but in the process of buying and assembling my BP/W and regulator set....with that comes the hogarthian options, especially for hose lengths and routings.

I know where I wanna go and this is gear to buy once. Sure, I might change a thing here or there, but the base is all the same. I don’t care TOO much....but I don’t want the tech divers to laugh at me for just doing recreational dives with a setup similar to what they’re using.

I feel like I’m already planning the “I’m a new diver, but this is my gear and I want to go tech when I improve my skills” talk as they eyeball my cressi Leonardo pre-dive.

1. If they laugh, nobody will be able to hear it under the water.

2. Only the shallowest (no pun intended) of people will care about your setup unless your gear is unsafe.

3. Giving a speech about your future plans in order to justify your setup only makes you come across as insecure. You don't owe anyone an explanation about "why" you have configured your gear the way you want...you only owe an explanation of how your gear functions to whomever you are going to splash with.

4. Get the gear/gear configuration you feel most comfortable with and dive the s&#t out it.

5. When you stop worrying about what people might think of you, your overall enjoyment will increase, as you won't be bogged down psychologically pre-dive engagements.

Get your gear and go make bubbles.

Cheers,
-Z

 

[KenGordon]

"Technical Diving" is generally considered to be when diving outside "recreational" limits, which really boils down to diving when you can't just bolt to the surface, such as in an overhead or with significant decompression obligation, where you need specialist "technical" kit and skills such as stage bottles, specialist gasses and oxygen.

Diving with a longhose and backplate+wing (BP+W) is quite mainstream nowadays, so not considered specialist technical equipment, thus isn't technical diving per se.

The benefits of diving with a longhose BP+W are many, as are the drawbacks. Benefits include:

• A wing promotes far better trim; being flat in the water and not the proverbial seahorse. Whilst it's possible to dive flat in a jacket BCD, the buoyancy in a jacket is wrapped around you, rather than around your tank where the wing floats up to 'taco' around the tank so the centre of buoyancy is a bit higher.
• A doughnut wing, as opposed to a horseshoe style wing, will make dumping gas easier from the hip dump. Jacket BCDs and horseshoe wings frequently require the diver to roll from side to side or come out of trim to move the buoyancy gas from side to side. So doughnuts mean you keep in better trim.
  
• The crotch strap keeps everything in place, so more consistent trim. This is important on the surface where everything's kept in place.
  
• There's no removable weights which tends to encourage you to dive with correct weighting which is critical for optimising your gas consumption. Whilst people on a BCD should do this, they frequently don't.
• The backplate harness fits better because it's infinitely adjustable to your shape, not some designer's perfect ideal of the average body. A harness fits everyone from petite to enormous with D-rings in the correct places.
  
• There's no dangly flubber -- all that total rubbish floating around you with straps, clips and 'stuff' here there and everywhere. The harness is reduced down to the 3 D-rings of minimalist zen-like calm. No 'crap' dangling off of you like hoses, SPGs, unnecessary retractors.
  
• In summary, if you look cool in the water, you probably are cool, calm and collected in the water.

Longhose benefits:

• You dive with your backup kept in a single place, under your neck. Take the longhose out of your mouth and simply scoop up the backup reg under your chin and pop it into your mouth. Breathe. It's so simple.
• Any form of OOG (Out Of Gas) incident is trivially easy to handle: you grab the reg from your mouth and thrust it into the face of the person who needs it, you'd have scooped up your backup and be breathing with it almost before they are breathing from your guaranteed to be WORKING regulator. Everybody lives. The utter mess that is a jacket BCD and some clipped off, bungeed, folded, shoved in a pocket, dangling off and dragging in the silt, never tested in the water "octopus" regulator takes an age to find and will probably result in the OOG diver simply grabbing your regulator -- you're both now in trouble.
  
• That jacket-BCD crazy sweeping back to find a regulator floating behind you isn't necessary with a longhose. You've one regulator that's either in your mouth or clipped off on the RH D-ring. The other regulator's on a bungee below your chin.
• When 'donating' you can get out of the face of the person you're helping. You can both be "in trim" as you ascend, it's calmer, simpler and a lot easier.
• Only when you're using an umbilical battery torch (battery on your waist, torch on a Goodman handle in your left hand) does donating get slightly more complicated as you need to move your torch cable under your longhose. It's simple once you're shown and practice.
• SPG's always in the right place: left hand hip D-ring.
• You will test your backup regulator on every dive; it's so easy to swap to your backup, take a breath or three and swap back.
  
• All of these skills are identical when you move to a twinset (for extended range and redundancy). Learn once.

Longhose with backplate and wing drawbacks:

• None.

Jacket BCD drawbacks:

• They don't fit
• They ride up because there's no crotch strap
• Clip-tastic, strap-tastic dangly 'stuff' all over the place
• D-rings in the wrong place -- one size fits nobody
• Octopus placement is awful
• Buoyancy in the wrong place
• Removable weights -- these fall out and break

Jacket BCD benefits:

• None

So do go for a Longhose, Harness, Backplate and a doughnut Wing.

It is highly recommended to get someone to show you how to configure it and how to do the longhose donate.

I think you are assuming many things as advantages which are not specific to a BPW/long hose setup. For example, weighting needs are actually the same, I always use a weight belt with both a BCD and a single on a BPW. Plenty of people use a long hose with a BCD, the APD Buddy has a perfect space to store a 7ft octopus. I can necklace a second stage octopus using a silicone octo holder. A BCD has a dump valve at the back and the bladder runs below the backplate (BCDs usually have backplates too, just integral and plastic) so the effect is similar to a donut wing. You really don’t want your taco effect as it makes dumping a pain (see my comment about a 40lb wing on a single). As to trim, there are back inflate BCDs, but of course you shouldn’t have more that 3l of gas in that 20l bladder while under the water so does it matter?

Really it is perfectly easy to have a lovely, comfortable and effective traditional BCD setup. It is also possible to have a terrible BPW setup. A classic case is a BPW with a “luxury” harness, weight pockets on the waist band, random “trim” weights all over it and stuff clipped off everywhere and catching any long hose deployment and unable to float if removed. It is harder to get a weight harness to work well with a BPW as the various straps tend to clash.

I usually dive a twinset (in typical “tech” style) or a rebreather. When diving a single it is normally club kit identical to the student. I have no trouble due to the kit.

The BPW pushers will say that they are more flexible, being modular. This is partly true but doesn’t quite pan out. Thus I own three steel back plates and a super light aluminium one, as well as four wings, and I’d buy another if I was likely to dive singles in cold water more. I have one, 30 year old, bcd which can actually take a single or twins.

BPW setups are more flexible. With a simple single piece harness (which the OP really ought to get - and be shown how to setup so it is easy to don and doff) you can put d-rings almost anywhere you like. This means hanging a pony is easy, with a BCD you need to realise that need up front as they are often sown in or the straps cannot be completely taken to bits.

BPW setups are often more robust. Everything hanging off a big lump of metal and held together by 50mm webbing means you can be a bit less paranoid about breaking things.

The use of a BPW is just a choice. It is not essential and certainly not a guarantee of diving bliss.

However, if you do buy one and then put your cylinder on the wrong way round you will be marked out as “one of them” and some little old lady will be telling her friends about “all the gear and no idea”...

 

[KenGordon]

This the rig I settled with after trying the long hose for a few years. No penetration just open water rec diving.
40" Primary, 22" octo
I found this set up to be perfect for my style of diving.

View attachment 645884

OP. Don’t do this. This is the school of SB and marks you out in a non flattering way. The only worse option is an bcd inflator that doubles as an alternate air source.

This is why solo courses exist

 

[DiveClimbRide]

True, haven't seen that but have seen some other hysterical stuff. Let's just leave it there. I won't side track this thread further. The OP has made his choice clear and I have no problem with that but he needn't assume too, the "attitude".

Ahh you're no fun, we want to hear the hysterical stuff

 

[Joris Vd]

Because I've dived and watched them. Whilst you may not do this, plenty of other novices have.

When have you *ever* seen a BP/Wing person dragging a longhose in the dirt?

I am a proponent of best practices, but let's not pretend a beginner with 10 dives could dive the primary donate setup casually without proper training. You can recognize these people immediately. They struggle with the kidney dump, but refuse to deflate via the LPI when **** hits the fan, they never stow the hose properly, and they leave the water with their longhose dingly dangly around belly button height because they can't properly clip it off yet.

So yeah, you don't see bp/wing people dragging longhoses in the dirt, but let's not pretend as soon as you switch to bpwing you are some supreme uber-diver.

That is the big advantage of the octo setup. Even if you're a complete dumb dumb who hasn't payed attention in the five checkout dives that you did to do your OW-cert, if you have a basic grasp of the concept of your octo and primary you will be able to get by.

The thing of dragging an octo in the dirt has nothing to do with the jacket style + octo setup.
It's an issue of people not configuring their jacket octo correctly. Same thing goes for those consoles that drag the bottom like a ship's stern. This can easily be fixed by either stowing it or clipping it off correctly and getting a right hose length.

This is actually the thing that bothers me the most with alot of dive shops that sell conventional setups. Not sure if it's a thing in America, but here in Belgium shops don't give a flying **** about hose lengths. Many classic setups could be pretty streamlined if only the dive shop had sold people the correct length LPI, short hose primary, longer hose octo and a console with a shorter (70-80 cm hose max). As people often buy a kit anyway, it's not that hard to do.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Ahh you're no fun, we want to hear the hysterical stuff

You had to be there! And I have no photos

 

[Wibble]

Because I've dived and watched them. Whilst you may not do this, plenty of other novices have.

When have you *ever* seen a BP/Wing person dragging a longhose in the dirt?

I know this because this was me looking like some victim of an explosion in a dive shop with all the yellow tat and appendages. The octopus was always hard to "stow" because there's nowhere particularly clean to stash it. Weight belts fell out when on the surface. Trim was appalling and even resorted to ankle weights.

Then I moved to a BP+W (and a twinset, but that's not the point) and suddenly all changed. Being exposed to instructors who were competent in the water showed me what good looked like -- I hadn't seen any recreational instructors who could properly be still in the water and use their fins correctly.

Yes, a conflation of many things, but I know what I saw in recreational 'resorts' and there was very little that looked 'good'.

The real benefit of a BP+W (and I'm talking Hogarthian here, not that recreational tat labelled as "Tek Extreeem" with cliptastic harness) is the sheer minimalism; the cleanliness: everything has a purpose and everything is thought through. And a BP+W is cheaper than a BCD (Halcyon!).

 

[rob.mwpropane]

When have you *ever* seen a BP/Wing person dragging a longhose in the dirt?

Where's the emoji of the little guy holding his hand up? < the best I could come up with! (edit...to clarify it was me dragging my hose in the dirt!)

For me in the beginning stowing the long hose pre and post dive was the hardest part of a bp/w, techish kind of setup. It took a little getting used to but after 10 or so dives its second nature just like anything else. That and having the webbing too tight in the beginning...that took some tweaking and a mentor would have helped but SB was the next best thing.

And to the OP, don't be put off by other people at a dive site. Some people are great, some people are just ***holes. Remember you're there to have fun and you don't have to take anyone home with you (unless of course you want to,.... but that's probably a topic for a different thread).

Every dive I do every trip I go on I get just that much more comfortable with my gear, and I'm really happy with the gear I chose. Everything I have can "grow" with me to the next level if I choose.

Good luck!!

 

[doctormike]

The benefits of diving with a longhose BP+W are many, as are the drawbacks. Benefits include:

• There's no removable weights which tends to encourage you to dive with correct weighting which is critical for optimising your gas consumption. Whilst people on a BCD should do this, they frequently don't.

An excellent writeup! Just a minor addition and one quibble.

A Jacket BC is positively buoyant, some more than others, and some significantly. So that means that you have to add extra weight just to sink the BC. And extra ballast and buoyancy usually ends up affecting the dive to some degree, in terms of trim and the fact that the extra buoyancy is variable but the ballast isn't, which means the need for extra adjustment at different depths.

Also, some divers may end up wanting to configure their BCD with ditchable weight, especially since many new divers are reluctant not to have that at all. You don't need to ditch a lot of weight to get positive, and the only reason for ditchable weight is to become buoyant at the surface (another topic with a million threads).

A single tank diver, especially one with any significant amount of neoprene, may well be able to use a weight belt or pockets if they prefer that to integrated weight (bolted on, a second plate or cam band pockets). I personally don't do that when I'm diving single tank, since I'm pretty well weighted and don't need a lot on my cam band, but I can see the comfort in having that. You could even use an aluminum plate if you really wanted to make sure you had ditchable weight.

 

[Divin'Papaw]

I was certified in 2005 in the ‘traditional’ jacket BCD and short hose primary/medium hose octo. I quickly fell in love with diving and after much research (a lot of it here on ScubaBoard) I purchased a BP/W and a DIN reg configured with a long hose primary/bungeed alternate and I’ve never looked back. That’s been my setup every dive since dive #7! It has served me incredibly well. Not a day a regret.