Gdon
Contributor
1. Valve on or off? I decided to leave it on because if I am faced with a situation where I NEED to use my bail out (aka Pony) bottle, it will be because the crap hit the fan and I will be under a lot of stress already and don’t need to add one more task to perform, possibly while getting ready to breath water. If the pony reg starts to leak or free flow during the dive I will see it because it is slung right under my chest. I would rather deal with a leak when I am not stressed than trying to turn on a valve when I am stressed. (Decos are different, esp if you are leaving them on a line while you go off yonder)
2. It is a fact that a pony can give one an unearned feeling of confidence that might lead them to get into trouble. The solution is to plan your dive, and dive your plan as if you did not have the pony. When deciding what to do during my dives I pretend I don’t have the pony at all, and if it not safe to do without the pony, it’s not safe to do WITH the pony. On the other hand, having a redundant air source can help to keep one composed so that he can work out the problem at hand better, even if he never touches the back-up air supply. Confidence is more valuable than gold at 100 feet!
3. All this discussion would be moot if the buddy system was foolproof, and hats off to the DIR folks (and others) who make it almost that way, but in the real world it is not that reliable. I think DumpsterDiver said it quite well; "… the recreation diving buddy system, which is demonstrated to NOT work each and every day. Anyone who has any diving experience at all has seen the breakdown of the buddy system, when watching recreational divers. It constantly fails and if scuba diving was not relatively safe, this failure would result in many dive accidents.”
2. It is a fact that a pony can give one an unearned feeling of confidence that might lead them to get into trouble. The solution is to plan your dive, and dive your plan as if you did not have the pony. When deciding what to do during my dives I pretend I don’t have the pony at all, and if it not safe to do without the pony, it’s not safe to do WITH the pony. On the other hand, having a redundant air source can help to keep one composed so that he can work out the problem at hand better, even if he never touches the back-up air supply. Confidence is more valuable than gold at 100 feet!
3. All this discussion would be moot if the buddy system was foolproof, and hats off to the DIR folks (and others) who make it almost that way, but in the real world it is not that reliable. I think DumpsterDiver said it quite well; "… the recreation diving buddy system, which is demonstrated to NOT work each and every day. Anyone who has any diving experience at all has seen the breakdown of the buddy system, when watching recreational divers. It constantly fails and if scuba diving was not relatively safe, this failure would result in many dive accidents.”
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