If I can use a 7 foot hose,at 5'1", and not have excess length down to my knees,and TSandM, who is about my size, than the people who have hose down to their knees must be 4'2". Beano must be teaching 8 year olds!
You could actually read the post that referenced the situation I was referring to.
It's hard to learn new things when you think you already know everything. When you listen to new ideas without assuming you already know everything, you can learn new things. Try listening to people who have experience, and experience in conditions you are not familiar with, and it works better. Being polite and respectful and not sarcastic works too.
When everything is perfect, and there are no waves, no surge and most importantly
no actual OOA, then quite simply hose length does not matter. One can make
anything work, and get by with anything. We could even buddy breath and not use an octo. It's all just playing around anyway. SO of course in those situations, a 7 footer
seems to be fine, because, frankly anything works OK in those situation.
If someone is actually on a long hose in tough conditions, (surge, surf, hands full), and then the go off the long hose, the donor has to stow (or something) the hose. There are quite simply times when stowing it is next to impossible. The hose cannot be wrapped, and certainly there is no time to fiddle with silly things that require two hands like pulling a length of hose into an insecure belt tuck (that as has been pointed out by several people (including TSandM herself) comes untucked by itself even in ideal conditions.)
At those times, the long hose reg goes in the donors mouth, and the long loop just goes under the donor's arm. That foot longer dangle of the 7 footer run underarm, versus the 5 footer run under arm, makes all the difference in the world. And that is exactly the situation where the 7 footer gets hooked on stuff.
Yes, underarm is not how the hose is
supposed to be run, and yet in actual conditions, sometimes it has to be done because
actual OOA conditions don't happen when it is 70 and sunny, in pool like situations. Actual OOA situations happen in high stress situation when and conditions are ****, and breathing rates go way up, and divers have more important things to deal with than playing with trying to fiddle with their gear.
Experience, and not just 'what I heard on the internet' does in fact matter. The 7 footer is very from ideal, and even dangerous, in exactly that situation, and the 5 footer is at least manageable, though not ideal. This situation not common, but then OOA should basically be so uncommon as to have never happened to most people, because most people simply do not do enough diving to run into 1 in 1000 circumstances.
This is why the pantomime S-Drills are not great for finding and eliminating problems with OOA: because the people practicing them, and even people teaching them, simply have no real world experience with actual OOA situations, much less in OOA in bad conditions. People without experience can imagine a whole bunch of bull**** about how it will be. It's not like those things when it happens.
(It's worth pointing out that in the "Molested at 100' thread', that the only person other person who actually had someone else go OOA on them at depth had exactly what I said would happen, happen to them. Everyone was just making **** up. WHich is fine, but then again we learn from new info, not from repeating nonsense we heard but have no experience with.)
So you call an S-Drill as practiced a safety thing. I call it a false sense of security
unless it is routinely practiced in the worst conditions and situations one can find. Blind in a surge zone with hands full is a good place to practice. In an actual restriction, where hand signals are not possible is a good place to learn that a long hose is a serious entanglement hazard on the return.
What someone said on the internet about how this length or that length is the way to to do it is just what someone imagining **** says. This is exactly the time to listen to the contrarian with experience in the actual situation where any long hose is needed (OOA).