wb416:But you're back to thinking you can get your pony deployed in a chaotic shower of bubbles. Is this something you work on?
A good reality check might be to have you're buddy unexpectedly shut off your backgas and see how quickly you can get to the pony reg. The time to find out if you can do or not is in 20ft of water, not 100ft of water.
I keep seeing the common solutions being:
1. You need an adequate amount of redundancy to hand significant tank (such as an extruded valve o-ring) or 1st stage (such as free flow) issues and get you and your buddy to the surface in a safe manner.
2. Practice, practice, practice. Don't slap a tank on your back or sling one on your side, never use it and then plan to be able to miraculously deploy it when the caca hits the fan. It must be a response that does not require thought or analysis but is pure reaction honed by repeated practice.
Those are the key answers I see to issues like this. Pony vs. doubles is simply a matter of how much redundancy, where is it and how is it accessed. Both have pros and cons that need to be weighed. There is at least one diver on this board who dives triples. That's another option, just not a common one.
I'm really not trying to be a pain. I'm an analyst by nature and I'm trained to analyze problems, boil them down to their root cause, assess a set of possible solutions and select the best solution. In some scenarios, doubles are clearly the best solution to the problem. In others they are overkill. Then there are gray areas where you can make arguments both ways and you can have divers going in EITHER direction and doing it SAFELY. I'm trying to figure out where that gray area lies.