It seems odd to me as well. I get, and understand, that sidemount was not designed for open water dives. I understand sidemount was designed for ultra-tight restrictions only. However, I can't agree that it is any less good than BM in the Open Water.
This is something to be considered. The world is full of items that are common-place and beneficial, but actually evolved from a completely different and less common-place usage.
The current 'trend' seems to be for sidemount critics to describe the popularity of sidemount as a "craze". Fair enough - it is a craze. Within the space of two years, virtually every scuba agency has rushed to adopt sidemount within their recreational and technical curriculum. Even an agency like PADI, which has traditionally been quite circumspect about rushing into new and untested areas (
think 'nitrox'); and they've done so at such speed that the production of training materials (
their major profit line) still hasn't caught up.
Likewise, the scuba manufacturers are rushing to supply that demand. A cynic (
and I am one, normally...you know that's true!) would level their finger at manufacturers and blame them for engineering this demand. Except this isn't a manufacturer driven phenomenon. The major scuba manufacturers are only
now sprinting after the market with their pants round their ankles trying to catch up with demand. The demand arose from divers... and was originally supplied by some very small, very specialist manufacturers.. There were no six-figure marketing budgets or clever 'ad-man' gimmickry to blame for the exponential demand for their equipment...
There's huge, undeniable, consumer demand for sidemount - unlike anything else we've ever seen emerging from a specialist niche into the mainstream with the exception, perhaps, of nitrox - which itself was the target of similar criticism and naysayers when it went 'mainstream' (
"it's more dangerous"; "it's a fad"; "it has no real use for the majority of scuba divers" etc etc).
So, how do we explain such a 'craze'? How do we explain why the mainstream scuba community is so eager and appreciative to learn sidemount? A community that, for the most part, has been reluctant to spend time considering any intricacy to their configuration beyond which day-glo color schemes are available or how many 'go-faster' spilts could be added to their fins...
Is this really the result of the most genius inter-agency scuba marketing campaign ever devised? Is it some form of mass hysteria, the like of which the scuba industry has never seen before? ......
Or is it simply a case that people are trying sidemount and loving it?
How do we explain sky-rocketing demand for something new in a traditionally inertia-ridden market? Really?
It never happened with back-mount doubles... did it? That never 'caught on' in the mainstream recreational community... why not? PADI never rushed out to write a 'Backmount Doubles Diver' course available at OW/AOW levels... There were no 'Recreational Backmount Double Diving' user-groups on Facebook... The major scuba manufacturers didn't fall over themselves to design and release back-mount doubles options in months - it took them years, and most still don't bother.....
If people are trying sidemount and
loving it... then it's hard to rationalize sidemount as a "silly craze". People.... many people...
must be seeing advantages in it. Sufficiently so that they're willing to seek training, buy new equipment, join social-media groups, trawl the internet for information.... Wow... a humble equipment configuration that's promoting mainstream recreational divers to
think?... to get
involved?...to
learn?... to
discuss?... to
adapt? A bad, terrible, pointless thing - some would have us believe...
If you're carrying 8 tanks, yeah...I get it....strap some to your back, there's a LOT of space there. That's a cogent argument for the "Real-estate" argument.
There is.
Whilst realistically, this is a small niche in technical diving, I do think that sidemount becomes much less efficient beyond 6-8 tanks. You do need to utilize that real-estate.
When I did the ANDI Advanced Sidemount course (
prerequisites: Full Cave/Technical Wreck), we covered options for wearing back-mount doubles
over a sidemount rig, where those cylinders were used as stages/travel. They were dispensed for penetration and re-donned upon return, along with deco cylinders. That left only sidemount primaries/stages (
4 cylinders) for the overhead portions of the dive (
was done on wrecks, not cave). It was taught as
an option, not
the option - a tool in the toolbox, one of many solutions taught. It also depended on the sidemount rig used. I wasn't smitten with that particular idea - but it did raise the issue of 'real-estate' usage - whilst still permitting the benefits of sidemount to be realized on the penetration phase of the dive. I've done a little head-scratching with this, but little practical testing (
6-8 cylinder dives are quite rare for me) and sidemount does provide the flexibility for alternative approaches. I've looked at additional soft-mountings on the back for accessible individual stage tanks, amongst other things.
That said, for the types of dives we're talking about here; I think the practicalities of open-circuit in general start to become highly questionable. Do we need to debate 8-tank sidemount versus backmount? Or rather, shouldn't 8-tank open-circuit versus CCR be the real issue of debate?
---------- Post added December 21st, 2013 at 11:18 AM ----------
Well, we're at the point where part of my..stringed together..exit..has lots of tenticles now... I'll leave you guys to talk about that,...
You are a very sick, sick puppy
