Stainless backplate for tropical diving

[NitroxSam]

I use a DR SS "Lite". It's about 4# with the harness/hardware, 2.6# bare, so more than an AL, but still relatively light when compared to a full weight SS. I'm in FLA, so it's warm water, and 1-3/2 mm wetsuit if it's "cold" (below 78, lol) pretty much all the time.

 

[dmaziuk]

I had a wing failure 5 minutes into a dive. My buddy had washed our gear after the last dive, removing the dump valve to rinse out my wing, and then not fully screwed it on. It passed pre-dive checks, holding air. I was carrying extra weight to donate if others ended up light on this dive. I had to hand off 1kg shortly after the start of the dive. I used the dump valve. It came off the wing in my hand and my wing filled with water. I was able to swim it up from 12m, but had a little difficulty staying positive on the surface for the swim back to the boat, so I had to inflate my DSMB.

Now you’ve heard of it in real life

Speaking of dump valves, we had them unscrewed from my wife's BCD for drying/storage, then screwed them back on without noticing the rubber disk in the shoulder one got unglued (thank you Cressi). It was fine until she used it a couple of times during the dive and it fell out of its holder. So the dump wouldn't close properly and she had a few very unpleasant moments after coming up -- unpleasant mostly because the failure was unexpected and non-obvious, I was directly under her and had no idea something was wrong (thankfully she didn't drop her weights on me), and the DM was herding the others back to the boat and didn't pay attention to her either.

So yeah: it happens.