I'm new to SCUBA and planning to purchase some gear for my wife and I. I apologise if is this has been covered in a previous post. It would seem to make very good sense to have an octo that can be used upside down or right side up. I could see this being a major (if not fatal) issue when someone is in despirate need of air. As best i can tell, this seems to be a feature different than most octos have. All that being said ,are there any puck style octos out there that can be used in either orientation? Would you recommend them? We will always be diving in warm waters.
Hi David
Great questions
Like many other posters I believe that "primary donate" with a bungeed secondary around the neck is the safest practice. It is what I use and what my children have been taught. Among other things there is less question as to the proper orientation of the air supply to be used by the out-of-air diver.
But it is my experience that a properly adjusted regulator will more or less work in any orientation. I have very ordinary regulators of simple design from the early 1980s, the main difference between them and most regulators on the market being that they have a metal body rather than a plastic one. I have my primary regulators set up to be a little more sensitive, about 1.5" cracking pressure, compared to 2.5" for the secondaries. It doesn't matter much but the idea is that I want the primary to breathe freely and I want the secondary to be a little more resistant to freeflow. In any case, I find that I can breathe my regs in any orientation although they will breathe wetter and tend to freeflow a little if inverted. This is true of both my primary and secondary.
Breathing a wet reg is a skill that can be learned. It is more a matter of expecting the water and being prepared to spit it back into the reg than anything else although tongue and jaw position are part of it.
Similarly purging an upside-down reg is possible but you will get a mouthful of water and are going to have to do something with it. Spit it out, swallow it, open your jaw so it sits in the bottom of your mouth to make room for air.
It is useful to be able to position one's body inverted while diving so as to be able to see under rocks and ledges. Of course the reg is going to misbehave a little. Builds skill as well as letting you see stuff.
Finally a fact to consider is that the scuba diving accident statistics have never revealed problems with any of the basic gear we all use. There isn't, for example, anything to suggest that the expensive-brand gear is any safer than the discount-brand gear, or even that primary donate is safer than an octo. The eitiology of typical dive accidents has more to do with buoyancy control problems than breathing air supply, more to do with planning, monitoring, and navigation failures than equipment, more to do with cool calm collected behavior when tshtf than redundant systems.
In other words, more people are killed by stuck power inflators than anything that went wrong with their reg.
So, my advice, buy whatever reg pleases you, and if you think a reg that is supposed to be more all-orientation-ey will make you a safer diver, great. Maybe it will, and I doubt if it will do any harm. But whatever reg you have, try breathing it in all orientations, upside down, on your back, sideways, whatever, and get used to how it acts and what you have to do to keep breathing from it. That will do more for you IMO, safety wise, then reg choice.
