I'm new to diving and also work in a unrelated technical field and for the life of me I can't think of any legitimate benefit to have a diver take primary instead of alternate regulator?
I was taught to take the alternate from your buddy if needed and not necessarily wait for them to hand it to you.
Maybe I'm missing something but here are my thoughts.
If you tell or train people to go for or give up primary your just increasing the odds of 2 people having an emergency instead of one.
For example you have group 1 who believes in giving up primary.
Best case diver has issue and needs to share air and their buddy sees this and gives primary to diver in trouble and switches to alternate themselves and everyone lives to tell the tale.
Worst case scenario diver has issue and needs to share air but buddy isn't paying attention and doesn't see what's going on. So diver in trouble grabs the primary right out of mouth of buddy who then could swallow water, freak out or any number of other problems leading to both divers possibly being in serious trouble.
Now group 2 believes in giving or taking the alternate. Since we all double check our buddies gear before getting in water we know that the buddy has their alternate in the triangle.
Again best case scenario buddy sees diver in trouble and hands them their octo and everyone lives to tell the tale.
Worse case scenario diver has problem and buddy isn't paying attention. They swim over and grab the alternate buddy and again live to tell the tale.
I guess I just don't understand why have that added risk of something going wrong by taking the primary away from the diver not in distress?
If there is a better reason to give primary instead of alternate I would definitely like to know so I can start training that way.
Fashion and bravado. People want to look like the cool kids (literally see rule 6), and (just my opinion) because they want to seem ‘hard’ - some claiming you can take a regulator from their mouths and they will not care.
In proper ‘technical’ diving you want a long hose (1.5m or more normally 2.1m) for a primary. This is so it is possible to get out through small spaces while sharing gas and because it is easier to share using a long hose in any case if both divers are any good.
Now there are a couple of ways to store a long hose. One is bungeed to the side of the twinset, another is the Hogarthian loop (aka hog loop) named after some bloke called Bill. The hog loop is a long hose which runs down the right side, below a canister light, up across the chest, round behind the neck and then presents the regulator in the usual way.
The bungee scheme is like a regular octopus, just longer, and suffers from similar problem similar of dropping and being a bit of a pain. That is not hard to fix though. I use a necklace for the octopus long hose or not. However you cannot put it back underwater once deployed. This inhibits practice.
Practice is very much required for a hog loop. In fact it is called for on very dive to do an ‘S Drill’ to check that the long hose can actually deploy. With a fairly complicated hose routing it is possible to trap the long hose, classically under a drysuit inflate hose, under a dangling DSMB reel, etc. With a hog loop that is very easy to check. I suspect that it happens a lot less than it is supposed to.
Now, it follows from the hog looped long hose that it must be used as the primary (or it will fall away - once on deco gas it is clipped off and so unavailable) and it must be donated (as the wrapping is such that an OOG Diver taking it probably will not have it deploy properly).
In technical training it is a prerequisite that the divers have good situational awareness, in other words they know what is happening around them, to themselves and to their buddies (sorry, ‘team members’). This means that an OOG situation should not be a complete surprise. Also everyone will have redundant gas of their own. Thus donating the primary ought not to be a drama. The OOG diver will never have to TAKE the primary so your concern
“I just don't understand why have that added risk of something going wrong by taking the primary away from the diver not in distress?”
does not apply. Nobody ever TAKES a primary, they are always GIVEN it.
However, with the short bungee necklaces secondary that goes with a long hose, an OOG diver can ONLY get gas from the primary. So it is ESSENTIAL that the diver with the gas is aware of what is going on or the OOG dive will have no choice but to steal the primary if they fail to get their attention.
Now, everyone (or at least 75% judging by the poll) on SB considers themselves a heroic and attentive diver. You never read the story about how THEY mugged some poor innocent of their primary, just how it happened to them or their instructor told them it happens all the time etc etc. So given that mindset everything is peachy in their eyes.
Out in the world divers are taught to dive in a few days, often regardless of actual progress. Very many of these divers are having a hard enough time with awareness of themselves, let alone what is going on around them or with their buddy. I teach at a London club. We sometimes get people who have completed training in places like Thailand who come and want to start again from scratch, although entitled to go on at the next level, because they realise how little they learned.
Some agencies do try quite hard, I know the local SDI/TDI rep and he is excellent and encourages the shops to teach neutral buoyancy, situational awareness etc... I would happily send my 13 yr old to him, and to some of the shops he supports, to be trained with a long hose and primary donate from day one, but then I’d need to be careful about who he dived with.
So, given the commercial constraints and being realistic about the skills a new diver has, is it better at a population level to expose them to the additional risk of having a primary taken vs having a secondary taken?
SB essentially encourages people to switch to primary donate by putting forward primary take as a real world thing. It is ok here to recommend people switch to primary donate configurations, including those not recommended by any agency, without taking specific training. Meanwhile suggesting that going into a big hole in a cliff under the water such that there is rock above you is ok will get a thread closed.
When diving OC and not teaching I dive a hog loop. When teaching I use a long hose, on my twinset, or a standard 1m octopus on a single. My GF uses a long hose. She was taught by the TDI bloke mentioned above. On club dives you have to have been trained if using a primary donate config, some configs are not considered having an AS (alternative supply) and so The DO cannot allow them. That never happens though.
In my opinion either way is workable, but do dive as you are trained and if you want to follow fashion get the appropriate training. And be realistic, if you are taking pictures will you notice your buddy OOG as early?
Going back to rule 6 etc. There are a bunch of rules most of which are worth taking notice of
The rules of DIR Diving
Rule one means not diving with people who will run out.
