@PfcAJ and @ajduplessis, thanks for your input, and I'll certainly think about this some more. For the diving I do, I'm usually not that overly heavy at the surface. I dive wet, so at depth, wetsuit compression come into play, so buoyancy down deep is a bigger concern. If I have an elbow pop off my wing at the surface, I'm light enough not to plummet to the bottom.
Your thoughts on dual bladder wing
- Thread starter CAPTAIN SINBAD
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
@ajduplessis, if you wouldn't mind sharing, I would certainly appreciate hearing the details of your experience where you found that a lift bag was a poor option. I find the details helpful in learning. Thanks!
RandomGuy1
Contributor
Not sure about @ajduplessis , but i assume it is something similar to this. I can deploy a lift bag in about 45 seconds under pretty much optimal conditions. Imagine how far you could descend in 45 seconds. Once you add trying to kick toward the surface, potential panic, and any other unknown factors that time goes up. Also, hope you don't fumble that lift bag either. I think a lift bag is a pretty poor backup unless you have a hard bottom immediately below you. For me personally it will be tanks that I can drop some weight and swim up or redundant buoyancy via a drysuit.
OP
CAPTAIN SINBAD
Contributor
Those of you who use dual bladder wing. Dont you feel unusually cluttered / less streamlined? If you dive in a hogarthian configuration then the access to your right D ring may also get compromised. No?
@richiewrt, yes, I certainly agree that it would be a bad solution for immediate deployment at the surface when you find yourself too heavy to kick your rig up.
I just looked through my log and the absolute fastest momentary descent rate I can find it 78 ft/min. That was on a hot drop into current doing my best to get down as quickly as I could and that was a momentary spike in the descent rate. Most of the fast drops I can find are under 60 ft/min.
So, if it takes a full minute to deploy a lift bag, you shouldn't drop more than 60 feet, I think. And that's based on jumping in with an empty wing and immediately losing your elbow. If you're at depth and you pull the elbow off, presumably you would be pretty close to neutral when it happens, so not a sudden precipitous drop in depth.
I did my Solo Diver cert recently. A skill I was taught and then asked to demonstrate was deploying a lift bag to control my buoyancy. I only did it once, but I'm pretty sure it took me less than a minute to pull it out, clip it to my scooter ring and start putting air in it.
For recreational diving, I'm pretty comfortable with having a single bladder wing and a lift bag for redundancy.
RandomGuy1
Contributor
So after reading your post, I went back and looked at a few of my logs. I have one dive where I descended to 90ft in right at a minute. This was on an intentional descent where I arrived at depth neutral. I am thinking worse case scenario where if someone jumped off a boat with double steels at the start of the dive you could easily see 150-200 feet before you could get that lift bag deployed. That is assuming in your panic of becoming a dirt dart you don't fumble and lose the lift bag. Everyone can do what they want, but I will stick with either redundant lift via drysuit, or diving AL tanks so I can drop a weight and become less negative enough to swim up. Trying to deploy a lift bag while sinking like a rock doesn't seem like a good plan to me. to each their own though.
Not trying to argue you with you. As you say, to each their own. But, just for the record, the dives I was looking at in Subsurface, where I was trying to find my maximum descent rate, were all with double steel 120s and me wearing a drysuit.
I agree that if you panic and lose your lift bag, you could be screwed. But, the key is ALWAYS to not panic. However, now that we've had this discussion, the next couple of times I get out on a boat, if conditions are conducive, I'm going to have to try it. Jump in with a totally empty wing and fully compressed drysuit (or even better, a wetsuit) and then see how deep I get before I can take out my lift bag, clip it on, and start to fill it.
You do have to realize that while looking at past decent rates can be useful, they are in no way accurate, as in this case, not being a controlled descent doesn't care if your happy about it (air spaces, panic, stress, fumbling around with trying to deploy, yet alone inflate a bag......)
_R
_R
Similar threads
