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Hi Grateful,
You have put a lot of time in answering to my comment, so I owe you an answer.
First of all, I don't make a big deal of people diving another way, where did you see that?
Secondly, I am a dive educator and not a hard core cave explorer, although I am a cave diver.
I teach people to dive to the best I can, that is my job..
UTD offers me a fantastic teaching system to teach people how to dive, in the sidemount case it comes with a z-system.
I know there are great instructors out there, but great instructors don't come from the 1000's of IDC a year, they come through experience, these guys
have made their own courses.
Almost everyone seems to agree on the fact that UTD divers usually are well prepared, and that's exactly what I am trying to do.
Number 1 in diver accidents is and always will be HUMAN ERROR and not a BCD or your newest hippest regulator. I am after reducing that human error percentage in this case with the z-sytem and the playbook.
If tomorrow someone shows up with a manual, a way to safely teach sidemount in details ALSO to non-cavers, I would be the first one to have a look at that! (and I mean by that ; a course and manual with for example ; A freeflow drill is not just "sipping air from a freeflowing regulator" and an S-drill is NOt.."Donate air to a diver signalling OOA" )
These guys in Mexico are awesome, great divers and inspirational...the truth is that most sidemountdivers nowadays will never ever dive in a cave.
It is sad to see these new sidemountdivers from the big agencies trying to get into the water, helplessly trying to bungee their steel tanks on the shore being washed away by the swell...yes..and lots of them are returning to backmount.
I mean to say that the level what we see here of all these new SM divers is not very high, if you want I can send you some youtube links ;-)
I honestly can see your points, I chose for the bigger picture.
Regards
Mike
I see it here too, Mike ... but it's not the system, it's the fact that some agencies have made it possible for a backmount instructor to do four dives in sidemount and therefore "qualify" to teach it ... hell, they don't even need to take a sidemount class. Seems all they need to do is buy a rig and figure out how to clip the tanks in place. It's pathetic ... and more a mindset of the instructor who wants to add sidemount to his "stable" of class offerings.
For anyone considering sidemount ... whichever system or approach you choose ... my recommendation is to go find an instructor who knows what the hell they're doing ... which ALWAYS boils down to someone who dives sidemount routinely, rather than some recreational instructor who just offers it as another specialty class.
... Bob (Grateful Diver)