Any tips and examples on how to configure and attach a stage / deco bottle?

[Dive-aholic]

Diving with stages vs deco cylinders is different. I do not recommend diving deco cylinders on top. You need to confirm the cylinder and gas you are breathing and cannot do that if the deco cylinder is on top. I will only run a stage cylinder on top if it contains the same gas mix as what I have in my sidemount cylinders. I also set up my regs so the 2nd stages are different enough so that I know which cylinder I am breathing from by looking at it or feeling it.

When I dive deco cylinders in open water I carry them below and use additional bungees to hold them up tight against me. They pull up in tight in the space between my torso and my sidemount cylinder quite nicely. I've done a giant stride about 6-7' from the platform to the water carrying a set of LP108s, 2 AL40 deco cylinders, and a Silent Submersion Magnus scooter without any issues. I prefer that over having anything handed down.

For stage cylinders, I do carry them on top. When I was trying to figure out how to carry them I had seen some youtube videos of other divers doing the top carry. I played around with this and initially tried to connect the top clip over my shoulder but didn't have the flexibility to do this. After talking to some other sidemount divers and experimenting I started pulling the clip under my arm and that worked much better. The issue with this was the bottom of the cylinder tended to ride high. Playing around with the position of the bottom clip I was able to find a position that kept the bottom fairly close to my body. There's no set distance from the bottom of the cylinder to position it. I ended up placing it 18 inches from the bottom but some people need it a little closer. The determining factor is how tall you are and how far apart the bottom and top attachment points are. With top mounting it's much easier to clip on in the water. While clipping on before getting in the water is possible it is difficult and the bungees on the stage cylinder attachments also make it less desirable.

 

[beanojones]

I've read about the Dive Rite system and it looks very good with the online material. I'm just a bit concerned with the "choker" system they mentioned on tanks, it could make attaching bottles a little more challenging on boats?

First I have only done a few boat dives with a full sidemount setup as opposed to a couple hundred from the the beach, but my whole goal is to be able to handle surf entries.

A boat is simpler in most respects.

More importantly, The Dive Rite way of having the clips fixed to the valve, and the clip off point being down below the armpit has just made everything simpler in a big way. I always loved SM underwater, but the "out the water part " was just a pain, since I had to put together the system to work with the tanks being attached above water and walk in, and walk out.

FWIW, I actually do not use the Nomad BCD itself, just the Daisy Chain bungies, but the way the bungies have a metal connection but hanging down out of the way, and the fact that the bungies make pulling the ring forward to clip off simple, and the way the clips on the tanks are fixed into valves has made everything about the system possible to deal with out of the water.

Since switching to the Nomad Bungie system, everything has just come together in terms of the out if the water part.

Important: It is the 2012 Daisy chain bungie one, with the neck choker bands to lock the neck clips into position: Dive Rite TV channel, diving videos, dive gear videos, training videos: Dive Rite Scuba

Not the older style, which was as much of a pain in the ass as every other system in terms of hooking up and transport. One tip I have found: if you can manage it condition wise, unclip the butt clips before you get out of the water. Since the upper clip is solidly attached by metal, you don't need the lower clip for security like you do with an upper bungie only system.

 

[mulla]

When I dive off a boat I have the stages handed to me or if its rough they can be dropped a few feet under the boat on a line. If its calm I will jump in with just my left cylinder which has my short hose on it giving me a reg and inflation then have my long hose cylinder handed down. I use loop bungees with my 1st stages facing up tucked into my arm pits. I tried the diverite bungee without the chokers or the ring bungees and didnt care for them. I think the loop bungee is the most flexible option out there and its as cheap as a piece of bungee you have laying around in the garage.

Any photos of examples of this loop bungee you're talking about? I've looked at the Dive Rite website and the Nomad Loop Bungee mentioned there looked exactly the same as the ring bungee? At the moment I don't mind clipping off both tanks on the shoulder D ring, stand up and clip off the rails then jump in. It would be a good idea to eliminate having to clip off the bungee after getting in the water. As this would reduce the number of things I have to do under water to just clipping off deco bottle.

With a stage underneath I just clip it like I would in backmount. Top of stage on chest D ring,bottom of stage on waist D ring.

Ahhh... Waist D rings, my SMS 100 doesn't come with any waist D rings so I was tyring to picture clipping it off the rail. Might have to get a waist D ring.

Diving with stages vs deco cylinders is different. I do not recommend diving deco cylinders on top. You need to confirm the cylinder and gas you are breathing and cannot do that if the deco cylinder is on top. I will only run a stage cylinder on top if it contains the same gas mix as what I have in my sidemount cylinders. I also set up my regs so the 2nd stages are different enough so that I know which cylinder I am breathing from by looking at it or feeling it.

When I dive deco cylinders in open water I carry them below and use additional bungees to hold them up tight against me. They pull up in tight in the space between my torso and my sidemount cylinder quite nicely. I've done a giant stride about 6-7' from the platform to the water carrying a set of LP108s, 2 AL40 deco cylinders, and a Silent Submersion Magnus scooter without any issues. I prefer that over having anything handed down.

Good call about the benifit of having the deco bottle under so you can see / confirm correctness.
Do you have photos of this "additional" bungee that you use to tie down the deco tank? Preferable with where you attach it on your BC. Thanks in advance

More importantly, The Dive Rite way of having the clips fixed to the valve, and the clip off point being down below the armpit has just made everything simpler in a big way. I always loved SM underwater, but the "out the water part " was just a pain, since I had to put together the system to work with the tanks being attached above water and walk in, and walk out.

FWIW, I actually do not use the Nomad BCD itself, just the Daisy Chain bungies, but the way the bungies have a metal connection but hanging down out of the way, and the fact that the bungies make pulling the ring forward to clip off simple, and the way the clips on the tanks are fixed into valves has made everything about the system possible to deal with out of the water.

I've got a better understanding of the Dive Rite daisy chain bungee system now after I've looked at it in a bit more detail. However, in the videos I noticed due the chokers on the cylinders demanding that 1st stage be facing AWAY from you. I prefer to have them face INSIDE towards me. Have you tried diving the daisy chain bungee without cylinder chokers? I might clip the bungee off higher up on a shoulder D ring to compensate for the extra distance created by the cylinder bolt snap by not using a choker.

<- Off to order some daisy chain bungees... can't wait to test

 

[Mike2Fst]

I sidemount steel 120s and carry one stage/deco bottle on top of each clipped to the rear rail and lower chest D-ring. I prefer to have all this on before leaving the boat. When carrying a 5th and 6th stage/deco bottle, I will have those handed to me once in the water and I will trail those by one clip and can change where I clip them for trim purposes or to move them out of the way to access the other stage/deco bottles. Lots of practice will make whatever your choice is comfortable and familiar.

 

[beanojones]

(I hate losing longs posts dammit...)

I find the chokers to be a big part of why everything works. Without the chokers the neck clips get jumbled, and tank position is less consistent.

Quick recap:

The positioning benefits outweigh that first stage orientation for me, and I have found hose routing to become much cleaner especially when dealing with multiple tanks on a side. I used to fight with three tanks total, and since switching I have had no problems with three tanks on a side. With the Daisy chaing bungie being able to pull them all out to double check things makes it a lot less crucial which goes where (for me). I can easily check by pulling the ring out and looking three tanks over, and then just let got to have everything go back to the side.

(I was using 5 80's to see how everything worked. It worked great, much to my surprise.)

And with the locked in position from the chokers, the gear is much more consistently positioned anyway.

Here's a tricky bit to keep in mind: You have to use stage rigging to properly position the base of the upper clip of the shoulder of the tank, rather than at the neck. This is a big part of locking the positioning in for me.

What DiveRite has filed to mention, and it is hard to spot in the videos is that the position of the lower clip has changed as well:

Old style (same idea at least for the lower clip as the typical GUE stage rigging):
Stage/Deco Straps and Hose Retainers by Dive Rite - Dive Gear Express

But watch carefully in the previous video and in this one, and you ill see the lowet clip is no longer on a loop hanging below the cam band, but rather on the outside loop the bottom of which is trapped by the cam band.

Sidemount Diving: Stage Strap Tank Mounting System - YouTube

DiveRite does not mention this, and the pictures on their website don;t note the difference, and I fought with the lower clip till I figured out that the lower clip want to be more free to move up and down, and putting it on the outside of the loop make it work much better.

 

[Teller]

When I dive off a boat I have the stages handed to me or if its rough they can be dropped a few feet under the boat on a line. If its calm I will jump in with just my left cylinder which has my short hose on it giving me a reg and inflation then have my long hose cylinder handed down. I use loop bungees with my 1st stages facing up tucked into my arm pits. I tried the diverite bungee without the chokers or the ring bungees and didnt care for them. I think the loop bungee is the most flexible option out there and its as cheap as a piece of bungee you have laying around in the garage.

Any photos of examples of this loop bungee you're talking about? I've looked at the Dive Rite website and the Nomad Loop Bungee mentioned there looked exactly the same as the ring bungee? At the moment I don't mind clipping off both tanks on the shoulder D ring, stand up and clip off the rails then jump in. It would be a good idea to eliminate having to clip off the bungee after getting in the water. As this would reduce the number of things I have to do under water to just clipping off deco bottle.

With a stage underneath I just clip it like I would in backmount. Top of stage on chest D ring,bottom of stage on waist D ring.

Ahhh... Waist D rings, my SMS 100 doesn't come with any waist D rings so I was tyring to picture clipping it off the rail. Might have to get a waist D ring.

Diving with stages vs deco cylinders is different. I do not recommend diving deco cylinders on top. You need to confirm the cylinder and gas you are breathing and cannot do that if the deco cylinder is on top. I will only run a stage cylinder on top if it contains the same gas mix as what I have in my sidemount cylinders. I also set up my regs so the 2nd stages are different enough so that I know which cylinder I am breathing from by looking at it or feeling it.

When I dive deco cylinders in open water I carry them below and use additional bungees to hold them up tight against me. They pull up in tight in the space between my torso and my sidemount cylinder quite nicely. I've done a giant stride about 6-7' from the platform to the water carrying a set of LP108s, 2 AL40 deco cylinders, and a Silent Submersion Magnus scooter without any issues. I prefer that over having anything handed down.

Good call about the benifit of having the deco bottle under so you can see / confirm correctness.
Do you have photos of this "additional" bungee that you use to tie down the deco tank? Preferable with where you attach it on your BC. Thanks in advance

More importantly, The Dive Rite way of having the clips fixed to the valve, and the clip off point being down below the armpit has just made everything simpler in a big way. I always loved SM underwater, but the "out the water part " was just a pain, since I had to put together the system to work with the tanks being attached above water and walk in, and walk out.

FWIW, I actually do not use the Nomad BCD itself, just the Daisy Chain bungies, but the way the bungies have a metal connection but hanging down out of the way, and the fact that the bungies make pulling the ring forward to clip off simple, and the way the clips on the tanks are fixed into valves has made everything about the system possible to deal with out of the water.

I've got a better understanding of the Dive Rite daisy chain bungee system now after I've looked at it in a bit more detail. However, in the videos I noticed due the chokers on the cylinders demanding that 1st stage be facing AWAY from you. I prefer to have them face INSIDE towards me. Have you tried diving the daisy chain bungee without cylinder chokers? I might clip the bungee off higher up on a shoulder D ring to compensate for the extra distance created by the cylinder bolt snap by not using a choker.

<- Off to order some daisy chain bungees... can't wait to test

Go to Rob Neto's (dive-aholic) website, look at sidemount modifications. He has some good photos of his loop bungees. Rob do you have any pictures of how you hook up your stages with bungees?

 

[JamesK]

Any photos of examples of this loop bungee you're talking about? I've looked at the Dive Rite website and the Nomad Loop Bungee mentioned there looked exactly the same as the ring bungee?

The new bungees from dive rite have been combined basically. It is a ring bungee that uses a loop of bungee. That way you can unthread the ring if you prefer to use just a loop. Look at the bungee portion of it.

 

[beanojones]

The new bungees from dive rite have been combined basically. It is a ring bungee that uses a loop of bungee. That way you can unthread the ring if you prefer to use just a loop. Look at the bungee portion of it.

Actually it is pretty clear that while you may be able to do that, it is not at all the purpose of using the system. Because DiveRite is throwing videos up unedited, and not pulling old videos down, and not arranging the videos in chronological order, and is not updating their own product webpages to reflect new approaches it is hard to put together.

On top of it all, all divers always claim to be doing things a certain way forever way before anyone else did it that way. While DiveRite does not spend much time talking about their own flailing through different approaches that ran into problems, and they include lots of fairly recent video (2009,2010) of using approaches that they claim to have given up in the 90's, or even in the 80's in one case, the fact is that the system they have now (2012) is the end result of trying and discarding other approaches. In order to appear to have known everything since the beginning of time in the talking during the videos, they are failing to acknowledge that this new approach is actually something new and different to 2012, and it is not what they were doing even last year(2011).

It is not a combination of approaches, it is a different approach to how to how things hook up to a bungie while maintaining hard metal attachment out of the water, and allows a ring that the upper tank clip to to be repositionable and still bungieable, with the upper tank attachemtn point in a specific location on the tank. Not using it this way is just using another bungie system, which generates various problems with mulitiple tanks (which the Nomad system just makes disappear). One tank per side works well enough in good conditions with any setup, but because hook up of the upper end is relatively insecure in a bungie system (either in terms of the dry weight of the tanks over powering the bungie, or because UW they are positionly insecure, or have to be fixed into position and left) , bad conditions makes three or more tanks a real PITA, or it did before the Nomad system (chokered clip, stages strap, shoulder mounted upper clip, upper clips snaps to a ring that hangs unde the arm off a solid metal attachment, which ring is bungies to pull into position.)

There a several parts that if not used together makes the system as unwieldy as any other bungie system. If you loop the bungies then it is not going to work the same, because the tanks will be sloppy in and out of the water, and you lose the ability to reposition them freely. If you do not use the clip chokers it is not going to work the same, because the clip can wander and tangle. If you do not use the stage straps it is not going to work the same, because their is no other way to fix the bottom of the top clip on the shoulder of the tank. etc.

Not using the system as designed is no big deal, but it is also not going to generate any benefits over all the other systems which are annoying to use out of the water, and/or hard to hook up on the move underwater systems out there. The upper clip needs to be on the stage strap so that the clip can be bound to the valve, so the the tank is not wiggling/swinging around with the length of the clip providing lots of slop, and the clip itself simply never needs to be found because it always in the same place on the bottle.

The chokered neck clip is the heart of the system because it fixes the upper point to a location (the ring) that is on a bungie. If a diver is not going to use the neck choker, and/or not clip it to the ring, then the DiveRite hardware is just the same as everyone else's. And the chokered neck clip itself is something brought over from the 2009-2011 system of clipping the neck clip to the bungie rather than the Ring. The neck clip in that system was easy to hook up, but the bottles were sloppy as hell in the water, which made the neck clips not seem to be useful.

And the valves chokers just weren't useful in the 2009-2011 DiveRite system, because the tanks were always in each others way clipped off, and not stable out of the water, because bungies are just not stable enough for many conditions.

 

[Dive-aholic]

Do you have photos of this "additional" bungee that you use to tie down the deco tank? Preferable with where you attach it on your BC. Thanks in advance

No photos at this time. I have a long list of photos I need to get, just no time to get them! But, FWIW, on my Armadillo I have an additional grommet on each side where I can feed through an additional bungee loop for the deco cylinders. On my Nomad, I just feed the bungee loop through the same 1 inch d-ring as the main bungee loop. The deco loop needs to be slightly longer than the main loop.

 

[billgraham]

I've been diving sidemount in caves and off boats for about 10 years and I'd suggest saving yourself some aggravation and getting a couple of stage kits from Edd at Cave Adventurers. What I do on boats depends on the dive and conditions. As a general proposition, I've got a clip at the neck of my stage bottles/deco bottles for boat diving. If it's just going to be bottom gas and o-2, I put the o-2 cylindar by the gate, gear up with my sidemount tanks, pick up the deco bottle at the gate and clip it to a crotch d-ring, jump and then normally I'd leave that bottle near the anchor line and attach my line reel to it and the wreck. If it's a deeper dive and the current isn't too bad, I'll use an equipment line for larger deco bottles and go grab them before I head down the anchor line, and put them back on the line at the end of the dive before I climb the ladder. A strobe at the bottom of the equipment line is a good idea.