Does GUE claim to even teach DIR anymore? It was my understanding that they have distanced themselves from the use of that term. Certainly, GUE has its roots in DIR, but are we overstepping the bounds by saying that only GUE divers can be called DIR? What about the Unified Team divers from the West Coast? I realize that Dan suggested that GUE is "quality control" and he was there at pretty much the outset. But really: who defines what is DIR? George? Jared? Andrew? I am not trying to piss off anyone or start a turf war, but its hard to keep up with all the players who are going in slightly different directions.
I don't know for sure who the arbiter of this should be...though I think it should be George....
The way Bill and George and I see most of this, is that DIR was spread around to help bring common sense ideas to recreational divers, and we wanted them to adopt as many of these ideas as they could. We also wanted some of these to get really into DIR, and to potentially dive with us, or to join the WKPP and get mentored into DIR in the purest way possible....
Overwhelming growth of the idea, became far greater than WKPP could ever handle (for mentoring in DIR).....JJ finally created GUE, to teach DIR diving....this being almost 10 years ago now....in that time, growth and Agency Issues have modified some of our DIR practices.... If George and Bill and I planned a dive, it would be OUR dive plan, for us.....each of us knows the way the others handle stress and gas useage, and our approach to gas required on a 150 foot dive like the Hole in the Wall, is for "extreme slickness" in the big current dominant force, and the gas we believe we need to get up a buddy with a failure, safely.
There are differences between old DIR, and the new DIR or GUE planning
...new planning is not for the 3 of us, but rather a
model that is intelligent for use by
many thousands of divers....the customization of tables is different, and there is more emphasis now on "perfect form" in a swimming pool....... over what we would have considered "perfect form" 80 feet into the hold of a shipwreck 280 feet deep, or "perfect form" on a Hole in the wall dive with 5 mph current, a dozen 10 foot bullsharks trying to say hi to us, and an ocean cave we want to explore....
I am glad that this thread is not in the DIR forum, where we can't ask WHY backplates must be metal to be GUE compliant. Consider this question asked!
Silly me! It must be about some other BC!
As it is, some outlandish statements were made about the Express Tech. If peeps had avoided such misrepresentation, I would not have felt the need to post. When you post inaccuracies based on mere speculation you can find me as well as others pointing them out. Do you feel that I should allow such statements to go unchallenged just because I am not DIR? As it is, I don't find you disagreeing with my assertions that you are wrong... you just seem upset that I am not DIR and had the temerity to add my point of view.
Pete, the guy said right in his original post he wanted to become DIR, that he liked our philosophy.....and he wanted to know how this particular BC would be accepted by DIR or GUE....
It is not a bp/wing design. A DIR diver with Halcyon bp/wing, will know how to help a DIR diver with an Oxycheck wing and backplate, but this is a different deal with this other type of BC...
A tangent...you know I like these
....I recently had to get a Rescue cert, through PADI
, for a project I am involved in now...
So here is a bp/wing diver, having to do a pretend rescue to a diver wearing an Express Tech BC.....I don't really know how he releases the weights, and the bc does not work like mine....if there is lots of time, no big deal, it can be figured out....the DIR idea though, is that a buddy team knows instantly how to deal with each other's gear, because it is nearly identical....this is HUGE! if the **** hits the fan...If you actually "need" the buddy.
So the Express tech is not intuitive enough to other DIR divers, and is outside their zone of knowledge, where it will remain. Because it does not have a steel backplate, it will be considered non-DIR, pretty much untill Jarrod or George or Casey or some other authority on DIR or GUE, dives one and proclaims it has evolved far beyond the other non-steel plate systems on the market....
In the early days, if George said such and such about diving, many would question, and argue, then try it, and see he was right....dead right....this went on for years, and after a while, it is human nature to just say, if this is his suggestion, lets just assume it is good, unless later given a reason to decide differently....
This kind of reminds me of the discussions from early on with a few DIR divers. We were discussing why they said you had to be horizontal at all times, even during ascent. After we cut all the BS theories having to do with better off gassing and other such nonsense we were left with the ultimate reason: Because!
It was like I was talking with my mother.
Let's do this one at another time... the hydrostatic lung loading discussion....the one thing I will say now, is George and I could clear bubbles way faster than we were supposed to be able to, from the dopplers done on us after extreme profiles.....the horizontal position seems to have contributed to this, and particularly so on the major 6 hour bottom times they did at Wakkulla at 275, with 12 hour decos.
