Dhboner
Contributor
If you take a course from an experienced sidemount instructor such as Steve Lewis then your set-up takes around an hour After that you might tweak a few minor things but you are basically there. I rig my tanks on land (just prefer it that way) and I am ready to go as fast or faster than my backmount friends. I can get on or off a boat with absolutely no trouble with steel 100's in my drysuit (I am 56 years young)...I simply giant stride or backroll off and climb the ladder with tanks on to exit. All my failure points are right in front of me and in the event of some catastrophic problem I can feather my valves and continue using a free flowing regulator. As for charters...if the other divers are using single tanks then I just follow their profile more or less and get two dives out of my gear (I never understood the whole boat operator balking at letting a sidemounter in the water with two tanks thing). I am certainly not an evangelist for sidemount, but until you have experienced it and had your questions answered by someone who actually knows what they are talking about then dismissing it outright is pretty damn stupid.