Inflator hose and warm water.

[cnidae]

I always just inflate it with my mouth. I never use my drysuit hose for the small smb. Ditch the hose.

 

[tomcat]

i dive in the tropics. never seen a drysuit before in my life. over here, we inflate the closed circuit smbs orally. besides, you need to be able to control it before releasing so oral inflation appears to be very convenient. one full lung into the smb is probably what most people can control. if they had more than that in the smb, it means that they would have had to be slightly overweighted and be completely deflated. after shooting the smb, they lose the buoyancy and have to inflate their bcs again. what's the point in that?

 

[d33ps1x]

They have a one way flapper valve also so I wouldn't consider them open bottom lift bags.

 

[Charlie99]

Why the concern about removing the wing inflator hose?

1) You should be headed up, so shouldn't need to add air to the wing.
2) If you can't put back on the wing inflator hose, you should be able to orally inflate it.

Why have an extra failure point of the drysuit hose flopping around? Schrader valves on the end of LP hoses have been known to fail.

Surely there is a standard way for wetsuit wearing DIR divers to inflate a sausage.

 

[joko]

As you would only inflate your SMB on your ascend. And you should already have enough air in you BC. You wouldn't need to use it for that so it's free for your SMB.

 

[Spectre]

1) You should be headed up, so shouldn't need to add air to the wing.
2) If you can't put back on the wing inflator hose, you should be able to orally inflate it.

Very true. I was required, during a class, to disconnect my wing inflator on exit a number of times. If your shooting a bad, you shouldn't need to inflate your wing anymore.

I definately wouldn't orally inflate it unless I absolutely had to. If you need more then one breath, you now have to hold onto that extra bouyancy while getting another lungful of air.

 

[ColdH2Odvr]

Ok, I went the orally inflated rout. This was less than satisfactory with my 80lb(?) CC bag. We typically shot from 30-40ft so there wasn’t much more than a 2X gain in volume. The 80 made it to the surface just fine but left a lot to be desired in the visibility department. In stark contrast was Halcyons 4.5’ CC “Big Alert Marker”. One breath was sufficient to provide excellent visibility when shot from 30-40 ft. You do need to maintain some tension on the line to keep the marker upright. Holding the line isn’t strictly DIR but then neither is getting propped.

I missed the convenience of the drysuit inflator but for 85-90 deg water, I’ll manage.

I did notice that Halcyon has a semi-closed circuit bag for wetsuit divers. The “semi-closed” bag looks suspiciously like my open bottom bag that was pronounced non-dir in tech 1…

Semi-closed bag… semi-virgin, semi-pregnant…? Hmmm