Here's where we are at.
Me, and my wife, are planning to take intro to cave next year, with the goal of working up to full cave in the next couple of years. We are going to be doing this slowly and gaining experience.
We are in Missouri but will be doing all our cave stuff in northern Florida (Jackson county)
After talking to Edd & Dive-aholic (who we are going to be doing our cave with) both advised that since we plan to do sidemount from the start. We plan to "upgrade" our current cavern class with additional stuff that Rob teaches that we didn't get in our original cavern class, then do intro to cave, both in sidemount.
That means we have to start working on getting our sidemount gear together so we can learn what the heck we are doing.
Basically, we are using BP/W open water rigs right now, and I don't really want to mess with any of that, I want to leave that all as it is for now, so we are talking (mostly) two complete rigs.
We are going to have to get a sidemount rig (probably Nomads), reg set ups and all the associated rigging.
We are HOPING to be able to get down to Florida in December to do some training with Rob on setting up and using backmount, so we can work on it locally over the winter and next spring and become at least not a freakshow in backmount diving.
I have no idea about the secondary lift device for when we are down there, but when diving locally we can use our drysuits, so that will work for now.
Here's my question
We need 2 sidemount rigs, regs & guages, and the strapping. I have couple LP 12o steels already, but they are not set up cave-style (yoke, not set up for cave fills, etc) but those are easy to get fixed when down in cave country. She has AL80's, and AL63's yoke. By cave training time we will have her in steels of an appropriate size.
Primary lights by then are just not going to happen (since there are two of us, that's about $3K), we are going to have to use rentals, but Edd says that's not a problem.
Since all this stuff costs money, would you:
A) Just save money like crazy, drive down to Florida and have Edd fix us up...
B) Start buying gear one bit at a time. If this, would you start with regs or with the sidemount rigs?
I don't know of anybody around here who dives sidemount, and the local dive shops all kind of break out in hives when I start talking about this stuff.
Were you me, what would you do?