Not understanding the long hose thing

I was thinking about this, and it seems to me that if someone came up to me OOA and panicking, I'd want to hold him/her as close to me as possible in order to maintain good eye contact with him in an effort to calm him down instead of dragging me to the surface with his teeth clamped onto my reg and kicking me in the face.
Why the long hose?
I mean, I can maybe see the logic if you're penetrating wrecks with narrow passage ways, but out in open water?

The simple answer is that with a short hose, you do not have near as many options to move around if you ever find yourself in this situation. Yes, a shorter hose menas face to face contact, but a long hose does not deny face-to-face contact, it only adds potential goodness to a bad situation. Perhaps the donating diver can move around the back of the OOA and resolve the situation, perhaps they need to swim out of somewhere (a rig, an overhead environment) or simply need to surface swim with regs in due to conditions. All possible with a long hose and far more difficult with a short one.

Of course, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong.

fishoutawater:

I was thinking about this, and it seems to me that if someone came up to me OOA and panicking, I'd want to hold him/her as close to me as possible in order to maintain good eye contact with him in an effort to calm him down instead of dragging me to the surface with his teeth clamped onto my reg and kicking me in the face.
Why the long hose?
I mean, I can maybe see the logic if you're penetrating wrecks with narrow passage ways, but out in open water?

Click to expand...

Because in the real world ...

(a) not everyone who runs out of air will tend toward panic ... in fact, that will be the exception more than the rule.

(b) most times you will decide to share air not because someone ran out of air, but because they allowed themselves to get lower on air than they should be, and you will want to share air to do an orderly ascent.

In either case, having a long hose gives you a degree of freedom to do a more comfortable and "normal" ascent than you will be able to while swimming vertically and holding onto each other.

The easiest way to understand it is to go diving with someone who uses a long hose, while you use the traditional setup. Do a shared-air ascent while breathing off of each setup ... then decide for yourself which you would prefer in a real emergency.

The long-hose gives you options that simply aren't possible with the traditional setup ... and if you find yourself in a situation where you still feel you need to hold your buddy close and look into their eyes, you can still do so.

BTW - it is not only easy, but desireable to maintain eye contact with someone who's sharing your air even if you are using a long hose.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

fishoutawater:

I was thinking about this, and it seems to me that if someone came up to me OOA and panicking, I'd want to hold him/her as close to me as possible in order to maintain good eye contact with him in an effort to calm him down instead of dragging me to the surface with his teeth clamped onto my reg and kicking me in the face.
Why the long hose?
I mean, I can maybe see the logic if you're penetrating wrecks with narrow passage ways, but out in open water?

Click to expand...

The longhose concept as currently used came into being in the caves of Florida where it would be needed to swim, sometimes long distances, back to safety in the event that a buddy team had a problem. Generally such divers, exploring wrecks or caves are well trained, not prone to panic(bolting away) and are well practiced. In this context the longer hoses make perfect sense and are a true life saver. However, in most open water diving, this is not the case, my experiences to the contrary are that you are more likely to be diving with less trained, newer divers, infrequent divers, insta-buddys and there is a high probability of anxiety or panic in the event of a an OOA situation. Since the dive is not overhead (no deco) as soon as there is an OOA you are headed up. Making eye contact, controlling the OOA diver who is sharing your air supply is important. The long hosers will dismiss this in a one size, one way only argument that simply does not hold water. Again, tech, wreck, cave, deco is a different situation than encountered by the vast majority of the diving public where a more conventional system, dedicated octo, shorter hose (36-40 inches) and donation of the secondary are preferred by most all divers and agencies. They are both good approaches, best when used in their intended environment.

N

Thanks guys, makes sense, provided I dive with someone with similar knowledge and experience. But as I usually end diving with the "cattle boat crowd", I always seem to end up buddying up with the guy that forgot one boot, or didn't cinch his tank straps tight enough (or wet them) etc., I'm not quite sure I want to deal with more than the basic stuff right now. Don't want to end up hog tied in my own hose.

Thanks for confirming my concerns Nemrod!

I felt, even in my OW course, that the currently common "short" octo hose set-up was less than optimal. Even paddling around in the shallow end of the pool sharing air was cumbersome - bumping into my buddy, having no room to swim and maneuver and constantly feling like the octo was going to get pulled from my mouth.

When I bought my own gear I went with a long hose and bungied back-up. Made a lot more sense to me, and now after having been trained with that set-up even more so. And since you're not donating the entire length of the hose at first, the receiver is still close enough for you to grab a solid hold if necessary.

You don't need the full 7' hose for rec open water diving, a wrapped 5' hose will still give you some "room to play."

I'm not saying one is wrong and the other is the way to go, but I, for me, made an informed decision and am very happy with it and would never go back.

Henrik

I use a long hose, but not because of the length since I dive only O/W where it extra length if of reduced value. It resolved 2 other issues for me.
- Sometimes I did not know where my octo was, different rigs had different clip on places, all of which seems to fail at some times resulting in a dangling octo that I would have to sweep for in an emergency. With the long hose it is on a necklace intsantly available 100% of the time to me. Also, since it is right there, it gets used every dive for a few minutes so I always know it works.
- If you look at my avatar (old picture), you see a huge loop of hose. Even with this, the reg pulled on my mouth. The long hose routes different and relives the stress and forms a smaller hoop.

In the almost five years and 900 some-odd dives I've done, I've never been involved in an OOA scenario. I HAVE been involved in a couple of free-flows, and one incident where a diver got low on gas in a place that was NOT ideal to surface (outside a marina). In each case, it was extremely convenient to be able to share gas while both divers retained freedom of motion. We were able to do an orderly ascent, or swim, while comfortable and remaining in good eye contact -- hanging onto one another's BCs simply wasn't necessary and wouldn't have been nearly as pleasant.

A long hose setup is NECESSARY if you are going to dive anywhere that mandates divers proceed in single file. It is not a necessity anywhere else, but it's awfully nice.

The other thing the long hose does is keep your hoses very close to your body, which is really nice if you are diving anywhere where entanglement is an issue (eg. kelp).

fishoutawater:

Thanks guys, makes sense, provided I dive with someone with similar knowledge and experience. But as I usually end diving with the "cattle boat crowd", I always seem to end up buddying up with the guy that forgot one boot, or didn't cinch his tank straps tight enough (or wet them) etc., I'm not quite sure I want to deal with more than the basic stuff right now. Don't want to end up hog tied in my own hose.

Click to expand...

You close enough to Bonne Terre, go take a cavern course and experience it for yourself. Good training and nice dives even if you choose not to dive long hose going forward