is Sidemount diving more safe?

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Plenty of folks have drowned running out of gas in SM. The Calimba accident that @Norwegian Cave Diver wrote up is a good example. Whenever someone says anything is "safer" another idiot is born to prove them wro

OOG situation happen every day. **** happens every day.
but as you state the Calimba accident


where is there the crunchy point BM would have been the better decision or could avoid the sad
final?
 
Unfortunately your statement of needing data to determine if Sidemount with two tanks vs Backmount doubles - what is safer - isn’t correct.
The person you quoted said the opposite of this. I think you're actually agreeing with him.
Some questions are just not very amenable to being answered empirically
For the most part what Rilelen and myself were saying was that (in summary) actually getting the data would be near impossible, and have such a large margin of error it wouldn't be useful. Instead, it's much easier to use logic, observation, and rationality.

It's still of course possible to miss something. For example, perhaps sidemount itself is safer against drowning, but dive boat operators have an irrational hatred for SM divers and try to run them over with their boat.
 
OOG situation happen every day. **** happens every day.
but as you state the Calimba accident


where is there the crunchy point BM would have been the better decision or could avoid the sad
final?
That report is a great read for any cave diver. I gave my thoughts on this from the original posting. It had nothing to do with SM or to some degree Sm with a stage. But instead gas management and navigation mistake(s).

I see that Stunni is from Germany. I believe the divers fro the Calimba fatality were from Germany also.
 
where is there the crunchy point BM would have been the better decision or could avoid the sad
final?
All I'm saying is the SM isn't magically safer than BM. Sure you can see your valves easier but not seeing your valves in BM isnt what is hurting and/or killing people. Neither is having 2 gauges making SM gas management some brain teasing nightmare. In fact, equipment failures are so genuinely rare causes of OC fatalities that saying one is/isn't safe is like saying 1 in 1 million vs 1.2 in 1 million is safer or riskier. It's functionally irrelevant, and why there will never be actual data to support this hypothesis. But hey it fills up the board with people who wanna yap and they have eyeballs and clicks for ads so carry on.
 
If the question is... Why do people die in caves?... then you are correct that cave diving deaths are not normally gear related or health related. They are mental mistakes. Navigation, gas management, Normalization of Deviance/We will be fine, I've done this lots of times before, or perhaps being too aggressive in the dive plan or environment.

But if the question is what is safer - I would vote sidemount because of the flexibility of seeing the tanks, first stages, hoses, and being able hand one off to another diver if that is a safe choice for the one donating.
 
But then a single tank backmount, wow, that is not redundant, you cannot see it, most people cannot close valves, most people dive only with 1 valve, wow, this is than dangerous. So shall we make sidemount standard?

No, of course not. Every way of diving has it's own risks. With sidemount, people forget to look at 2 spg's, instead of one with backmount. (ok, cmas has 2 spg's on a twinset and some divers dive independent doubles). There are divesites where it is way more easier to get in the water with a backmount set than a sidemount set, and visa versa.
Mexico is a great place to dive sidemount as you don't have to worry about narrow passages. But the first time I went there, we used a Gue divecenter and then sidemount was not part of their curriculum. So we rented twinsets. There were some caves we could not do because of the twinset, but most are possible.
Remember, most cave divers stay on the 'recreational cavediving' level. So they are happy with following lines that are already there, they never do explorations. And a lot of cavedivers never go to narrow passages, so they maybe dive with sidemount equipment, but don't need it. And as a cave diver or technical diver, you must be able to reach your valves and know how your equipment works. This is not diferent from sidemount and backmount.

But have you tried boatdiving with sidemount? Especially when you have to put on the cylinders in the water with waves? All divers are waiting for that very slow sidemount diver. I have had this, they did not have enough twinsets for rent, so I said, then I will use sidemount as I was the only diver that was able to dive sidemount. So everybody was already ready and I was still putting cylinders on my harnass.

The same you see in mines, they are quite cold and are absolutely not that narrow that sidemount is needed. The sidemountdivers are the slowest ones and if others have to wait in the water, they are already cold before the dive starts (yes I agree, sometimes I take my sidemount ccr in old mines, but the last times I took my backmount ccr as this is way much faster).

When I prefer sidemount is for example in the caves in the Jura, you need to walk quite far and I can put 1 cylinder or my sidekick in a backpack and then bring it to the water.
But as soon as I start with equipment removal in a cave, so the cylinders clilpping of my harnass to pull them through narrow passages, the 'more safety' with sidemount is completely gone. As a diver you take more risks by doing such passages. You completely dive solo then. Sometimes you cannot move back, so if you want to get out, you need first go further till you can turn.

I also know from an accident where 2 divers died in the Netherlands in a wreck, 2 recreational dive instructors. They did not use a line. So backmount single tank divers, but their accident has nothing to do with the equipment.
I almost died myself when I was a recreational diver due to group pressure, on the same way these 2 people died. We did not take a line with us because others said it was not needed. I have decided to share air at the moment my buddy runned out of gas and happely we found the exit. After the required decostops, I had 15 bars left in my single 18 liter steel. And I decided to learn cave diving and start my technical career.

In Tulamben, on Bali a couple of years a German diver and instructor dissapeared, he had it's own divecenter there, and is never found back. He was a diver who dove very often to 90m on air because helium was already extremely expensive in Bali.
I know from a died person in the Christine mine in Germany because they runned a compressor in the entrance area and CO was the problem.
It sound now maybe that Germans always die because they make strange decisisions, but also that is not shown in overal statistics.
There are a lot of examples from other accidents where other nationalities made decisions that most would not make. In Ginnie it was I believe, divers died because they took of their rebreather. I would never take off my backmount ccr to go through passages, there are limits in my diving.

So to make safe dives, the first step is learn how your equipment works and stay confident, practise the skills needed for the dives you do or want to do.
Then the second step is follow the learned rules about safety.
Then third, if you don't like to do things, there is never a need to do it. There is not best diver in diving. You will never win a gold medal with diving on the olympics.
 
All I'm saying is the SM isn't magically safer than BM.
Nobody else in this thread is talking about magic.

So shall we make sidemount standard? No, of course not.
Nobody in this thread proposed that, from what I remember.
With sidemount, people forget to look at 2 spg's,
That doesn't make any sense. You only need to check the one you're using typically. Using AI, you can make checking both easily. My setup has 2 dive computers, just because that's what I bought inexpenive off the used market, but I'm fairly sure numerous dive computers can support multiple AI.

Further, if one tank has a significant amount more air than the other (lets say 20cu), you'll trim will be thrown off, and you'll begin to tilt to one side.

Next, when I dive SM, each tank always has enough air to safely surface. If either tank has any problem, I can surface with the other. I believe that's standard practice for most SM divers. Therefore if I (or a similar SM diver) ran OOA due to failure to check a gauge, that's not a significant problem. One simply surfaces using the other tank.

However, if we pretend a diver is one to want to squeeze every last PSI out of both tanks, they should be closely watching both tanks near the end of the dive anyway. If a diver chooses to be an idiot, it may not matter what configuration they use anyway. For example, diving in a cave without proper cave-diving training or equipment.
I almost died myself when I was a recreational diver due to group pressure, on the same way these 2 people died.
I call that the "buddy hazard."
 
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