I’m not cave trained, so out of morbid curiosity, what’s the rationale behind this choice? I was under the assumption that cave diving literally lived and died on redundancy.
You're drysuit is your backup buoyancy source.
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I’m not cave trained, so out of morbid curiosity, what’s the rationale behind this choice? I was under the assumption that cave diving literally lived and died on redundancy.
I’m not cave trained, so out of morbid curiosity, what’s the rationale behind this choice? I was under the assumption that cave diving literally lived and died on redundancy.
Redundancy is key, unless adding redundancy causes a number of additional potential failure points. You're adding another hose for the extra inflator, so the standard number of potential failure points associated with a hose, an additional inflator , so the standard failure modes of an inflator. Trying to figure out which inflator is stuck would be a bad day. Unplugging the inflator makes it useless, so in the event of a failure you're going to go to your drysuit anyway, so why bother dealing with something that's useless by design to prevent failure (leaving it unplugged), which in turn means it's useless when you would need it. It's another thing to stow and streamline.
It's just something that in a cave doesn't really provide enough benefit to overcome the potential downsides. In open water where you might be carrying all of your gas all the time and thus significantly overweighted, I can see it being beneficial. But again, I'd leave it unplugged anyway, so what's the point if my first response is to go to my drysuit in the first place.
Good points and valid comments
I have a Stealth Tec with redundancy, but as you know for most of the year here in the Middle East a Dry suit is the last thing you need.
I have mine plugged in and stowed but easily accessible
I'm still a little miffed I never got to dive the u-boat when I was out there, but piddling around Dibba rock was always great fun!