MaxTorque
Contributor
There is, within recreational diving limits and situations, really only one reason to carry a pony:
When there is a reasonable chance that you will be unable to safely and completely carry out an air sharing scenario with your buddy at any point during your dive plan.
What drives that "reasonable" chance is of course rather varriable, from an un-reliable or simply unknown buddies to diving conditions that might render a long duration close quarters contact difficult (high current on a drift dive for example)
However, as a beginer, it's going to be a lot better on to try to avoid getting to more complex situations such as those mentioned anyway.
One "non" reason to carry a pony is because you are not very good at managing your own air supply. If you can't manage a primary supply, then adding a (small) secondary one is not going to help, it's going to hinder!
The fact the OP says they are checking their SPG very often is GOOD. As a beginer you haven't yet got the feel or experience for how fast you use your air, and you are also going to have a much more variable consumption because your buoyancy and trim will be less refined, and because you are not yet "at home" underwater. I'd say by around OW dive number 20, you should really be mostly "at home" ie not be worrying or thinking continuously about the fact you are under water, and you should by this point be able to start to estimate your consumption. Try it, look at your spg, and think, i'll look in 5min, and i think it will show a reading of "x" and do that and see ho close you are! You'l also start to have a back-catalogue of dives to look up, to say "ah yes, i did a similar dive and i used "x" amount of pressure in "y" minutes". At this point, you need to be very conservative with your basic dive planning,to give yourself room to make some small mistakes, to give your self confidence that a small error is not going to spiral out of control.
Do not use the fact you are carrying an extra cylinder to cloud your judgement or change your conservative planning at this stage of your experience.
So would i recommend a pony to a beginner, no, not really. Far better to increase your plan conservatism and to end the dive or "Go shallow" with a higher reserve air volume in your backgas. There are plenty of really good beginner dives where you drop under say 100 bar, you are already "back at the boat" because you turned the dive conservatively, but you can spend another 20 min just staying at say 5m in close proximity to the boat. Here's if you suddenly notice "oops, i'm down to 50 bar" then there is no drama, simply surface.
When there is a reasonable chance that you will be unable to safely and completely carry out an air sharing scenario with your buddy at any point during your dive plan.
What drives that "reasonable" chance is of course rather varriable, from an un-reliable or simply unknown buddies to diving conditions that might render a long duration close quarters contact difficult (high current on a drift dive for example)
However, as a beginer, it's going to be a lot better on to try to avoid getting to more complex situations such as those mentioned anyway.
One "non" reason to carry a pony is because you are not very good at managing your own air supply. If you can't manage a primary supply, then adding a (small) secondary one is not going to help, it's going to hinder!
The fact the OP says they are checking their SPG very often is GOOD. As a beginer you haven't yet got the feel or experience for how fast you use your air, and you are also going to have a much more variable consumption because your buoyancy and trim will be less refined, and because you are not yet "at home" underwater. I'd say by around OW dive number 20, you should really be mostly "at home" ie not be worrying or thinking continuously about the fact you are under water, and you should by this point be able to start to estimate your consumption. Try it, look at your spg, and think, i'll look in 5min, and i think it will show a reading of "x" and do that and see ho close you are! You'l also start to have a back-catalogue of dives to look up, to say "ah yes, i did a similar dive and i used "x" amount of pressure in "y" minutes". At this point, you need to be very conservative with your basic dive planning,to give yourself room to make some small mistakes, to give your self confidence that a small error is not going to spiral out of control.
Do not use the fact you are carrying an extra cylinder to cloud your judgement or change your conservative planning at this stage of your experience.
So would i recommend a pony to a beginner, no, not really. Far better to increase your plan conservatism and to end the dive or "Go shallow" with a higher reserve air volume in your backgas. There are plenty of really good beginner dives where you drop under say 100 bar, you are already "back at the boat" because you turned the dive conservatively, but you can spend another 20 min just staying at say 5m in close proximity to the boat. Here's if you suddenly notice "oops, i'm down to 50 bar" then there is no drama, simply surface.