No Octo?? Here goes...Blast away!!

[Diver Dennis]

You can have all the equipment in the world but if you don't know how to use it, you might as well not have it.

 

[divermatt]

I chose not to dive with any octo myself. It bangs around too much. I also hate having a primary. I don't like stuff in my mouth. Safety is for the weak. If it isn't convenient, I just don't do it. It's also why I don't use a tank. Too heavy. Anyone wanna hit the Doria with me this weekend?

 

[scubapro50]

there was a lot of discussion about using octo's and Cayman requireing their use on www.scubaboard.com/t72457-.html (new law in Cayman ?)

 

[NadMat]

for everyone saying that they used to dive without octopusses(sp?) and they survived... well people used to take horse drawn carriages to travel the country. guess what technology has evolved and there is a better and safer way to do things. adapt or darwin will get you!

...And maybe you can avoid a poor analogy.

Horse drawn carriages were safer, and enviromentally better, but we wanted faster. Plus cars were the latest techy thing.

You can dive quite safely without an octo or other secondary, it is just easier to share air if you don't have to buddy breath. However, you should master buddy breathing, as you never know how well maintained the equipment you have rented or that that your 'instabuddy' is using is maintained. Perhaps you never dive with rented equipment, or without checking the maintainance logs of your buddies equipment so this is not an issue. But even the best maintained equipment can fail.

I have and will again use octo's, but don't like them either dangling loose, or bungied around my neck. But when grabbing a quick dive and renting all equipment, that is usually what you get. My personal preference is the airII or similar option, because it is out of way, yet handy if needed. So currently is no octo on my rig, and will be diving without backup second stage until replace my current BCD, unless rental BCD comes with integrated secondary.

Only once in all my dives have I 'had' to share air, due to buddies malfunctioning spg and that was in days when octos were exception rather than the norm(spg's were still considered 'techy') and was done with the then traditional buddy breathing method. So don't be suggesting I'm 'unsafe' because you can't or won't learn buddy breathing.

Is it better to have an extra secondary? Yes, provided it is kept properly maintained. It is even somewhat safer as long as you are not using the extra equipment to justify not learning what to do when that option has failed or is unavailable. But diving without it is not of itself unsafe. At least IMAO.

Also remember, Darwin has a habit of surprising those with much more opinion than experience and knowledge.

 

[John C. Ratliff]

for everyone saying that they used to dive without octopusses(sp?) and they survived... well people used to take horse drawn carriages to travel the country. guess what technology has evolved and there is a better and safer way to do things. adapt or darwin will get you!

Mattroz,

It is interesting the way you put this, to adapt or Darwin will get you (Darwin was a guy's name, you know). We adapt in all manner of ways. What a lot of us who have been around awhile are finding is that much of today's diving in the United States is controlled by marketing. The Diving Equipment Manufacturer's Association (DEMA) has renamed itself the Diving Equipment and Marketing Association. You can see the name on their website:

http://www.dema.org/index.cfm

NAUI's motto, at least in the old days, was "Safety through Education." Now, it seems that the diving industry (not NAUI) has turned to "safety through marketing." While the octopus regulator, and alternative air sources for emergencies, is now regarded as a necessity, in the 1970s it was a necessity only for some specialties, such as cave diving or wreck diving or deep diving. If our we had an out-of-air situation develop, we simply surfaced. No big deal, simply swim to the surface.

Today's divers are gear-dependent, and not skill-dependent, in many cases. What we used to call "push button diving" has become the norm for getting to and from the surface; divers don't swim up and down much anymore. So some skills that we were taught in the 1969s and 1970s are no longer in the lessons. Buddy breathing is one of them. BCs now cost as much or more than do regulators, and are a "necessity" even with dry suits which are buoyance compensated (know what the letters "BC" stand for, and which suits they were built for?).

What I'm saying is that the sport I learned to love as a teenager has evolved into a "rich person's sport." I earned my first scuba picking strawberries and beans in the Willamette Valley near Salem, Oregon. That cannot happen today. What used to be auxillary equipment (a vest, a wet suit--yes, my first year diving was without a wet suit in cool water) now is required. My first snorkeling experiences were in an icy pond at Silver Creek Falls Scout Camp, and in the Cascade Mountains. My equipment, a mask, a snorkel and fins plus a swim suit. We got out of the water to warm up after about 15 minutes. That was diving and snorkeling in Oregon in the 1950s.

Today, marketing has taken over, and the more equipment that can be sold, the better for the industry. It is much safer now, but equipment is only part of the solution. The other half is being completely comfortable in the water, and what we used to call "water skills." We now have instructors who are not really comfortable in the water; I saw one who called an emergency and got police going after two divers he was diving with because he was too out-of-shape to swim the distance against a current. But the divers were not having difficulty--it was the instructor. So when some of us who have seen diving evolve say we see problems with some of the marketing techniques currently used, you may see where we are coming from.

To give perspective, I think many of today's divers have too much gear on them. They are not streamlined in the water, and therefore cannot swim well in the water. The drag induced by BCs can be enormous, and the other equipment dangling from the diver also increases drag. This causes increased effort to swim, which increases air consumption, which leads the diver to get a bigger, heavier tank (or doubles). This increases the drag more, and so on. Sometimes equipment can cause problems, as well as solve them.

To give one example, I have a book titled Solo Diving, The Aret of Underwater Self-Sufficiency, by Robert Von Maier. It is a good book on solo diving, and well written. But it talks about redundancy as a means of coping with a regulator failure. One of the best, most redundant systems is called "Dual Cylinders with Separate Regulators and SPGs." Each cylinder has it's own regulator and SPG. The main problem with regulator failure is seat failure, or O-ring failure. Seats rarely fail, and usually the problem is an O-ring failure. But this setup has (for my regulators) 18 different O-rings on the two different regulators.

Compare this with the 1950s single 72 cubic foot tank and an Aquamaster of Mistral double hose regulator. The tank valves at that time were not O-ring sealed; they were 1/2 inch tapered pipe threads sealed with teflon tape. They either sealed, or they did not seal when they were put into the tank. The Aquamaster and Mistral regulators had no O-rings at all. These were extremely robust and reliable diving systems. If there was a failure, the regulators would "leak" air rather than turn off, so air was still available.

So when people talk about the new verses the older equipment, they need to keep in perspective that the old equipment was pretty good so far as failure rates go.

SeaRat