PADI rescue in a back plate?

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I did my Rescue class in a BP/W, but be aware that, if the instructors teaching it aren't familiar with your gear, they won't have a clue how to optimize procedures with it. When I took Rescue, I had to call a friend who was a NAUI instructor every night with the questions that had come up in the day's diving, that my instructors couldn't answer.

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/basic-scuba-discussions/126817-insights-rescue-bp-w-users.html
Keep in mind, this type of thing might very well happen in a real situation. You could be presented with something you dont know how to handle. Thats part of what rescue class is. Theres no one way to do a rescue. You asses the situation, figure out what tools you have to deal with it, come up with a plan, and execute it.

Whether you use a BP/W or jacket doesnt matter basically. You still have to rescue someone or be rescued. Ideally the instructor should have figured it out, or let you come up with a way to do the rescue, even if its not optimal. Success isnt measured in whether it was optimal, but whether the rescue is complete.
 
Yeah - generally agree with the above - PADI don't specify what type of equipment you may use, as long as you meet the requirements - i.e. ditchable weight system, BCD of some type, alternate air source etc. We are encouraged to explain the different configurations whilst teaching.

As TSandM suggested - make sure your instructor knows how your system works - many recreational instructors may never encounter a BP/wing or other tech configuration because generally their divers don't wear them. Also make sure your buddy knows how to remove your equipment properly! I watched one student - with some mirth - try to open a push fastener type BCD by trying to unclip it... good object lesson in terms of: "what do you mean you don't know how your buddy's equipment works!?!?!?... now, please do it again" :D

Have fun with the Rescue - great course!

Cheers

C.
 
It makes the course more educational when you have different setups available. Wear the BP&W and have fun.
 
I think it is important to take this course in the gear you normally use. Firstly you are familiar with it and will be more comfortable and secondly it is more realistic. It may also make you think about the practicality of your set up. ( I teach rescue senarios, although not PADI in a BP/wing)
 
I did my rescue in my BP&W but then again I use a deluxe harness which has releases like a standard BCD. No cutting is needed.
 
Of course, there are no agency-related issues with conducting a rescue course in BP/W.

If you are unsure about your instructor's ability to run the course for your configuration - then find an instructor who is also tech certified. They will be familiar with the gear and specific rescue procedures.
 
A backplate and a wing is not technical diving equipment. It never was meant to be a technical diver's rig. It was meant to be scuba diving equipment, but it is of such great design that the "technical" diving community, especially cave divers, adopted it and made it better over the years.

If you watch Sea Hunt you will only see backplates and harnesses in 1959. That harness system worked with single tanks, double tanks, triple tanks and even more complicated cylinder arrangements. Technical diving didn't exist yet. All diving was as technical as it was recreational. Diving was just diving and scuba diving was also termed both skin diving and free diving when the diver wasn't tethered to an umbilical, hookah or Desco mask.

In order to create an effective buoyancy compensator, since using bags and containers wasn't exactly hands free diving, the horsecollar style buoyancy devices were modeled after the Mae West life jackets some skin divers wore for surface floatation and others experimented with at depth. The horsecollar BCD's placed the floatation in front and it is a myth that they will throw you onto your back underwater or float you face up if unconscious. Those of us who began diving with them know this to be true. At the same time, plastics were replacing steel. They began molding plastic backplates into a more ergonomic shape to fit the curvature of the spine rather than the straight steel plate in some cases, but most were relatively straight. Many divers began referring to these plastic designs as backpacks to distinguish them from a steel plate. However, as many divers called both the steel and plastic packs, backpacks as well. Both steel and plastic designs had always had a harness system and crotch straps were as likely to be found on many steel plates, especially those for doubles. Plastic wasn't (and still isn't) a robust pack system for doubles. Yes, that includes the ABS plastic backplates on "technical" rigs today.

Divers pretty much immediately figured out that if you can put a buoyancy cell on the front of a diver in the form of a horsecollar BCD, you can design a cell to go on the back of the diver. The inverted "U" shape of the back inflation BCD was born. If this is for technical diving, then why is it as popular a BCD system in the 1970's in the Jeppesen Open Water Manuals, The Divemaster Manual II, The PADI Open Water Diver Manual and just about every other manual and publication? In fact, the dives most wearing a harness system with a backpack and a wing are underwater models. Once it became "a safety issue" to portray models without BCD's in magazines, the back inflation/wing system was an ideal choice to show off the curvature of a woman's breasts under her wetsuit or in a bikini top and still have her be properly equipped! Obviously, a horsecollar BCD covering the chest would not be as attractive. :blinking:

It is a myth that back inflation cells will float you facedown. In fact, I dare say that nothing floats you face up better. If you want to be facedown, you can be facedown. If you want to be (or a rescuer wants you to be) face up, you're face up.

Drysuits were often used without a BCD, because the popular horsecollar and Fenzy vests covered easy access to the inflation and dump systems on many brands of suits.

The first jacket systems, while bulky in some cases due to bladder design, fit divers better than most brands today. The jacket probably reached its zenith with the ScubaPro design (Walter on the board can tell us all about that BCD if he reads this thread) that was incredibly popular in the 1980's with many divers and the rental programs of many resorts. It was very low profile, single bladder, and fit well.

For the most part, the "recreational" designs of today are very poor. Watch divers walk and you'll see the tanks hanging so far down that they cannot reach their valves. It's sick that divers die when they jump in the water with their gas accidentally turned off and can't simply reach back and turn on the tank. Somehow, reaching a tank valve and valve shutdown drills have become "technical". There is so much nonsense and dangling thingies that I want to leave presents under all the Christmas trees I see around dive sites. The reason that jackets became popular is because divers and dive pros at tropical resorts could easily gear up. No more strapping items securely to your wrists which takes time, or putting on a harness and packpack that brushed against bare shoulders in the warm water and sunshine. They'll just put all instruments on a console and put on a more comfortable jacket. You just need to add mask and fins - oh! - and that pesky weightbelt and we are ready to go!

(I still remember the days when I tried using the Aquacraft console board that you attached to your SPG and strapped your watch, bottom timer, depth gauge and compass to it - even you're Decometer. I'm only 41 years-old or I'm old - 41! Depending upon your perspective of time.)

What do we do about having to put on that pesky weightbelt? We'll integrate the weights into the jacket! Awesome, right? Well, not really. It may be more comfortable for some divers, but with all the weight pouches, pull-tabs, slots for balacing weights, etc., it can be a huge pain to properly trim a diver in an open water class. How do we solve that? We'll just do most of the class on the knees and do a little swimming. If they have poor trim, they'll figure it out later on their own. Or, we think they are diving well because we've reduced the gear and standards to dive it so much, many seasoned pros still haven't really seen good scuba diving or wouldn't know it if it swam up to them & CHOMP!

As the industry raced more and more compete in the production of sub-standard gear, the manuals in which horse-collar BCS, back-inflation BCD's (wings folks, not today's back-inflation designs that are hybrids of wings and jackets) and jacket style BCD's lived together side by side and were equally supported by training agencies at large as proper "recreational" attire. Instructors, though, had their opinions and their favorites. As more divers learned to dive at resorts where jackets were the rage, many divers didn't even know that other divers were using wings and horse-collars. The dive industry began to promote "dive travel" rather than local diving and the manufacturers scrambled to meet the demand of the vacationing warm water resort diver with sexier looking, lighter and more compact systems. Status dives were no longer about depth, wreck, or cave exploration, but traveling to some unknown destination to explore a reef by camel near Abu al Wadi El Alamein which means, "You can't get there from here," in the local Arabic dialect with Aramaic built-in. It didn't matter if you only dove 30 feet. It was status, baby! Gone were the days of Mike Nelson, the days of Skin Diver magazine portraying divers struggling with speared sharks, the days of Hal Watts and, are you serious - 400 feet??? The age of adventure, exploration, and mankind trying to plunge deper and live underwater all became a footnote. Romantic dive travel with big haired lovers was in - macho former UDT guys with buzz cuts was out.
 
Gear followed the mass market and became less and less quality. By the early to mid-1990's, pieces of BCD's were breaking around me, Dacor second stage covers were littering the bottoms of popular dive sites and training areas, and nitrox hit the scene! At first, PADI wanted to squash nitrox as a death gas and threatened to eject anyone who mentioned the word, "Nitrox," at DEMA faster than the TSA would eject someone who said the word, "Bomb," from the airport. However, Brett Gilliam of TDI, Tom Mount of IANTD, Dick Rutkowski, "The Father of Nitrox" and others didn't care. They talked about it, and people listened -even PADI eventually.

Meanwhile, divers were still wreck and cave diving with what gear worked and often making their own when the manufacturers woudn't since diving had forgotten them; much the same way that women and minority groups were still continuing to make great historical strides that no one talked about. The wreck and cave divers were simply making whatever modifications to the "recreational" gear that was needed to "recreate" in wrecks and caves more seriously than what the industry had been turning diving into since Jacqueline Bisset thrilled everyone with her white T-shirt in The Deep. "The Deep" had become 70 feet. Anyone going past 130 feet was dangerous. The reason 130 feet became the recreational limit is because the old double hose regulators got a little wonky at that depth, so the US Navy decided that was the limit for a scuba diver and a hard hat diver could still go incredibly deep. Also, the first ascent rate in diving was 60 feet per minute. A lot of science went into that. The scuba divers wanted to swim up at 120 feet per minute because they could. The hardhate tenders wanted to crank at 30 feet per minute because it was work. The Navy didn't want to make separate tables and split the difference. Scuba guys, slow down! Hard hat guys ... crank, boys, crank! Later, with so many recreational divers getting bent within the tables, studies showed recreational divers were going as fast, if not faster, than 120 feet per minute! Studies also showed that 60 feet per minute and times on the tables might be too aggressive. Everyone S-L-O-W down.

Diving became interested in science again to prevent recreational divers from getting hurt, the industry wondered how select groups of people were diving so deep on air and trimix and not dying. It was now okay to talk about it. Thanks to the Internet, one could find out about how much technical diving was talked and not read the fluff in the magazines.

The world met George Irvine III, the Woodville Karst Plain Project Director, who was telling people how to "Do It Right." George was a very quiet, very soft-spoken individual ... NOT! Thanks to the famous G-isms, George, or "Trey" as his friends know him, had epic Internet battles with those whose equipment and methods were not quite safe, sound and resulted in many deaths. The philosophy of DIR, the better training of GUE, and the constant improvement on wings, lights, gases, methods, etc., created a safer sounder diving universe. DIR is as recreational as it is technical.

Some of the better wings available to cave divers in the late 70's and early 80's were made by SeaTec which manufactured one of the first jacket BCD's. The problem with the SeaTec wing is that it has too much lift for a recreational diver and too little for a steel tank cave diver. The inflator is also in a poor place attached at the top left. I have one. George had one listed in one of his first equipment lists. He recommended moving the inflator to the center. They also wanted a more robust wing. GUE and WKPP approached several manufacturers who declined to make what they needed. Jarrod Jablonski, WKPP diver and GUE president, created Halcyon to meet the needs the manufacturers told them no one wanted. One of the very first wings was an 18 lb. lift bat wing for recreational diving. The idea was so simple, it is amazing that with back inflation going back decades in recreational diving, no one thought of a smaller more streamlined BCD - especially to be worn by underwater models to make BCD's more attractive, less obvious and better sell the image of the sport.

Things became so bad with both equipment image and design, kids used to tell me that they thought divers looked lame. They didn't wanted to dive and look stupid. I remember, as a kid, how cool divers looked! Yeah, the kids were right, especially when Mares ran the add on the back of Skin Diver Magazinewith a multi-colored 80's paint splash pattern on the gear, Harlequinn-like neon blocks all over a wetsuit and day-glow everything. I personally think that's when 20,000 or so divers left the sport and when Skin Diver died. By the way, my brother, a motorcycle, ATV and jet ski racer had already repainted his stuff away from the paint splash pattern, with two other trendy schemes, by the time the diving industry thought paint splash was cool!

GUE began making gear. Black is cheap, so I would guess many things were black just based on cost. It was needed for exploration. Function was important. At the same time, black was "in" in society. While the diving industry was still manufacturing Miami Vice neon and pastel plastic junk, better things were on the way. There was little difference in anything made by GUE in function that wasn't on Lloyd Bridges or nearly any other diver in the late 1950's and early 1960's except a BCD and an SPG. The recommended DIR fin is a rubber fin and a design that goes back 30 or 40 years! It works - WELL! The isolation manifolds of today are better, but manifolds were in use and popular on doubles and advertised in magazines into the early 1980's - when the resort rage hit.

While the gear of today is improved, watching old recreational diving movies, television shows and looking at old pictures there is nothing, including necklaced regulators and long hoses, that divers in the 50's, 60's and 70's were using that you can't point to an item and and see today's counterpart on a DIR/Hogarthian rig. That old stuff was good quality. It worked. Good quality gear was used by the technical community because when you are doing dives that are cutting edge, you need good stuff, not cheap junk marketed as, "the way to dive" by the same corporate mentally that brings you McDonald's burgers and posterboard craftsmanship. The "good stuff" was the same recreational gear used by everyone for 3 or 4 decades, forgotten by the general public while diving leaped into the hype of market-driven training, manufacturing, and advertising. The "technical" equipment of today is just improved upon old designs or in the case of some things such as ScubaPro Jet Fins - completely unchanged. Yet, my dive center sells the "Jet" style designs such as OMS Slipstreams and XS fins as "tech fins". They once used to be called "power fins" because they do just that, give you power in comparison to the softer blade "flippers" as children call them and still wear. By the way, instead of paying $180.00 for a floppy split fin, just buy some old Voit Vikings or Dacor Cordas on E-bay for $5.00.

Now, diving gets to be divided between recreational, technical and worse ... "techreational". Can we PLEASE tar and feather the person who came up with that last one?

The term "technical diving" was coined by Michael Menduno, the publisher of AquaCorps magazine in the early 90's. It was meant to describe diving that was often done for sport, but wasn't commercial, scientific or military in nature, yet had similar complexities and challenges to these endeavors.

WHAT HE REALLY MEANT WAS ... in the "invisible" sport of scuba diving these divers are not the poster children for the DO NOT BE THAT GUY type in the Mares ad. They have standards for training, diving and for stuff they'd BE CAUGHT DEAD IN, because ... well ... you might be.

So, if the instructor tells you that a backplate and wing is technical gear is not allowed in class pull out an old copy of a PADI Open Water Manual even as late as 1990 (my copy), and look at all the pictures of recreational divers in back packs, harnesses and back inflation wings.

If you get crap out not having a quick release, loosen the straps as one person advised.

The industry blew it when they turned away the divers who wanted to improve good gear for the time, with innovative changes and advances, that will meet the greater challenges of continuing exploration. Now, it's trying to catch up. The terms, "technical" and "recreational" help them to continue to market the lowest quality products or to design over-priced toys for the market and keep people buying them.

Gear is gear. Diving is diving. When you dive, use the proper tools for the job.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/peregrine/

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