Quote:
| Originally Posted by Bantam It's two things;
a) you have to remember where DIR evolved - the caves of Florida, where you'd normally dive with a semi-dry on. So your wing is your primary buoyancy. If you have a hole in your wing, the bungee will deflate it faster by pushing the air out.
b) It is an increased snag hazard. All the DIR kit is streamlined to remove all snag hazards.
The thing to remember when analyzing the DIR system is what it's being used for - cave and wreck penetration was the overriding factor in the kit design.
I still have the bungee on my OMS wing BTW, just because I think it's neater. But I'm not a DIR diver so it doesn't count (yet). |
Thank you Bantam - but it's neither of those things. I can't remember when I last saw a DIR diver in Florida in a semi dry suit. We certainly don't permit them on cave courses there as exposures times are too long.
I love the fact that most UK wreck divers feel that they face much harder, tougher on kit, colder etc here than in caves in Florida. Face it, other face reasonably difficult conditions at times - I've holed my drysuit ten times in one trip to Florida when using my legs to stop me being blown out of the cave.
We wouldn't as the original poster suggest use a dry suit for buoyancy. If you do a dive using heavy back gas cylinders and lots of stages you simply cannot support this on a dry suit without becoming very unstable. Those who cry that they do this here already don't understand the meaning of heavy back gas cylinders - fabers are lightweight steels. Even if you can hold enough gas, this amount of gas moving around in your suit would be difficult if you had to go heads down in a wreck or cave.
A good sized wing should not be "flapping" around as you emotively suggest. Mark did post a picture some time back of an inappropriately sized wing. 55lb wings were not designed for Faber tanks and looking at pictures like that tells us why.
Here is a picture of a correctly sized wing - it's not that big a deal is it?
I'm not going to go into it any more than that - but as this is the DIR forum I guess you wanted a DIR answer rather than merely seek to kick off Friday three days early.