OOA SOP in tight spaces.....

[NotDeadYet]

Bob, this is obviously written by someone with no idea about sidemount diving. I've tried the system and persevered with it until giving up.

If you are diving sidemount then it means you are somewhere with very little vertical height... why would anyone need a 36lb wing AND a drysuit? There is no space to have anything that approaches buoyancy control. A drysuit is adequate. If it fails then so what? You'll be cold but your attitude in the water won't change much.

Also wearing the backplate adds unnecessary height (and for me puts the weight in the wrong place for sidemount). It also makes manoeuvring through sharp bends, boulders, etc., quite difficult.

Having the cannister light in this position I don't think is good either. The sidemount bottle lies on top of the cannister pushing it forward. For a start it's uncomfortable and secondly it makes reaching pockets on your leg very difficult.

The bottles don't hang properly either, more like stage bottles rather than proper sidemounts i.e. parallel to the body and tight to it.

And how is the hose to the wing rigged? Unless you use a custom length hose that you can wrap up the back and over the shoulder to feed normally to it then the hose routing with normal hoses is very messy.

And to proscribe helmets wholesale I think is at best hubris or at worse written by someone who has no idea about caves.

I did try this system as I was genuinely interested in the DIR sidemount system. I was very disappointed, and as I've said many times I think it was written so that the DIR bods could say, yeah we have a sidemount system.

My own system:

Dragon harness (but also good ones by others). This is a soft harness rather like a Bowstone weight harness. It has d-rings in the right position at the waist (further round the back than a backplate harness) and bungee loops at the shoulders rather than d-rings (the loops get wrapped round the bottle neck and clipped in place, holds them very tightly against the body so they dont flop).

With a drysuit I don't wear any extra buoyancy. With a wetsuit I have a small bladder I made myself if it was necessary. But if I was using a wetsuit in this country I wouldn't bother with it as I won't be in the water long enough.

Bottles are rigged without jubilee clips. I thread a bolt snap on to a snoopy loop and wrap this round the bottom of the bottle. I put another couple of loops round the bottle too to hold hoses. There is no clip at the top. The clip attaches to the waist d-ring, the neck is held with the bungees. Regs, my normal back-up reg on the right, a stage reg with a spare LP hose and a SPG on the left. I route the stage reg as normal.

If I use a cannister light then I use the same bungee/bolt snap arrangement as above, one at the bottom one at the top. This clips on butt mounted (in the water it sits out the way and doesn't add any height). With the bottles and light rigged this way they can be pulled free easily if they snag, can be adjusted, etc. in the water.

My back-up lights I wear either on my shoulder straps or on my helmet if I'm using one. If I'm wearing a helmet then I always have a light on, it's LED so burns forever anyway. Weights if needed I thread on to the harness waist straps so it sits at the base of my spine where I like it.

Take 100 sidemount divers and you'll get 100 different set-ups.

[Digger]

My sidemount setup was made custom by a little man in a shop down the road from my old place. Works well once we adjusted it a bit, and I liked it while it lasted. I don't use it for much at the moment, but the tanks I'd be using are my 6s, currently used as stages, but nice for sidemounting and setup with snaps where I need them to just clip on.

Not sorted what I could do with a canister torch. Previously I just used a load of lights on the helmet, but where could I stick a Pro 3 now? It would be the torch of choice now I have it, but to be honest I'd be a bit dubious about using it ona dive where sidemounts are necessary, just because they're the dives when I break things.

[malcolm smith]

I'm experimenting sidemount just now.
Dragon harness plus single cylinder halcyon wing with suitable attachments made by Dragon.
Once I'd got longer than standard bungees on the dragon, no problems with easy on/off of cylinders in dive, until then, a bit of a nightmare.
Still messing about in Crummock, but it seems fine. Hose route for wing no problem so far, tucked under a surgical tubing loop on left shoulder of harness as in a normal twin type rig, left cylinder reg looped over back of neck.
Tried my prehistoric pro14 10 ton cannister in many a position, butt-mounted was the only satisfactory one for trim-----but complicated cylinder removal, so have recently gone onto helmet mounted lights.
Many thanks to YDers for a recent thread on lights for this.
I feel I'm going full circle here, from a pretty standard boring dir type rig-----horses for courses I guess!
I had tried the backplate method first, it is not as comfortable.
Crummock can be boring, but I've yet to hit my head on the roof :-)
Cheers, Malcolm.