Posted by Kendall Raine on March 23, 2001 at 11:02:00:
In Reply to: Re: Ditchable Weight and Alternative Question. posted by Steve on March 23, 2001 at 10:40:43:
DIR's position is use the right tanks for the job and the need for extra crap goes away. Period.
Frankly, the technical diving community is guilty of perpetuating the myth that more is better. Having two of everything, SPG's, bladders, timers, lift bags, pony bottles, knives everywhere and other assorted nonsense comes from the tech community. It's still taught by some of the technical agencies. The manufacturers then get ahold of this stupidity and use it to market "tech BC's" with d rings everywhere and 8,000 lbs of lift so you can get yourself and your favorite shipwreck off the bottom with the BC. Then to compensate for the extra drag caused by having too big a lifting capacity, they wrap the wing in bungie cord to insure that a wing failure is fatal. Then they add an extra bladder inside the wing to counteract that. The stupidity just coumpounds at the expense of the diver. Innocent people look at this and think, well if the technical divers use it, it must be good and I can use it if I get into technical diving someday.
Sorry this turned into such a rant, but the whole notion of blindly adding redundancy to fix a "problem" is the wrong way to go. If you start by saying, "how do I prevent the problem through better gear selection and configuration?" to start with, you then see where you really need redundancy and where you don't.