Читать книгу Sidemount Guide - Alexander Hartmann K. - Страница 4

Some years ago I was talking to a very good friend of mine, a professional and very experienced cave diver, about sidemount diving.

In his broad southern German dialect he exclaimed, very upset, ‘Oh, don’t give me any of this bull… . All of a sudden everybody is an expert. Just because they’ve conducted a few dives with sidemount configuration they think they can tell us how it works. We’ve been doing this for years, but they think they know it all!’

Back then I didn’t follow this up, but later I found out: he was right!

What I mean to say is:

1 Sidemount diving is not really new. It has just lived in the shadows for a long time or was regarded as a second-rate variation of backmount diving (in the form of stages).

2 There is indeed very little instructional material on the market, presumably in order not to encourage divers to try an autodidactic approach.

3 There are a lot of variations and just as many instructors who propagate their own specific system. And when observing the debates on the internet, you can really get the impression that quite a few people, who are professional instructors, rail at everything that differs from their own dogma – probably because they feel their reputation and possibly their existence as a professional instructor might be in jeopardy!But ideologies often prevent you from seeing the bigger picture. One should look at all the options before making a choice. Everybody has different preferences, and something that is suitable for one person may not be the right thing for another.

4 And last but not least – if the crazy cave-diving danger seekers have been using sidemount configurations for years and are still alive, it can’t be that bad!

Of course I will elaborate on all these points in the following chapters and hope that it will be as informative as interesting.

However the considerations in this book cannot be final, there are too many possible variations and different training instructors attach more importance to some points than to others. Some things are suitable for all purposes, others specifically for technical diving and so forth, but primarily this book is aimed at beginners of sidemount diving.