Sidemount: Long hoses or Short hoses?

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Originally Posted by normblitch

Is the long hose(s) 60" or 84"?

AND, since you are alternating regs-tanks for balance every 250-500#, do you also change the resulting neck-loop on every tank-reg exchange?

Norm

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The part that got me here was the changing neck loops- Use one tight neck loop and put break-away rigged clips on your regs. MUCH easier to manage- and you can get to either one without all that wierdness around your neck. Swapping neck loops takes too much time.

C and I both use "stage bottle" (46-49?") hoses on both tanks. We commonly finish dives with switched bottles for practice and have on a couple of occasions drained one completely and made the swim out to test out the bouyancy difficulties.

Ary is correct, a full bottle slung across the belly does the job- particularly early on in the dive with a full 120 of nitrox and one at 100 pounds.

j

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Originally Posted by Climber703

I'm new to sidemount diving and wanted to float a question by the forum and that is do you use short hoses and hand off a tank when a situation arises or do you use long hoses and apply the same rules in backmounting.

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Short hoses - less clutter. Each diver is responsible for his/her own gas management. If one cylinder goes down you dive out on the other. There is no question of sharing air although I have practised exchanging cylinders underwater but consider bailout onto someone else's gas supply the last resort - something you might do if there was gas left in stages or you were on deco.

Both 2nd stages are on the same necklace and not removed from this to breath from.