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> I would consider it extremely reasonable to always have a continuous > guideline back to anything that you _must_ find, be it the end of the > cave that the light shines into, or any gas supplies you're not > physically wearing. You've never tried to collect reef fishes, have you.....;-) Seriously, we often do drift dives, which precludes the use of a guide line. Even when we set an anchor, we only mess with guidelines if we are going to be working at one known station, and if we will return to that station repeatedly. Otherwise, with corals and seafans and overhangs and whatnot, guidelines present a greater hazard than safety tool. > On a wreck dive, especially in low visibility and when the wreck is > partially broken up, it's much much too easy to take a wrong turn and not > find the mooring line, as happened to myself and another member of this > list a few months ago. This isn't a huge problem if you're set up to > send up a bag and do drifting deco and you're carrying your deco gas. That's basically how every single one of our deep dives is setup. It only gets tricky if we have no live boat on surface support. > Even if you did have a guideline back to the main line, the weather can > change and the mooring can break loose. The Great Lakes can kick up > really quickly, too. For openwater dives, I feel a lot better about > carrying everything I need to finish the dive safely. Whenever possible, I like to do that as well. But as the dives start to get extreme (4 hrs plus deco time), it becomes very impractical to carry everything we need PLUS a complete backup. The rebreather is everything we need, but the backup (OC bailout gas supplies) need to be staged somewhere. > If I was on a multi-dive expedition far from sources of supply, I might > consider hanging a larger bottle in-water, or more likely long hoses from > a tank in the boat We often do both. It depends a lot on the local conditions and reef topography. > Out in the Pacific, with visibility from here to next week and probably a > weather system with more inertia to change, your situation may of course > be quite different. Weather can actually whip around pretty quick, so we do have to be on gaurd about that. It's the good visibility and the nature of the topography that probably most distinguishes my environment from yours. Aloha, Rich
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