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Phil Clarke wrote: [snip, snip] > > My rig comes off with 4 buckles beside the RIB and can be lifted away so > I only have my own bodyweight to haul into the boat. It takes serious > wriggling to escape a Hog rig with no buckles in a flowing tide - > possible, but best practise? I keep hearing people say this and it's simply not true. Have you guys actually tried it? ALL of my diving is ocean diving here in Alaska off small boats and RIBs and we have some of the quirkiest currents in the world. I have a Zeagle with all the buckles that I don't use much anymore, even for single tank diving, because I prefer the cleaner simpler Hog harness. The trick to getting out of a Hog Harness is to unbuckle the waist belt and then simply reach back, grab the shoulder straps where they connect with the top of the backplate and pull the whole rig over your head. Leave the long hose in your mouth if you like. It's easier to do this underwater with deflated wings but still no big deal if you do it on the surface with fully inflated wings. I keep several short lines tied off the rails of my boat with clips or carabiners on the ends so in a current you can clip off the BC to the boat before shrugging out of it. My old Scubapro Classic BC was exactly the same way. It was a one piece job with no shoulder buckles...I think ScubaPro actually still makes these BCs as it's a popular design. You use the same exact technique with these Scubapro BCs. I get out of my hog harness just as fast as my old Scubapro BC. Getting into the harness is a different story because I can't throw the doubles rig over my head like I can with the scubapro BC...but then I can't do that no matter what BC the doubles are attached to. > Etc. Some are small points maybe, but valid. So lets drop this "Hog kit > is the last word for all" bluster and accept that Hog is damn fine for > 90% of tasks but sometimes other kit works better - even the most ardent > Hog'er cant easily cut 200lb monofilament with his small knife, but my > line cutter shears will. I don't know where you're getting this "single small knive" thing. That would be the gear of choice for warm water cave diving where you have bare hands to handle a small knife and are unlikely to ever enounter monofilament. But you aren't talking about cave diving. For cold water ocean diving, I keep a pair of paramedic shears on my waist belt for monofilament and I keep a medium size knife on my leg which mostly gets used for measuring crabs. Phil, from your description of your gear and typical dive profile, it sounds like you are really doing hard core sport diving rather than what most people would call technical diving (e.g. penetrations, rule of thirds, staged decompression). That's fine and it's the type of diving that I do most of the time too. But, if you're not diving doubles, then much of the reason for using a backplate and harness isn't going to be there for you. Kent Lind Juneau Alaska -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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