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In Sweden where i live and dive we make quite a lot of ice diving. We find the DIR configuration optimal for ice diving and in fact any kind of diving you can imagine. I am involved in a divegroup called BSTD. It was started in 1995 and at the time we had a lot of so called "strokes" in the group. Only i and 2 more where diving DIR which we learnt on a cave course thought by Jarrod Jablonski. In a few years all of our members switched to diving DIR (over 20 divers) because they saw the advantages that this rig produces for our type of diving witch is cold water ice, deep wreck, cave and flooded mine dives. Today every single diver in BSTD dives DIR and they do so because they think it is the best configuration and it works for any kind of environment and believe me they have tried every kind of configuration you can come up with. It took almost 4 years for everybody to realize the full advantage of DIR and nobody has ever forced anybody to change there configuration. But still all of the diver came to the same conclusion. Isn't that amazing? Back to the ice diving issue then. You certainly want to have redundancy as it is an overhead environment. Executing the dive can bee done like a cave dive with a reel line to the surface. What we normally do is to deploy a shot line to the bottom and connect the reel to that. Otherwise the standard method thought by the sport diving agencies like CMAS and PADI is to use a safety rope as described by Adri Hane. Always have a person on the surface that can clear the hole from ice as it can freeze up again during the dive if it is very cold. To get some aid in case you would lose the line you can shovel snow from the ice in lines extruding from the hole. Locking up from underneath the ice these lines will bee clearly visible and will aid you getting back. If you lose the line in a cave it is a very serious situation but it is even more serious under the ice. That is because in a cave you have more reference to where you are, in ice diving you just have the bottom. That is why you should bee familiar with the dive site before doing an ice dive and remember to shovel the snow to create navigational aid too. The best advice though that i can give you is to take an ice diving course. Ice diving is easy and safe if you know how to do it right. To find out more about DIR have a look at this webpage: wkpp.org To read about what we are doing in BSTD have a look at: bstd.org Hope this helps, Ingemar Christopher Cox wrote: > Hello, > I am posting this as a request for information. I am interested in ice diving and would like to know what the opinion is out there concerning gear set-up for said activity. Are redundant air sources consider standard equipment? If so how should they be rigged? Any thoughtfull information would be appreciated. Thank you. > -- > Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. > Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'. -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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