> Richard, I'd be curious to know what equipment and techniques you use in 
> your gear configuration that had not been used before you for your bounce 
> dives or others.

I don't have time to list items individually, but I think it's been a very
long time since commercial divers did 300+ foot dives on mixed gas
surface-to-surface, entirely self-contained, without topside support.  I
think the last time they did that stuff, the available equipment was of a
different era.  Like I said, I don't know what the hell the military guys
usually do, but if they do stuff similar to what I do, I certainly didn't
learn it from them.  Besides the physiology (which I openly acknowledge
was extensively investigated and elucidated by the military and commercial
divers), most of the stuff I incorporate in my dives came from the
non-commercial civilian divers.  I'm talking about equipment ranging from
my OMS dual bladder BCD to my Catalina 100cf aluminum cylinders, right
down to my Pony Tamer gizmo that allows me to easily attach and detach
pony bottles from my rig.  As far as I know, none of this stuff was
invented or developed by the military or commercial divers.  I'm talking
about techniques for doing various kinds of drift decompression dives.  I
invented most of those techniques for myself (if the military or
commercial divers invented it, I've never seen it published anywhere). 
The reels I use for sending lift bags to the surface were developed by
civilian cave divers.  I'm talking about things like in-water
recompression (while the USN published a method on this, they certainly
weren't the first, and their method is the worst of all of them). 
Commercial divers have all sorts of information on surface decompression, 
but I ain't seen much of it published or applied to IWR.

Sure, of course I give credit where credit is due - the military and 
commercial organizations are among the real pioneers of rebreather and 
regulator design (except, it's my understanding that the Electrolung was 
the first electronically controlled rebreather - and it was designed by 
civilian divers for non-commercial purposes).  I'm not trying to ridicule 
or poh-poh the military or comm. divers - they laid the foundation upon 
which all of this is built.  But when it comes to specific pieces of 
equipment and techniques, the lion's share of the credit goes to the 
"cutting edge" non-commercial civilian divers, at least in my book.

Aloha,
Rich

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