Bantin's Blog - Redundancy
My daughter-in-law used a courtesy car from her garage while hers was being worked on. It was a new Merceded C180, a very nice car. That is until she drove over a bottle and wrecked a tyre. Luckily, although she was 70 miles from home, she was only 70 metres from my house, so I took care of things while she went on to her job at the nearby film studios.
All I had to do was to remove the wheel and take it to a tyre dealer for a replacement. It was at this point I discovered that the car had neither a spare wheel nor a jack. So much for advances in modern technology. I had to wait all day for a rescue service to take the car to a garage. Luckily this all didn't happen somewhere remote.
This happily brings us to the subject of redundancy. When you are only 20 metres under water, you are a long way from 'home'. It's not a place to find that you need a 'spare' that you don't have and unless your buddy is actually holding your hand, the spare carried there might be well beyond reach.
So what are the spares you should carry?
Firstly, let's think about spares that could save a dive before you even get in the water. A spare mask strap and a spare fin strap in your bag could save the frustration of finding the first one break just as you put your mask or fins on. A spare regulator in your bag can save the day if you're diving far from home. These things never fail when they are sitting in a cupboard. It's worth carrying a spare dive mask too, if you're travelling and deep divers take a spare mask with them to avoid disaster under water. Every diver should be competent enough to handle a broken strap while diving and you'll soon discover a mask will work without one if you need to.
A couple of spare tank O-rings (DIN or A-clamp) are always worth having too.
So what are the spares you should carry under water?
If you were working professionally as a diving instructor might, the HSE demands that you carry an independent air supply. That makes sense. If you are diving in the poorer visibility we encounter in home waters, it make sense for every diver to carry spare gas so why not invest in a pony cylinder (a smaller cylinder that you wear alongside the main) complete with its own regulator, or even simply twin two standard cylinders? Just be sure they are not too heavy together for you to handle.
BCs are very low-tech affairs but if you are wearing a drysuit and not over-weighted, that will give you the redundancy you need for cold water diving. If you are warm water diving and not over-weighted, you should always be able to swim up easily, even if your BC were to suffer a rare failure.
I've already mentioned in a previous blog about having two dive computers on dives. If one should fail (and everything fails at some time or other) you will need to wait 24 hours before continuing to dive and if you're away on an expensive diving trip, you won't be happy doing that.
Dive Torches are much more reliable than they used to be but people are just as bad as ever so there's always the chance that you forgot to fully charge yours or even didn't reassemble it faultlessly afterwards. It's not very nice to be left in the dark. The simple solution is to carry a back up in the pocket of your BC and small inexpensive dive torches can have big performances nowadays.
Happy diving. - John Bantin
