For about a year, I’ve been doing most of my diving in sidemount. However, I’ve only recently started doing dives that require multiple bottom stage and decompression cylinders. Naturally, there’s more than one way to attach these extra bottles, and I’ve been having a hard time deciding how I want to do it. I’ve tried several methods over the last few months, and the method I’ve decided to use (for now) was a surprise to me.
I tried the standard DIR method for carrying extra bottles first : all extra bottles hanging from the the shoulder D ring and hip D ring on the left side. I wasn’t happy with the asymmetry of this method (all stage bottles on the left side), and I wasn’t happy with how the stage bottles hung slightly below my main sidemount bottle (the stage bottle’s lower bolt snap tails have to be long enough to grab easily, but that also lets them hang down a few inches).
I tried what I’ll call Protec-style stage rigging next. This is pretty similar to DIR stage rigging, but the lower bolt snap tail is an adjustable length bungee instead of a fixed length cord. The first thing I learned is that I can’t use this method the same way they do in Mexico using aluminum tanks as the main sidemount bottles. This rigging method was designed to be used with the aluminum main tanks attached to hip D rings, and stage bottles clipped to butt D rings. To don the stage bottle, you reach between your main sidemount bottle and body, grab the tail, and pull it back to the butt D ring. There’s enough space to do this when the main bottle is attached to a hip D ring, but doesn’t work at all in Florida-style sidemount where the main bottle is attached to a butt D ring. The lower bolt snap can be attached to a hip D ring, but then it will still hang below the main bottle (although not as much as with DIR rigging).
I’ve also tried both of the preceding methods with the hip D ring slid way back so that the stage bottles wouldn’t hang down as far. This does help with streamlining, but it also makes donning/doffing stage bottles much harder – the wing and main bottle make reaching the D ring almost impossible.
I’ve since gone back to carrying stage bottles DIR-style because it makes donning/doffing easy, even if it isn’t the most streamlined. Surprisingly, having all the stage bottles being on my left side is my favorite thing about this method. It means I don’t have to me ambidextrous with my bottle handling skills! Donning/doffing stage bottles, gas switches, stowing the hose, etc. are processes with a lot of steps. It’s hard enough getting good at it on one side. Putting stage bottles on both sides makes it twice as hard!
I probably shouldn’t be too surprised by this. There are lots of skills that most of us only learn to do with one hard, like writing. I still wish my stages sat closer to my main sidemount bottle for streamlining, but I wouldn’t make any changes if it stopped me from keeping my stage bottles on one side.