Dave Sutton

Uhh..... Mike, you know I love ya, and we usually are like peas and carrots in the way we look at technical things, but:

Different environments drive different requirements, and the prism of your (or my, or anyones) experience often causes us to loose sight of the fact that other places may be different. I know that I make the error of assuming that everyone is diving anchor-line descent, non-drift deco, in cold water with minimum vis, a strong current, and three finger mitts, so sometimes I am incredulous that people think they can do some 'action' in the water when for them, in their environment it is easy. So, I can see that for some people it's hard to believe that is might be simply IMPOSSIBLE to do what seems a simple task elsewhere.

YES, Switch blocks are generally not needed. No argument. I've been able to rig my system to work without them. I play with them and I gently caress them at the dive shows (cannot resist nicely made chrome plated brass hardware), but... I don't own one. Come to think of it, I don't know anyone else who does either.

BUT:

Back to "my" environment, I'm not so sure I could hold my breath reliably long enough to switch a QD while task saturated in a high workload bailout situation on an anchor line deco, in sea-surge conditions, in minimum visibility, in a strong current, in a thick drysuit, with three finger mitts. If I bobble one thing it can go bad very fast. Bottom line is that if I am holding onto the anchor line for my life with one hand, I have one other hand left to do the rest. Having been there and done that.... it can be a task saturation condition that causes one to wonder how it'll all turn out. My solution is neither a switch block OR a QD that needs to be changed, but rather an integrated system that requires neither. The process of thinking it out drove the result. Then again... my rig itself has valves for switching (Mark-15 onboard/offboard Whitey), so one mans 'rig control' might be another mans 'switch block' mounted on a harness, eh?


So:

Best advice to our new correspondant is what Mark Nix suggests: Read the old threads and then make a decision, and then come back and ask a reasoned question if doubts still exist. Yes, the answer will 'probably' be "You can do without", but he'll have come to that point by self realization, and not by receipt of a dogmatic short-answer.

Hope you're well, bet there's no damned ice-storm happening there today!


Dave

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