InDepth Magazine - Issue 1
- Our Story

James Neal has been sidemount diving for well over a decade and has amassed a wealth of knowledge, experience and training in a variety of environments.

What attracted him to sidemount?

“The simple answer is overhead environment diving, in particular wreck penetration and mine diving. The longer answer is somewhat more complex. I started my overhead environment training with Ian France, completing an IANTD Limited Mine Diver course and my fellow student was diving sidemount. One of the things that really appealed was the fact that the kit was so much easier to carry into and out of the mine.  By pure coincidence a good friend of mine had also just bought a sidemount set-up and he talked me into a doing a course with him. So I then found myself down at Vobster Quay with Tim Clements. At the end of that course Tim also very kindly put me in touch with a young lady that had recently won a Hollis sidemount wing that she didn’t want. I grabbed myself a bargain!”

​

How difficult is it to dive sidemount?

“I wouldn’t describe diving in sidemount as ‘difficult’, not at all. It’s certainly different and it does take a bit of getting used to. The long hose, hogarthian configuration, can seem a little odd to start with, and switching regs is a discipline that you need to have ingrained!”

Why is that so important?

“Primarily safety! Although comfort plays a small part as the balance of the rig starts to affect your trim if you’re daft and only breathe down one cylinder. 

I can answer the question better by asking you this... What happens if you’ve breathed down one cylinder and then the other free flows at depth? You’ve now created a potentially life-threatening problem  for yourself  just because  you’re trying to save yourself  a fiver on gas! That’s simply the wrong mindset for sidemount diving. I keep  my cylinders balanced and within 50 bar of each other at all times. 

​

How long does it take to configure sidemount?

“That’s not a straightforward question to answer either! It all depends on what you’ve bought. Some wings are a lot easier to adjust than others. Every diver is a different shape and so every set-up is different. One of the things I see the most is what I describe as a ‘dog’s dinner’, whereby the cylinders themselves are just a complete mess, hoses in all directions, no cylinder markings, not rigged correctly, SPGs sticking up like a pair of wing-mirrors, suicide clips all over the place and then when they’re clipped on they’re at 45 degrees to the torso, essentially configured and hanging off the diver like a  stage cylinder would on a back-mounted set-up. I’ve seen that time and time again!”

To configure a complete sidemount rig properly usually takes me about a day, sometimes two. I  like to spend at least a morning with the student getting everything adjusted correctly and set-up as near as damn it and then we go and dive and tweak, dive and tweak, sometimes we need a second day’s diving to finesse. The desired outcome is horizontal cylinders, neat hose routing, easy access to all the dumps. The cylinders should hang down and not be hoiked up under your armpits! On land it looks cumbersome, in the water, it’s just sublime to dive!”

So how do you set it up correctly?

“The first thing you need to do is get in your drysuit and arm yourself with a tape measure! You need to know the distance from your armpit to your hip. This gives you the starting point for the cylinder bands. Then you need to position your clips at either 90 or 45 degrees to the valves, depending on body shape, you should have both left-handed and right handed valves. I prefer to have my first stages pointed upwards so that they don’t get knocked and bashed. The long hose should be on the right hand side, not the left!! And flat bottomed euro 12s are my preference for the cylinders. From this point I then have the student lie on