Why We Dive the Way We Do: The Equipment Behind Conservation Diving
One of the most common questions we get from new volunteers is
“Why do you use that equipment?”
After a few weeks on the project the answers become apparent, if not especially profound. We do not configure our equipment to follow a philosophy, a fad or retailer marketing. We configure it to suit the job.
Conservation diving is not recreational diving
A recreational dive centre optimises for one thing, and the good ones do it very well: taking paying divers underwater safely and sending them home with a great experience. The same rental equipment is fitted and adjusted daily, for a different person each time.It has to be quick. Excellent fit is secondary. Good enough is good enough.
Our situation is close to the opposite. A volunteer at MCP is issued a full set of equipment on arrival and hands it back six, eight, ten or even twenty-four weeks later. In between, that same set goes in the water almost every day, often twice.
The diving itself is different too. Most of our dives have an objective before anyone gets wet. We might be surveying reef fish, counting sea cucumbers, laying transect tapes, installing markers, recovering lost fishing gear, or simply reaching a survey site after a long swim on the surface.
Equipment has to help us finish that job. Looking “correct” or stylish in the right colours is not one of the criteria.
Why backplate and wing?
Almost all of our long-term volunteers, who later on go on to buy their own gear, opt for a backplate and wing solution. They’re familiar with it from MCP, and they know the three reasons we use it.
Firstly it’s durability: A backplate is a thick sheet of steel or aluminium with holes in it. A harness is webbing. There is very little to break, and anything that can break is fixed with a screwdriver and a few pesos of hardware. For equipment that does thousands of dives a year in salt water, that matters far more than any tricked out feature list. Some of our backplates have been diving twice daily for a decade! (this actually goes for our staff too by the way!)
The second reason is streamlining. When you swim long distances, or hover for an hour a few centimeters above fragile coral, drag is not a cosmetic concern. Less drag means less effort, and less effort means lower gas consumption, longer survey time and more comfortable diving. A tidy configuration also means fewer hoses hanging where they can touch down on the reef we’re here to protect.
And finally, it’s modularity: A wing can be repaired or adapted. Harness webbing costs very little. Nothing is proprietary. When something, anything, wears out, we replace that part rather than the whole system. It’s economical, smart and fast. A cut or a puncture in a jacket usually means replacing the whole unit. On a wing, it means replacing the inexpensive inner bladder and carrying on.
What about jacket BCDs?
There is nothing wrong with jacket BCDs. Millions of divers use them safely and happily, and for most diving they are a perfectly sensible choice if you dive once or twice a year (or if you’re a busy dive shop having to fit fifty new divers every day). They are simply not the best tool for the particular work we do: Our long time lines and personally assigned gear throughout a stay allows us to tinker and to set the system up perfectly for each diver, even if it takes ten minutes to get just right.
Why open-heel fins?
One of the first things visitors notice is that we use open-heel fins exclusively. The reason is that nearly all of our diving is done from shore. Quite simply, only some of our entries are sandy beaches. Much of this coastline is volcanic rock, loose stone and uneven reef flat. Walking to the water barefoot, or in thin neoprene socks, is neither painless or safe. A sturdy pair of dive boots gives proper grip and protects your feet during entries and exits.
Scientific diving is not always a walk in the park. Some days involve several hundred metres of surface swimming. Some involve pushing into current, towing equipment, or carrying lift bags, quadrants, transect tapes and sampling gear.
We therefore favour stiff, negatively buoyant fins that give reliable propulsion over distance and hold position when you stop to work. A strong fin that allows you to backfin too. (swimming backwards) A fin is not there to look fashionable. It is there to get you, and whatever you are carrying, to where the work is.
Why we do not use long hoses
This is probably the question we answer most often. Volunteers notice that a good deal of our configuration is influenced by DIR thinking: backplate and wing, huge attention to trim and buoyancy, standardised equipment across the team, and a strong emphasis on team awareness. So why not the two-metre hose that usually comes with it?
Well, originally the long hose system was devised to solve a particular challenge, and one we do not generally have. It was designed to allow safe diving in overhead environments, where two divers sharing gas may need to exit single file through a restriction.
Almost all of our diving is in open water however. We are not in caves, we are not penetrating wrecks, and we are not doing overhead dives. Most of our work happens in relatively shallow water, moving slowly along a transect, usually within arm’s reach of another surveyor. While a long hose extended to your buddy may be more comfortable for air sharing, a conventional regulator configuration handles this situation perfectly adequately too. (Consider please, that for regular non-decompression diving, air sharing means an expediently aborted dive, not long swims first or prolonged ascends, which can be the case in technical diving.) The usual, normal recreational regulator setup is already familiar to volunteers arriving from a recreational background, which is one less thing to relearn in a first week that is busy enough already. Secondly, while long hoses work perfectly fine, and may indeed be a superior solution in many cases, that’s not the rental gear people get given most places in the world. As all of our volunteers carry on diving after their stay with us, we want to be sure they are safe and have been trained in the emergency procedures relevant to the specific gear they will undoubtedly use in the future. For technical diver training at MCP, we of course use the standard setup which includes twin tanks and long hose configuration.
Skills matter more than equipment
Perhaps the most persistent idea in diving, well in any sport perhaps, is that better equipment makes a better diver. It does not. It’s nice to have certainly, but excellent buoyancy is not sold in a shop. Neither is trim, situational awareness, propulsion technique or teamwork. A diver with good buoyancy in rental equipment will outdive a poorly trained one in the most expensive kit imaginable, every single time.
That is why our diving programme spends so much time teaching diving rather than simply issuing certifications. We are not particularly interested in whether someone turns up with the newest wing or fashionable fins. We are interested in whether they can hold depth within 20 centimetres while laying a transect, keep track of the rest of the survey team, solve a problem calmly underwater, and surface with data somebody else can rely on.
Equipment supports those skills. It does not replace them.
Equipment should serve the mission
We are not attached to brands, and we are not attached to philosophies. We are attached to being safe and smooth divers, doing conservation work safely and efficiently.
Every piece of equipment we choose has one question to answer:
“Does this help us do our job better?”
If the answer is no, we don’t use it. Our configuration was not assembled from internet debate. It arrived one practical decision at a time, over thousands of scientific dives from shore on this particular stretch of coastline.
Come and see for yourself
If this is the kind of mission driven diving that appeals to you, it is exactly what our volunteer programme and internships are built around. You can arrive with nothing more than a swimsuit and a curiosity about the underwater world (a good sense of humour goes a long way too, when you live in a dorm.) Have a look at what you would actually be doing, or at the Divemaster and technical diving options if you already have plenty of dives behind you.
The equipment is the easy part. Being an awesome diver is what we will teach you.
