The Who’s Who of Sidemount

Marissa Eckert

Marissa Eckert is a passionate explorer and full-time technical diving instructor, photographer and owner of Hidden Worlds Diving, who specializes in cave, rebreather, sidemount training. She brings a wealth of experience and knowledge in both open and closed circuit diving. Her major passions are teaching, exploration, and photography. Marissa is certified on multiple rebreathers and can teach the Sidemount Liberty, X-CCR, SF2, the KISS Sidekick, and KISS Sidewinder.

What is sidemount to you?

Sidemount is a tool to me. I use this tool in many ways. From a teaching perspective, it allows me to be extremely self-sufficient when I’m training cave divers. From a personal diving perspective, it is a tool that opened up spaces in caves I just couldn’t comfortably fit with tanks on my back. It gave me an opportunity to explore new places, not just small spaces inside the cave, but places less accessible in backmount like cenotes far out in the jungle, cenotes with no steps, and cenotes with tiny dry cave entrances.

What can be improved in sidemount?

Backmount has a fairly standardized and accepted configuration, the Hogarthian setup. Our community should come up with a standardized and globally recognized configuration for sidemount as well. Also, I think because there are so many people out there doing things differently with so many different types of harnesses, students don’t always get the best class when learning sidemount. I’ve often heard the terms “open water sidemount” and “cave sidemount.” This doesn’t make any sense to me. Sidemount is sidemount. You want to look clean and streamlined no matter what environment you are in.

Should caver divers in Mexico and Florida approach sidemount configurations differently?

Sidemount is sidemount as far as I’m concerned. I want to be the most clean, streamlined, and efficient diver I can be, regardless of where I am. To me, it’s important to learn how to use both steel and aluminum cylinders so you can dive anywhere in the world. After many years of going back and forth from Florida to Mexico, I wouldn’t change anything about my configuration.

What, in your opinion, is the best accessory for sidemount diving? What’s the most useless?

I may get a lot of crap for this but I think the best accessory for sidemount are cylinder pressure transmitters. Once Shearwater came out with them it was a game changer. They are very reliable. From a safety perspective, they can eliminate a ton of failure points. Every sidemount diver has constant leaky spools from the pressure gauges, which this can eliminate. Also, from a gas management perspective, students learning new skills like running reels often get extremely task-loaded, especially in high-flow caves. This puts their pressures right there on their wrist. Another thing I’ve noticed is light movement or lights temporarily disappearing behind me because a buddy is checking tank pressures. This keeps the light forward for excellent buddy awareness.

The worse one, I guess I would say, I’ve seen some people get splitters for high pressure ports so they can have a transmitter and a pressure gauge pointing down coming off the same port. I think this creates so many more failure points, and defeats some of the major benefits of transmitters.

As long as you are always paying attention to your gas, if you had a transmitter failure, you’d simply call the dive. If you didn’t break the rule of thirds then you still should have sufficient gas to get yourself out. Over the years I’ve had gauge failures, high-pressure hose failures, and lots of leaky o-rings. I think transmitters are great.

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Speaking Sidemount: E034 – Marissa Eckert & James Draker on Sidemount Cave Diving

Divesoft Talks: Marissa Eckert – diving into Florida Caves, adventure travel, and underwater photography