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The Who’s Who of Sidemount

Published

11 months ago

June 16, 2023

InDEPTH

Tom Steiner van den Ouweelen

Tom is a technical diving instructor trainer with TDI/SDI, a PADI course director and Tec instructor trainer, Razor instructor and the owner of GOZOTECHNICALDIVING based in Xewkija, Gozo, Republic of Malta. His passion is teaching technical and cave diving in sidemount or backmount configurations. With over 35 years of professional diving, Tom has conducted over 15,000 dives, a total of 2,500 hours on rebreathers, and is arguably one of the most experienced instructor trainers in the world. He is also an active blogger and enthusiastic about sidemount diving education.

What is sidemount to you?

Sidemount is a streamlined configuration (depending on the type of configuration of course), that gives us more freedom, allows us to go places where other configurations will not allow us to, gives us extra gas (through redundancy) and also can be very useful for people with back issues or women that can’t carry comfortably a twinset.

How did you get started?

I started diving sidemount in 2009, with a simple BCD that was cleaned of all unnecessary details. Then in 2010 I got the first Razor system that still used the camel bag as a buoyancy device, which you had to inflate orally in order to adjust your buoyancy. I found it very exciting because it allowed me to access places that were not possible on a twinset when I was diving deeper cracks and caves, in Dahab, Egypt. It did give me more flexibility, freedom of movement and extra gas efficiency. It was and still remains a great tool for certain, specific tasks.

What can be improved in sidemount?

There are many units on the market today, offering a wide choice depending on your budget. But just a few of them are properly designed. The main improvement I believe that could be done on sidemount units, is developing a weight system that could adapt to the trim changes that happen when divers are breathing down their cylinders. This can also be done on the bladder itself (ask me if you are interested!).

Sidemount and ocean diving? Boat diving? What’s your take on it?

Sidemount is a tool, just as any other configuration. So each tool does its job. You use a screwdriver to insert a screw in a wooden wall but a hammer will also do the job, it’s just not the right tool! Sidemount for me is good for certain types of dives, environments and situations, and not necessarily for all types of boat diving. I teach quite a few sidemount courses every year and of course it does look cool, having a lot of cylinders around you. But is that really necessary? Is it easy enough to be considered “ideal” when diving from a boat or even sometimes from the shore?

How about with two cylinders?

When on a liveaboard or RIB for example, if you know the correct procedure to enter and exit, using sidemount is not a problem as long as the sea is not too rough and there isn’t to much current.

How about using four cylinders (two stages) or more?

When on a liveaboard, it can be possible but not necessarily ideal due to space and assistance required, but when diving from a rib it becomes far more complicated.

For me sidemount is ideal for shallow caves that and dives up to normoxic trimix (≤60m/197 ft) that are accessible from the shore or from hard boats with a sea that is not too rough.We should keep things simple and within common sense, without increasing task loading without a reason in our dives.

The most important moment in the history of Sidemount for you?

Sidemount diving started in the early 1960’s in the UK, but for me, the most important moment in the history of sidemount diving was when some of the pioneers started thinking about developing gear that could meet the expanding demand for sidemount in the diving industry.Thats where you saw suddenly an explosion in gear design with different degrees of success. Some were good. Others were just copies -or bringing little changes compared to what already existed on the market, and some were total jokes, in my opinion.

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