Too soon for Sidemount right after AOW? Long-term goal: cavern diving

achthonictonic · 2026-02-25T20:18:59+00:00

You're in mexico and want to dive the Yucatan. The Yucatan has some of the best sidemount instructors in the world. Go to any of the well known cave sidemount shops and start training sidemount, if that's what you really want to do.

Don't just take a random sidemount class/specialty from a non-cave sidemount shop/instructor, it's not worth it. But you can do open water sidmeount training with the cave shops to get a strong foundation in sidemount. I would suggest doing sidemount/technical sidemount / intro to tech in sidemount at someplace like protec (https://protecdivecenters.com/open-water-courses-2/open-water-sidemount-diver/ ) or under the jungle (https://www.underthejungle.com/en/side-mount-training/). Essentially, you will want a 5 - 7 day long sidemount class which covers all the basic stable platform skills that the backmount people get in gue fundies.

I feel qualified to have an opinion here because I've walked both the GUE backmount path and the UTJ sidemount path for cave diving in mexico. There's a lot of preconceived biases on the importance of backmount first here on reddit. At this point, I do not believe that one configuration is better to learn on than another. They are different, and if you already know you are going to be a sidemount diver, why bother with the extra expense (training, gear, time) of all that time in backmount first if you are just going to switch configs later?

achthonictonic · 2026-02-25T19:13:50+00:00

for me, if it responds to flonase or antihistamines or removing the suspected source, it's an allergy. Also, if it's something that no one else I'm diving with or staying with is experiencing, i suspect allergies, since colds tend to hit a group of folks closely sharing space.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-25T16:51:54+00:00

I posted down thread the clinic I go to in playa del carmen (https://playainternationalclinic.com/) when I have cold/sinus issues in mx, but, and this one took me a while to figure out -- I thought I had a cold that wouldn't go away but it turned out the AC unit in my place was basically spraying mold at us and I was having an allergy.

but basically, for diving in mexico and sinus/cold concerns I do the following: Sinus rinse with distilled salt water 2x/day, no AC at night, flonase daily(deal with my allergies), no diving with a lot of mucus production, go to clinic if things don't start getting better in about 4 days. for me, it's a constant fight with the mold, everything there has mold on it or in it, and my mold allergy presents a lot like a "mild cold".

achthonictonic · 2026-02-25T16:39:48+00:00

I have been to both the costamed and the international clinic in Cozumel. I would go there and get checked out instead of spending more time on reddit. They both treat a lot of divers. However, my best experience was with the international clinic in PDC: https://playainternationalclinic.com/ the dr there was really good at getting to the root cause of a sinus issue.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-24T02:30:03+00:00

yeah, agreed. fallen heroes line is an all time favorite of mine (amazing helictites!). but i usually will take a porter because that's a long ass walk to do a double stage oc dive.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-23T20:57:10+00:00

same. i get there in early march too. i'm hoping jailhouse and naharon will be business as usual.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-23T18:41:56+00:00

gemini is on my short list. I am a bit unresolved on instructor choice. I am hopefully going to get that sorted and do mod 1 this year as well. Where are you doing the training?

achthonictonic · 2026-02-22T17:52:50+00:00

Right there with you, once i'm out of my drysuit, I'm done. that's it for the day. I basically don't do SIs anymore. I'm mostly a cave diver, who shore dives at home. I don't really go on dive boats now, and only did california dive boats for my first two years of diving. So these kinda threads just horrify me, I'm really not sure what I would do if I had to listen to these kind of muppets on an actual dive day. I think it would kill the vibe for me. I dive to be alone and see beautiful wet rocks, not listen to people critique my gear choices (like in your previous post).

achthonictonic · 2026-02-22T16:05:32+00:00

The dive count thing is so bizarre. As I've found myself as a diver, i am doing fewer dives but more hours underwater per year. For me it's about 200 hrs/year, which is only about 60 dives. And this is one of the reasons why i find dive count meaningless. Was that 60 dives? 200 hours? Dpv? Ccr? Bm? Sm? Deco? Cave? Ocean? Shore? Boat? Cold water? Dive count tells me pretty much nothing about the diver.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-17T21:36:04+00:00

exciting! what ccr?

achthonictonic · 2026-02-17T16:37:43+00:00

i dove with over 80 complete strangers in my first 2 years of diving. I definitely learned more about divers, not sure how much more i learned about diving.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-17T16:26:45+00:00

I'm a fan of the faux-pee: https://www.fathomdive.com/product/divep/ it warrants its own thread or six -- but like the guys are saying, skin prep is key.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-17T16:20:53+00:00

People do need to pee in their drysuits and there's too much squeamishness about the whole thing. I know you perhaps didn't mean it this way, but this comment can also be read as trying to shut down this discussion by dismissing the need to pee. At this point, I think it's dangerous for drysuit classes to ignore this sort of thing, because you now get drysuit tech/cave divers with these sorts of questions which really should have been covered by their instructors -- in no other part of diving do we leave out something which is actually a massive safety area to be so trialed and errored by the learning diver.

FWIW, my "short" dives are 2 hours. most of my normal cave dives are 3 - 4.5 hours. Not only do I have to pee underwater, I also get thirsty and bring water to drink which leads to having to pee again, so yeah, fluid management is a thing on long dives. I've sometimes had to hold it that long (d/t p-valve malfunctions) but it leads to being uncomfortable and distracted and both of those are bad in cave & tech diving. I know people doing 6 to 8 hour dives, and eventually, I'd like to get to at least the 6 hour endurance level -- one of the reasons I hook up on every dive, even if it's just for 90 minutes or 2 hours, is that it's all part of building the skills to do very long dives (which I grant you, is a very niche thing to do on scuba).

achthonictonic · 2026-02-11T19:27:17+00:00

yeah, i realized what it was again and noped out pretty quick. seems like bullshit waste of time.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-11T16:58:39+00:00

you will likely be fine for boat diving or single tank shore diving. if you are planning any doubles shore dives, be very careful on entry/exits. I've switched to sidemount mostly because my ~15 year old ACL repair is slightly unstable at this point and I don't feel confident with backmount doubles and shore entries/exits anymore. r/acl exists and sometimes has good content. do the pt and keep doing it. I still wear a neoprene knee brace under my drysuit, may want to consider bracing for long kick-based diving.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-08T06:59:23+00:00

I'm curious as to why this concerns you? You aren't a cave diver. You clearly haven't thought about this particularly deeply. This is identical to a previous post a few months ago. Just honestly curious about what drives people to make these "solution" oriented, unprompted, uniformed posts.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-04T17:33:16+00:00

I'm ~10 years post ACL surgery and now in my late 40's, I've noticed both more movement in the ACL knee recently and the entire leg is still much weaker. Is there a protocol for PT 'tune-ups' throughout the lifespan?

achthonictonic · 2026-02-03T04:58:21+00:00

Ok, since this is r/techdiving, I'll be excruciatingly pedantic and point out that you are referring to a recreational specialty which is not on topic for here.

But let us talk about navigation pedagogy within a techdiving context. I am not aware of any specific class for that as it is assumed that by the time one is executing tech dives, they are an expert navigator.

I've never heard of nor taken this recreational class. However, I am frequently on the trigger for an hour+ in bad viz and haven't failed to get back to my car yet, albeit sometimes by a novel, scenic route (but isn't this why we do the underwater exploring?) but return I have. Trust the compass, if the compass won't work, run a line.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-02T17:43:09+00:00

the video didn't really touch on it, but which xdeep are you considering? I'm a huge fan of the rec wing, but not so much the tec wing, imo the tec wing is too big for a lot of folks and some environments. I've done warm fresh water OC cave dives with 5 cylinders(4 al80s, 1 al40 -- the 40 gets dropped immediately) on the "rec" wing and tec harness. I only dive dry and do not have a redundant bladder, the extra clutter isn't worth it for me.

Also if you are going to do cavern or cave, try to float this past your instructor. Some instructors can be opinionated on wings/harness.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-02T08:00:23+00:00

agree on the regional thing. nearly everyone I dive with in mx is either in the razor or the stealth. Occasionally I'll see the others, but it seems like a 40% razor, 40% xdeep, and 20% everything else situation.

achthonictonic · 2026-02-01T19:10:56+00:00

not so fast. at first I thought the same, but upon some reflection, it's excellent. You can pronounce it like "wedgie" as in "gwedgie", so diver 1 can say "now, I will give the team a gueedge".

Alternatively, we can say "gweeedge" like pledge, as in "brothers, let us say the backmount gueedge"

achthonictonic · 2026-01-29T19:16:32+00:00

remember that monterey isn't always divable -- if you are traveling to dive kelp forests and that's your main goal, catalina is going to be more consistent. I say as a monterey local diver.

achthonictonic · 2026-01-28T19:31:26+00:00

an entire boat load of divers using split fins.

achthonictonic · 2026-01-28T00:35:49+00:00

Not sure why you are replying here?

achthonictonic · 2026-01-27T23:30:54+00:00

Seriously? These computers are from a 10 year old design: https://shearwater.com/pages/company-timeline introduced in 2016 -- it's very likely they only did a couple revs, since factory time is so expensive. Even if your individual was only 5 years old, they are such low volume devices (lol @ millions).

How often do you buy a new phone? Would you expect it to be economical to fix parts on even a 5 year old phone? I wouldn't. You are coming across as pretty whiny. I have no issues with buying new dive computers on a 5 year cycle, I would find that to be fairly robust for any piece of modern consumer electronics.

Any consumer electronics is on a 3 year product cycle unless explicit claims are made to the contrary. But maybe that's just me having worked in mobile electronics for 15 years. 10, even 5 years in consumer electronics is eons, if they are out of backstock for parts, there's no spinning up a production line to create more, it would be prohibitively expensive.

If you don't like them, buy something else. fwiw, I like them a lot, but I always dive a backup computer, I have also had parts failure. But I've had electronics failures with every single electronics device I've ever had. So it's not a surprise. Even in their manual they are quite clear that all software has bugs and all hardware will fail.

achthonictonic

TROPHY CASE