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Ben Bos, UTD Training Director, on the current state of side mount in recreational diving, presented in the Technical Diving Resource Center at the DEMA show in Las Vegas, November 16, 2021:

Side mount has taken the scuba industry by storm over the past few years. At UTD we saw the potential of including this cave-born way of diving into our open water recreational and technical curriculum.

However traditional side mount using independent cylinders is very difficult to integrate in a consistent manner into our team diving mindset. We solved this by adding an isolatable gas distribution system to a wing and harness. This allows gas to continuously flow to all regulators and inflation systems (dry suit and BC) regardless of the number of cylinders carried. This also lets us integrate it with our standardized protocols for gas sharing and other emergency procedures. 

As we could see, most divers who are using side mount are diving in open water as opposed to caves and we had to have a system that would support mixed teams – back mount and side mount.

The downside was that it required a proprietary equipment setup – the isolatable manifold mounted on the harness. The system has been widely adopted and used all over the world but, we had to look for a more “stock” equipment configuration to implement our philosophies and thoughts on side mount in a system that supports, singles, doubles, and deco bottles.

UTD side mount training is now based on this new system. It is configured with off-the-shelf components and can be adopted by any side mount system on the market. Using this new gas distribution system we are staying true to our core beliefs and not breaking our own covenants.