Take the stage....

The family of stages is growing nicely....

We have an array of cylinders going down to France and I thought I'd talk a little about what we have and why.

The aluminium stages are obviously for trimix and deco gases and 'travel' gas - to get us where we need to be whilst leaving our 'backgas' intact.
Aluminium stages sit much better in the water and we can carry 5 or more fairly comfortably. These are going down for the resurgences.

Whilst some folk do dive sidemounted with aluminium stages, it is avoided in UK cave diving for two simple reasons. The cylinders are heavier than steels above water, making carrying them through dry caves harder - and they also only allow 200 bar, which is a bit lean given you've just carried their heavy backsides all the way through a cave!!
So, steels are the way to go for sidemounting. They sit beautifully in the water and contribute to the divers weighting system, meaning we don't have to carry extra lead through same said cave to compensate for the lively bouyancy characteristics of aluminium cylinders.

There are a few sidemount caves we plan on visiting and therefore we're taking steel cylinders for these, as we would at home, to make the whole process as easy as possible.
This of course means less space in the vans....luckily Osama has a big transit and can take the worst from us.