What event made you head toward/away from DIR?

[Vtach]

Since my first post on this thread had really litlle to do with original topic..........

Why DIR?

In a nutshell, I was trying to make my own system.  I had already had many years of uneventful diving, penetrating wrecks on single tanks, coming up with 100-200 psi and generally pushing my luck.  Fortunately I realized my luck would run out before long.  I had heard of DIR but I did not like the "stroke" term and didn't like the long hose or continuous webbing.  So I decided to make my own doubles rig with a home made harness with plastic fastex buckles and old Dacor BC hard pack and old cheap seaquest wing along with using my own ideas for equipment placement.  All because I thought it would work better and cheaper than what was already out there.  I had been diving this setup for less than a year with no problems.  Then, I had some equipment issues on a winter dive on the Len-Der.  My upstream second stage failed to deliver air at all at 100+ ft, I couldn't find my backup on a clip in the "PADI triangle", my backup freeflowed at the same depth, I could not reach my valves, broken harness clip......  Everything that could go wrong....did.  Fortunately, we were still using the buddy system and remained calm and I exited the water with fried egg eyes and realizing that this is not going to work.

After that I decided to look a bit more at DIR and try out some of the equipment options.  Tried the long hose, BP and wing and reconfigured my regs for proper hose routing.  Seemed to be pretty comfortable.  Funny though, Chris was teasing me for being "Johnny DIR".  ;D So converted to DIR from an equipment perspective and started to learn more about the fundamentals of DIR along with more diving classes which used DIR philosophy as a base.  Now it's just the way I dive along with the people that I dive with.  I have nothing to prove, no axe to grind, don't collect patches for patches sake, don't slam other divers and just work on perfecting my diving and seeing (and remembering) more cool wrecks as safely as possible.