W as WINGS

Definition

Butterfly wing-shaped stabilization vest (a large bombyx) attached directly to the diving blocks or to the plate connecting them. There is also a round model, called “Donut Wing” but that makes you fat!

Synonymes

Stab, Balancing buoy, Stabilizing vest.

Starter

Archimedes in his bath of liquid ...

Sorry for this anglicism but it seems that with “Waterproof” there is no other French term referring to diving starting with a W. If you find one, you have won! So it will be Wing.
Indeed, if there is a recurring problem that divers young and old are confronted with, it is that of stabilization. Too light, too heavy ... All because this idiotArchimedes had gotten into the habit of thinking in his bath! This gentleman had principles… If he had taken a shower, we wouldn't be there! You know: Any body immersed in a liquid rarely rises ... and so on.

I wouldn't teach the majority of readers of Scuba People but let us think of the neophytes who are unaware that under water one tends to sink but also to go up. That we need weights to compensate for the buoyancy of the diving suit. But as the thickness of the suit decreases in depth, crashing with pressure, sometimes turning the diver into an anvil. And therefore an inflatable buoy system is needed to compensate for variations in buoyancy. Finally, the air we exhale has a weight and that it often happens that at the end of the dive we are too light to the point of not being able to hold the decompression stop, attracted like plugs (immersed in a liquid ) to the surface! Difficult situation…

Main course

When I first started diving, there was only one stabilization system: our own lungs! Finally clean, more or less clogged with tar… The famous technique known as “ballast lung” which consists of filling the bronchi when you want to go up and emptying them when you want to go down. While breathing, on occasion. Simple and formidably effective except in recycler where, by definition… In short, there is no point in blowing like a calf in the “false lung” to try to stop a sudden rise; the solution being to blow through the nose, through the mask, but let's not go into the scabrous details ...

Douix de Chatillon - 1976

Lung ballast therefore, standard for all divers. A technique which, by the way, seems to me less and less taught, understood and practiced, entangled as we are in waterproof triple-walled clothing and as many “semi-automatic” stabilization systems. Because, at the start as we will see below, the “stabilization buoys” were not: they had been designed only for the ascent of the diver in emergency hence their name of “PA, parasailing”. So for the progression in gallery with the heavy “bi corailleur” they were often inflated more than reason; and we quickly got swollen heads; we were young; we didn't care!

A ballasted sausage ...

Source of Landenouze - 1978

In caving, in the 70s, we introduced the concept of “relay bottles”: 12-liter bottles that we put in different places in the siphon to find them on the way back. We carried them around as best we could: by hand, hung on the straps (the Swiss even used bungee cords) and it was particularly uncomfortable and heavy. This is how during a peak at the source of Landenouze in the Lot, we had the idea of ​​mounting a 12 l of a “Spiro” collar buoy, held in place by ten inner tube rings. It was enough to play with the inflator (mouth) and the purge to obtain a perfectly balanced sausage in the water! One collar buoy per relay bottle…

The Grail of stabilization had not yet been reached. We then witnessed a differentiation of species, the buoy simultaneously giving rise to the “stabilizing jacket” on the one hand and to the “wings” on the other hand, from 1975 in the USA (the “direct system” was launched on the market by Scubapro in 1971). During my two long stays in Florida in 1984 I often had the opportunity to dive with these systems considered exotic in France ... Sheck Exley had even shown me the sketches of a model he was developing which looked in every way like a ventral parachute: it was a question of floating on it in perfect balance and of progressing in “frog kick” to cross narrow passages without lift the sediment ...

Florida - Wing “butterfly” - 1984

It is therefore with brand new wings that we carried out the deep dives in Wakulla Springs and the photos of the report in the middle of the alligator fish ...

Less new was the one that was going to put me in difficulty during the next dive and I need to open a parenthesis here. Sheck was probably the greatest cave diver of all time. His remarkable performances and his exceptional explorations were the date before his tragic disappearance during an attempt to dive at -300 m in the cenote Zacaton in the Mexico. A formidable diver, but paradoxically very careless of the material. Thus, when opening the rear doors of his Van, we were lucky if we did not receive a bi 2 × 18 liters on the feet but we were sure to have to untangle a tangle of regulators and hoses that went up to 'Knee !

Dizziness…

We were that day in front of Die Polder II, an extraordinary cave that very few have had the chance to visit ... Dale Sweet, the first to attempt helium dives underground and who had advanced farthest into the source, was helping me piece together a piece of gear from Sheck's “spare parts” while periodically shaking his head. sorry…

Die Polder II - 1984

We are ready and I am honored to take the lead. The source does not look much: a small shallow swamp but streaked in its center by a narrow fault. I sink my fins forward, Dale follows me and Sheck brings up the rear. The tubular is so narrow that it is not possible to face each other… -15 m, -20 m… I regularly inflate the Wing with the direct system but I soon feel a gene on which I can not put a name: I literally go into a spin, as if I was screwed up. I progress a few more meters until a widening where Dale can come in front of me. And I see him shake his head again with his dismayed look as he bustles about my Wing. Due to the poor condition of the casing, one of the bladders came out and hovered over my head, making my stabilization impossible! Makeshift repairs with a piece of Ariadne's thread and a carabiner and the descent continues. It is at -68 m that we emerge at the ceiling of an immense flooded room, with a visibility of several hundred meters… Vertigo. What I had taken for gravel were in fact huge boulders, over 90 meters deep ...

Dessert

Dumas buoy - 1950

As we have seen, long before the adoption of the Wings, divers used stabilizing collars (or buoys) based on the famous “safety collar” invented by Frédéric Dumas in 1950 and a copy of which can be seen at Dumas Museum from Sanary sur mer. But, as the diver friend tells Loridon, a pioneer diver GERS at SOGETRAM and Comex : "… My Dumas buoy is there, if necessary, but I'm too afraid it will tear my head off!…"

Such collars and buoys were however marketed by Aerazur (first model in 1958) then Fenzy (first model in 1961). The inflation system was supplied with gas by an air or CO2 reserve, a reserve separate from the diver's main reserve and carried on one side of the buoy. A whole time ;-) ...

See you soon for a new definition of Scuba Bécédaire. The irreverent lexicon of diving, but not only. Because sometimes ...

Francis Le Guen

Café

So ? Wing or stab? This is the corny question to which our friend from Marseille Vincent Defossez tries to answer in this video. And you, what do you think ?