Recreational Sidemount

Sidemount diving has moved from a technical and cave diving technique into mainstream recreational diving over the past decade, and for good reason. The configuration — cylinders clipped along the diver’s sides rather than mounted on the back — offers genuine advantages that recreational divers benefit from regardless of whether they ever plan to enter a cave or overhead environment.

The most immediately noticeable benefit is trim. With cylinders positioned horizontally along the body, achieving a flat, streamlined position in the water becomes significantly easier — the weight is distributed in a way that naturally encourages horizontal trim rather than fighting against a back-mounted cylinder’s tendency to tip you head-up. For divers who’ve struggled with buoyancy and trim, sidemount often resolves the problem more effectively than technique work alone.

The configuration also increases redundancy — diving with two separate cylinders means that a valve failure or regulator problem on one side can be managed immediately by switching to the other, without surfacing or aborting the dive. And the absence of a back-mounted cylinder makes extremely tight restrictions passable that would otherwise require removing equipment.

The Sidemount specialty covers harness setup and configuration, cylinder rigging, the specific buoyancy and trim techniques the configuration requires, and managing the valve and regulator differences from back-mount diving. It’s a technically interesting course that rewards careful attention to setup — a well-configured sidemount rig is elegant and efficient, a poorly configured one is neither.