Safety Sausage should you get one?The safety sausage is is one of a plethora of safety accessories to choose from when if comes to diving.You’ve got your safety whistles, your strobe lights, your signal mirrors and of course your safety sausage. Of all the accessories you can choose from, a safety sausage is by far the best one. When you’re in open water you can find yourself in a variety of conditions ranging from rough seas, to cloudy skies, or maybe even a lost dive boat! The safety sausage is by far the most versatile signaling device for all of these situations. 
First let me explain why I’m not such a fan of other safety devices.First is the safety whistle. Sure it sounds big and bad when you give it a hard blow at the dive shop, but these things are next to useless on open water. Case in point, I was diving with three other buddies of mine and we found a place to anchor and two divers went down while my buddy and I stayed on the surface fishing. We didn’t talk, we didn’t have the radio on; there was nothing to distract us. Our friend’s planned dive time was 45 minutes, so we got a bit nervous when 50 minutes had past and we hadn’t seen them. Then I heard the faintest sound in the distance. So faint that I thought it was nothing. Then a couple of minutes later I heard it again. Turns out our friends had surfaced about 200 yards away and were kicking their hearts out trying to get to us all the while blowing as hard as they could on their useless safety whistle. It was a clear day and the ocean was calm, but had my friend and I been talking, we’d never have heard the whistle. What about other safety signaling devices?Other devices are useful only on certain occasions. What good is a signal mirror on a cloudy day? What good is a strobe light on a sunny day? The only item that will get you recognized in any condition is a safety sausage.Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about those pretty little 3 foot things that you inflate with your mouth and come in a variety of fashionable colors. I’m taking about the blazing orange, 20 foot / 6 metre tall, original safety sausage! This thing is just small enough to fit in your BC pocket, but when you inflate it (preferably with your regulator) it will stand up so high that it doesn’t matter how rough the seas are (assuming you’re not a lunatic out in 10 to 20 foot swells) you will get noticed. Even on a night dive, all you have to do is shine your light on the massive sausage and your boat is sure to notice you. And if your boat is out of sight, nothing says “help me” to other watercraft like a 20 foot / 6 metre tall, orange piece of rubber. This isn’t to say that the safety sausage is the only safety accessory worth having. I’ve seen some air horns that attach to your BC inflator valve that pack a mean punch. But even if I had one of these devices, I’d never be caught diving without my safety sausage. For some more scuba accessories, have a look here. Return to Underwater Diving Equipment Home Page.
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