First of all, choosing the lamp.

Lights are very important for cave divers, since caves are very, very dark. Inside a cave, without a light, you are 99% dead. Technical divers use three lamps (one primary and two secondary). Any of them will be enough for the full dive.

Hoghartian main lamp is a small headlight placed over the hand with a Goodman handle connected trough a umbilical to a battery canister fixed to the waist strap. Time ago the lamp was a 35-50 watts halogen with a lead battery. Today the lamp is a 12 W. HID and the battery is Ni-MH. Canister placement and wire routing are absolutely defined in DIR rigging and, if necessary, the battery canister doubles as a ditchable weight.

Integrated lamps are never used by DIR divers, they are supposed to be too heavy and difficult to handle. This is specially true if we think about big halogen lamps with Ni-Cad batteries that last for several hours.

During the last years things have changed a lot with the introduction of high intensity LED's, useful as a main light. Compact LED lamps, with 40-50 w. of equivalent power, lasting for several hours, are almost as compact as a typical headlight and, being cordless, their slight overweight is not a problem.

Rigid Goodman Handle is intended to be continuously placed on your hand. This is good for cave or night diving but can be very disturbing during open water day dives.

In different places a semi soft Goodman handle has been proposed as an efficient alternative. This is our second option.

There is a lot of stuff about the freedom the Goodman handle gives to your hand, but this is not absolutely true. The hand is not completely free and, more important, the light never reaches what is being manipulated by the porting hand. Both problems are solved with a forearm band. This are our third and fourth proposals. A soft one for small and light lamp heads and a semi soft for bigger and heavier ones.

The convenience of one of the four different designs for a given dive depends on three factors:

• Ambient light.
• The kind of manipulations intended during the dive.
• The entanglement risks.

Semi soft Goodman handle:

For night or wreck dives, when light is used almost full time, semi soft handles are very attractive, since are more comfortable than rigid handles, can be used more thigh to the hand in a way it is much more free to move.

The support band is a 20mm. double face express mountain strap (it's like a splashed pipe) . This shape and the two Velcro straps stitched to it give enough thickness to the set to offer a good grip for the hand.

Reel use:

Goodman handle enables simultaneous use of lamp and reel. That's why it's the standard procedure for wreck and cave penetration.