Dive Rite Sidewinder Safety Reel
Line length specifications on reels are approximate and the diver should confirm actual length before relying on a precise distance measurement.
Dive Rite Sidewinder Safety Reel
- Injection molded polycarbonate spool
- stainless steel axle w/ aircraft aluminum frame
- Generous size handle for easy deployment
The Dive Rite Sidewinder Safety Reel features an injection molded polycarbonate spool with a lifetime replacement warranty against breakage, cracking or warping. Side handle reels feature an anti-fouling design that uses precision machined tolerances to ensure that line cannot slip between the spool and the handle. The side-mounted closed-end handle allows ambidextrous single-handed operation and the thumb screw is positioned to ride on the outer rim of the spool, allowing precise drag or complete lock down of the reel. The marine grade stainless steel axle and high quality aircraft grade aluminum frame are highly corrosion resistant. The black knurled lockdown screw has a low profile to prevent snagging, and is made of HDPE to prevent bimetallic galvanic corrosion between the screw and frame. All DR Sidewinder Safety Reels include a marine quality 316 stainless steel medium bolt snap, line stop bead and a factory pre-load line choice of { 140 ft | 43 m } orange #21 polyester or white #24 nylon.
Dive Rite Sidewinder reels offer a couple of unique benefits associated with their design. The Dive Rite spools are held in place with an e-clip, making it a simple matter to remove and replace the spool. This means the diver can inventory spools loaded with several different types of line and quickly swap the line load in order to configure the reel for a specific mission. The design also means it is quick and easy to clear a reel jam by removing the spool. (The Dive Rite reels are not prone to jams, far from it, but we've yet to see the 'jam proof' reel. Reel jams occur regardless of brand or design because the proper function of any reel also depends, in part, on the skill of the user and sometimes just plain bad luck.)
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| Brand | Dive Rite |
|---|---|
| SKU | DR-RE52140x |
| Weight | 1.000000 |
Customer Reviews
The Original Sidewinding Style Cave Reel
The first cave diving reels were characterized by lantern style handles that hold the reel vertically. This classic design is simple and works reasonably well for cave diving, but has the disadvantage that the handle is an open ended Γ-shape. The open end of the inverted L makes it an entanglement hazard and the lantern style handle also does not scale up well for very large reels. As cave explorations were becoming longer, deeper, and more extensive, a reel was needed that could help an explorer make some serious penetrations into a virgin cave system. The original sidewinder-style reel was designed by legendary North Florida cave diver Woody Jasper. He first used the sidewinding style design when inventing his large "explorer reel" around 1980. Less likely to entangle than other reels on the market, Woody’s original reel was made of aluminum and a PVC spool, see the photo of an example. The side-handle style of the reel lent itself to exploration because it could easily switch from hand to hand while laying out line. Twenty years later, sidewinder-style reels were popularized in the technical diving community when DIR aficionados began using them for paying out line in deep caves at high speed on a DPV. Today, sidewinding style reels with a closed handle have become the standard for serious cave divers.
