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I'm just wondering what the average weight carried by everyone is....
The reason I ask is that I've alway's felt that I was a little overweighted, as I could sink like a stone once I emptied all of the air from my BC, and after diving with as little as 6 kilos in Cyprus I decided to try and reduce my load in the UK.
Now I realise that theres a big difference when wearing a shorty wet suit to a full membrane drysuit with undersuit, but how much of a difference??
When I went to Cyprus, I took my own BC, fins, mask, regs and snorkel.. The dive centre gave me an 8 kilo belt which felt just right.... no problem in getting down once I'd emptied the BC... I didn't feel overweighted at all and walking about fully kitted was a doddle (unlike walking about in the UK)For my Zenobia deep dives they reduced my belt even further down to 6 Kilo's and so this got me thinking... Did I really need to carry so much weight back in Blighty??
I decided therefore to reduce my load to 11 Kilo's yesterday, and found I was too light, yet the only difference from Cyprus was my membrane drysuit and weezle undersuit, yet I'm carrying 3 to 5 Kilos more... does this sound right? can these two items require so much compensation, especially as a 5mm Shortie must still have a certain amount of added bouyancy.
Now I always squat and squeeze all of the air out of my suit before I even kit up, so as not to trap any air with my belt, I keep the auto dump wide open too. I'll put a little squirt of air into my BC before entering the water, then when ready to go down I hold the hose above my head and dump... that's my usual routine which usually see's me down ok.... Now with 11 kilo's of combined weight (belt and ankle weights) I couldn't get down at first.... my head went below the surface but that was about it... I had to turn and fin for the bottom hoping to grab a rock or two when I got there, but once I'd gone down a bit I was ok.... Now this tells me that I had air trapped somewhere because obviously the increasing pressure made me less bouyant... once I was down I felt perfectly weighted and had good control, in fact I kept adding to my suit to stop the squeeze and cold, without sending myself upwards....
The next problem arose as we slowly got into shallower water. I'd already started dumping air in preparation for the decrease in pressure, yet I still started to rise uncontrollably, I was having to fin down and grab onto some kelp, I pulled myself into an upright position to make sure there was no air trapped in the lower half of my suit, wiggled and jiggled a bit to move any air and kept depressing the auto dump button, still hanging onto the kelp I was then curled up into a feotal position squeezing every nook and cranny in my suit and pulling on every available dump in turn. Yet I have to say, that if I hadn't had the kelp to hold onto I would of definately popped up...
So.... one can assume I was underweighted.... but how much should I be carrying?? I realise that its not an exact science, and that many different things effect bouyancy including physiology, but what I'm wondering is....
'What is the average, dry suited UK diver carrying?'
And knowing that I'm struggling to first get down, and then also stay down in the shallows, yet have no problem below say 10 metres.. trapped air!! yes, but obviously I'm going to have to account for it
'How much do you think I should add?'
Dave.
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