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Hmmmm, Sorry to disagree with you Billy but I think it might not be the best advice telling a fairly new diver to ONLY use his suit for bouyancy, especially while he is still trying to attain a correct amount of weight.
If he were to use only his suit for bouyancy control and happens to be carrying too much weight then there is a very great danger that the body of air needed to gain neutral bouyancy could be such that it ends up migrating all over the place, especially to the feet creating the very thing we least want... A Feet First Ascent or at least a feet high trim where his inexperience might not allow him to rotate in the water and release the air.
Although I personally 'do' tend to use my drysuit for bouyancy on shallower dives, (as no doubt you do too from your comments) I do this because it not only feels comfortable for me to do this and I also feel it helps me maintian a more horizontal trim in the water, but mainly because my weighting is such, that once I've taken the squeeze off I'm nearly neutral anyway.
But for a novice, and a novice still struggling with his weights it may be safer to keep his control in his BC for a while and only put enough air in the suit to remove the squeeze, thereby reducing not only the risk of FFA's but of fins being forced 'off' the feet through too much air moving into the boots (I saw this happen just very recently) theres also the fact that a drysuit dumps air much more slowly than a BC and can only dump from one location and Simon would have to raise his arm above his head to do that as he's using a cuff dump and therefore doesn't even have an Autodump working in his favour. At least with a BC he can dump air from it quickly and in any orientation.
Best regards
Dave.
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