Redundant buoyancy in a wetsuit

you should not need a wing/bcd with a wet suit if you are weighted correctley weighted. and whats wrong with your dsmb as a redundent supply of bouyancy?

Hi mate
I'll lend you my Ali plate, the twinsets are usually Al80 x2 in the Red Sea which helps
Weight belt also helps, but it's pretty much last resort because of the lack of control, and I doubt you'll even need one TBH
Reel / spool and DSMB is what I normally rely on
Generally they aren't deep dives if you're doing the Northern Wrecks circuit and it's almost always return to shot
Shinning up the shotline is considered to be a "catastrophic loss of magnificence" however

Brent said:

I'm not really a proper dir diver but a lot of my kit is including my single bladder wing. now I can understand that your redundant buoyancy comes from your drysuit, but I'm looking at going out to Egypt in mid June and will no doubt be wearing nothing more than a wetsuit, so what happens if I were to have catastrophic wing failure while on a wall dive with the bottom many leagues below me, am I doomed or is there something I'm missing. I usually only carry 3kg in v weights and without a drysuit there will probably be even less.

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The answer is to dive a balanced rig. If your wetsuit looses a lot of buoyancy due to compression, then you are better off diving a drysuit. If your wetsuit only has 1kg lift to start with, then you're not going to loose much, however if it starts with 10kgs, then at 30m you're going to have lost around 7.5kgs.

HTH

John

Any way to make your rig lighter and use a weight belt that you can ditch, assuming no deco ?

Otherwise perhaps invest in a sensible double bladder wing for use with wetsuits ?

TB.

HP said:

Shinning up the shotline is considered to be a "catastrophic loss of magnificence" however

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Oh. Bugger. That will be me out then. I was wondering what that corrugated hose and flappy thing is for, all that it seems to be there for is to get caught when I scrape across the wreck or through a hole!

Digs.

Baron015 said:

Any way to make your rig lighter and use a weight belt that you can ditch, assuming no deco ?

Otherwise perhaps invest in a sensible double bladder wing for use with wetsuits ?

TB.

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Note which section the post is in...

Regards

johnkendall said:

The answer is to dive a balanced rig. If your wetsuit looses a lot of buoyancy due to compression, then you are better off diving a drysuit. If your wetsuit only has 1kg lift to start with, then you're not going to loose much, however if it starts with 10kgs, then at 30m you're going to have lost around 7.5kgs.

HTH

John

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So, let me see if I've got this right, are you saying that with a wetsuit at depth I won't be very heavy and could simply swim the whole lot up? I kinda imagined that if the wing failed majorly I would just plummet down, which is why I wouldn't have thought the DSMB would work - by the time I got it out and sent up i'd be doing a yuri impression in the blue hole!

Or just take your drysuit...

We can do this on the phone if you like Brent
The worst you could be overweighted is about 10kg at the begining of the dive
That's the 5-6kg of gas in the tanks and the 5ish kg of buoyancy lost from a 5mm wetsuit at depth
An Ali plate would definitely help you - I reckon you'd need around a 4kg weightbelt with that, to be correctly weighted
Dumping your weight belt and splaying your fins would give you a sensible ascent rate at that stage in the dive when you inert gas loading is negligible
Towards the end - I would say the DSMB method is preferable.
It's not just a case of swimming it up - it's staying afloat on the surface whilst the boat collects you (probably at a time and place when they're not expecting you?)
Anything deeper than the mid 20's or with any deco and I'm in a drysuit

Brent said:

So, let me see if I've got this right, are you saying that with a wetsuit at depth I won't be very heavy and could simply swim the whole lot up? I kinda imagined that if the wing failed majorly I would just plummet down, which is why I wouldn't have thought the DSMB would work - by the time I got it out and sent up i'd be doing a yuri impression in the blue hole!

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No. I'm saying that with a thin wetsuit (1-3mm shortie) then you will not be very heavy at depth. With a thick wetsuit you can't balance the rig properly, and so should dive a drysuit.

HTH

John

Brent said:

I'm not really a proper dir diver but a lot of my kit is including my single bladder wing. now I can understand that your redundant buoyancy comes from your drysuit, but I'm looking at going out to Egypt in mid June and will no doubt be wearing nothing more than a wetsuit, so what happens if I were to have catastrophic wing failure while on a wall dive with the bottom many leagues below me, am I doomed or is there something I'm missing. I usually only carry 3kg in v weights and without a drysuit there will probably be even less.

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You will undoubtedly die a horrible death. Unless of course you are correctly weighted for neutral buoyancy at the surface, in which case you might have to make a swimming ascent which as we all know killed every diver who tried it up until 1968 when the ABLJ was invented. Would you honestly be diving in anything thicker than a 3mm in the Red Sea in June? And aren't the hire tanks pretty well all Aluminium? How much weight will you actually be carrying and realistically, how negative will you be at depth?

HP said:

It's not just a case of swimming it up - it's staying afloat on the surface whilst the boat collects you (probably at a time and place when they're not expecting you?)
Anything deeper than the mid 20's or with any deco and I'm in a drysuit

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Take it off?

HP said:

Anything deeper than the mid 20's or with any deco and I'm in a drysuit

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Honestly? Obviously I'm not saying that it's wrong or you're stupid - it just strikes me as a bit OTT to take a drysuit to Egypt to do a 20m+ dive. Would you not boil to death while on the surface?

James-S said:

Honestly? Obviously I'm not saying that it's wrong or you're stupid - it just strikes me as a bit OTT to take a drysuit to Egypt to do a 20m+ dive. Would you not boil to death while on the surface?

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Anything that involves twinset, deco and much deeper than 20m, sure I am. You can change right at the last minute, far more readily than a wetsuit. I regularly dive drysuits out in the height of the summer out in Malta - it's 35+ degrees. The other alternative is double bladdered wings, they have their place, but I'm not a huge fan.

I'll happily do the shallow wrecks in the Northern Red Sea in a wetsuit, apart from the Moller, they're all 25m ish with the boat tied into the wreck. You have more than one option if you lose your primary buoyancy

Ask yourself how you would get back up on a UK wreck dive in two layers of wetsuits (lose around 6-8kg of buoyancy at depth) if you pull the LPI dump on your BCD and it comes clean off in your hand? Do you fancy your chances dumping your 10kg weightbelt? I don't

Which is why I never pull on the LPI dump. Spawn of the devil.

What you want is a rebreather with nice big counterlungs, then you can do all your buoyancy control on that

Janos

I am only in the bracket of single deco cylinder but happily do Red Sea deco dives in a wetsuit.

I have 2-3kg of dumpable lead, 1kg of dumpable light, a dSMB, a non bungeed horseshoe wing, sometimes a scooter and always a buddy with dSMB and functioning wing - I think one or more of those combined would suffice.

I also check my kit pretty thoroughly to reduce the chance of the type of failure described.
HTH
Mal