./.. snip.../ That guy clearly had too much weight on him... or a kid or very skinny.
Unfortunately, these days, many instructors and shops tend to give people to much weight just so they have it easier.
As I said before, I and lots of other people used to dive without a BC and it works just fine as long as you only carry the amount of weight you really need.
I don't know. I had just met him 1/2 hour before. However, he was a German diver and the general impression that I have of German divers is that diver training in Germany must be relatively good because I don't see German divers making a lot of stupid mistakes. Moreover, I don't normally go nosing around the gear of people I don't know with all kinds of comments about it..... Maybe if we all did that more it would help but social conventions being what they are, I assumed that a diver (according to the list) with several hundred dives would know what he was doing.
We *were* in Egypt, however, so it's a context that he didn't dive in every day. There is a chance that he wasn't perfectly weighted since the configuration was very different to what he would have used at home.
In other words, all that I know is what I saw, which is that he was unable to regain neutral buoyancy after the BCD failed. He was able to hold his depth, more or less, by finning up but he was obviously struggling with it, perhaps due to the current, and I think he made the right decision to GTFO to the surface.
R..
P.S. as an aside, I have a massive allergy to "know it all" divers who sit behind a keyboard and level criticism on the actions of others. I've seen other things happen in Egypt too, to the point that a dive guide we had came to me in the evening, visibly distressed, because a couple of Dutch divers had leveled such massive criticisms of his response to an emergency during the dive I was on that he was shaken by it. This is someone who had 10,000 dives to the 50 that the Dutch divers had but they were so *sure* of themselves that they made the poor guy feel like he had made a massive mistake because he returned to the surface to fix it instead of fixing it under water.
The Dutch have a saying for these kinds of people. They say, (translated) "the best skippers are standing on the shore". This seems to apply to Dutch divers in Egypt but also to people on the internet.....
R..