Best Way To Dump Air From Your BCD?

[coreypenrose]

All BCD's have at least two ways of dumping air out of them. There is the inflator, a few have a dump by pulling the inflator, then there is dump on the rear left side and some have one on the rear right side.

When you are swimming along and need to dump just a little bit out, what is your preferred method?

1) Do you drop your legs and dump out of your inflator hose?

2) Do you pull the hose to dump?

3) Do you drop your head and dump out of the left rear valve?

4) Do you dump out of the right rear valve?

Pull the hose.

 

[lamont]

i'm getting the point where i almost exclusively use the rear dump now. every now and then i have a dive where i just can't seem to hit the string at all, but i'm having more dives where i hit the string every time, and fewer when i get frustrated. managing the amount of gas released from the rear dump is also getting easier -- dives where i misjudge the amount of air and head for the bottom are getting fairly infrequent...

it is a lot more efficient than using the inflator dump and breaking trim and all that now that i've got it down. but i do find that at the very end of the dive I always have a little bit of gas in my wing that I can't seem to get out of the rear dump. I go head down and pull the string on the rear dump up (relative to the bottom) and I just can't seem to get that last little air bubble out. I wind up using the inflator dump and rolling almost over onto my back and watching the bubbles come out....

 

[String]

90% of the time im just swimming along horizontally so just dump out of my rear lower valve.

 

[vel525]

Well, don't have as much experience as many of you on the board, but I tend to use the shoulder dump on my right shoulder. It seems to work well, even when I am horizontal.

 

[cmalinowski]

I just load extra weights (rocks, whatever) into my pockets and then drop them when I get near the bottom. If I'm too positive, I just grab some coral or wreck debri and jam it in my pockets :laughing:

Or, maybe I just use the inflator hose... new BC. New diver. Still learning.