Nevermind that - who here remembers the "good really old days" when there weren't drysuit divers? Or BCD divers? Horsecollars with CO2 cartridges and unlined neoprene were what real divers wore and why the heck were the new-fangled rigs referred to as "single hose" when they have all those hoses and doo-dads and...and you could tell when real divers were in the water by the piles of stashed ballast on the slope down.Dogboy:Who else remembers the "good old days", when drysuit divers never wore a BC? Your drysuit was your BC! Of course, this was long before compressed/crushed neoprene, and shell suits were so new that, anyone who used one was "sure to drown" if a leak occured. We were diving in the equivelant of a modern day survival suit, a little water down the back was no big thing. Nowdays, use your BC for neutral bouyancy, use your drysuit for neutral bouyancy, whatever works!
I don't know where PADI came up with the idea to use the suit for bouyancy control but I suspect that, whatever the reason might be, it's lost in the misty shrouds of history. Sort of like my horsecollar is lost in the basement. Nowadays, the tide has turned and sooner or later PADI will catch up, they most always do. Using both your suit and your BCD does add to the task loading, which is not a good thing. The trade off is that with a little bit of practice, using both provides substantially better control and helps prevent the all-too-common inversion problem and runaway ascent problem - improving safety. Besides, all the grooviest divers use both.
