Halcyon Eclipse, Pioneer or Evolve??

[pescador775]

Perrone, I dived for 15 years without a BC, not even a life jacket. Yeah, I've been around for awhile. For whatever reason, this buoyancy thing has become very "heavily" emphasized, by instructor groups, I guess. I bet some instructors spend significant class time and pool work on this. Actually, it's not all that important. The only thing you have to watch out for is being too buoyant or too negative. No, that's not a joke or trick comment. Think about it, being too buoyant is miserable. Also, loading up your body with lead to achieve neutral when bobbing near the surface or at the surface is problematic except where long deco stops are planned. It means that, at depth, the diver must inject near max air into the BC. Some of these divers wear 60 pound bags, one would think they are going to attempt to raise a sunken boat. Most divers, I suggest, would do better to go in a bit light, come back light. Most of the dive is spent on or near bottom. If the wetsuit clad diver is biased very heavy it is necessary to inflate the BC causing drag and also causing annoying buoyancy changes every time the diver ascends or descends a few feet. So what's so wrong if the diver ascends 5 pounds light when nearing the surface? If the diver elects to do a "safety" stop so what again? It only takes a few minutes hanging on the line. No big deal. My BC has advertised lift of 35 pounds but is probably nearer 30. I'm fine with that. I could go heavier but who needs it? Anyhoo, it sounds like you have selected a very practical and useful BC.

 

[PerroneFord]

I guess it depends on what kind of diving you intend to do. For tooling around in shallow water, I can see where a BC might not be necessary. You can rely on the air in an AL80 to simply go away and take you from slightly negative to slighly positive, and wear just enough weight to make you neutral at the end of the dive...

Part of the problem starts in OW class. I know my class indicated that you should start your weighting at about 10-12% of your body weight. If I followed that now, I'd be diving with about 24-28 pounds of lead! I use less than half that.

BUT, there are times with fine control of buoyancy is very useful, such as in overhead environments and to be honest, I think BC's are important there. There is also the problem of thermal exposure, and if you want to visit deep things, or dive in cold water, then you are going to need an exposure suit, and probably several tanks. As the diving gets more technical, the ability to alter buoyancy becomes more critical.

You've done about 1000 times more diving than me. But I think we can agree that sometimes "good enough" isn't quite good enough...

 

[pescador775]

Perrone, you may have missed the point. I use a BC. I was the first person in the state of VA to use a Scubapro stab jacket, in 1977. The inflatable wings preceded that but were not popular until the past 10 years when a well known group of cavers started pushing them. Currently, I am using a back inflate made by Seaquest. It's an old style that I decided was perfect, or nearly so for my type of SCUBA diving--100 feet, wrecks. Mostly, I'm a freediver and spearfisherman. I take my buddies to wrecks and what-have-you to keep everybody happy but it's not my thing. Cousteau started this sport with his book, "the silent world", in which he extolled the thrill of diving unemcumbered. I'm a kindred soul and just love to stream downward feeling the water flow over my body. This is possible with SCUBA, as opposed to the hardhat which Cousteau was using a a reference point, but only with minimalist gear. Oftentimes, today's diver is working with a burden that would make a hardhat diver wince.

 

[PerroneFord]

Too true... minmalism is where it is at man. I am glad I found this path sooner rather than later.