Is overweighting of OW students a violation of standards?

[Iralub]

The captain of the dive boat shrugged this off and said, "Well you can always add air," like my concern was trivial. Proper weighting clearly took a backseat to getting me on the bottom.

I've had that response a couple of times. The usual response of DM to slow descents on first dive is to hand more weight. After the first dive, now that my gear is nice and wet, I'll remove the extra weight and have had several dms urge me to keep it and just add more air.

This has resulted in difficulties with buoyancy control on a couple of dives, even with modest over weighing (less than 1.5kg). Now I just do my own thing, but it's taken a few dives to figure out the right weight.

 

[Centrals]

I have a similar suggestion once many yrs ago but I ignored it and removed a kg or two instead.

 

[archer1960]

The cognitive load is something that is always there to some degree at a 15' stop. With no air in a secondary bag (BC) besides your permanently installed and very delicate one I might add (your lungs), it makes it actually quite a bit easier to manage a stop. If your trying to manage depth with breath control AND also manage the expansion and contraction of air in your BC it can get really tiring and stressful for some people to try and breathe and constantly dump and inflate trying to hold a stop. Add ocean swells on top if this and it's like trying to stand on a beach ball. Fifteen feet deep is where the most changes in pressure happen, right in the middle of the first ATM (or second if you include the surface). This is also where any extra uneeded gas will expand and squeeze the most.
So if you are using the 15' empty BC rule and notice you are rising up to 12 or 10 feet and have to flip over and fin back down to 15 then that's not bad, it easy to correct. If I see myself creeping up I exhale deeply and allow myself to sink back down to 15 then resume normal breaths. You may consider adding a pound or two if you want if you seem just a little too light (that's part of the dial-in), but it's sure better than being 10 lbs or more overweight and having to ride the inflator the whole time.
The biggest and most important thing to me (and I'm not talking about a pound or two of trivial weight), is to be able to float on the surface even in the event of a total BC failure.
BTW, the 15 foot empty BC rule is also a good way to know when your wetsuit is starting to crush down and wear out. As soon as you start needing to shed weight to keep the rule and nothing else like body composition has changed, you can bet it's your suit.

Yeah, I don't worry much about being a pound or two over; just taking (or not) my lights probably makes close to that much difference. If my BC ruptured or the inflator hose failed, swimming that much up without help wouldn't be a problem (I had to swim and tread water carrying a 10lb weight, using just legs when I was in lifeguard training). The stories that some people in this post describe as being 10 or 20 lb over weight scare me, though; swimming that up from depth, even with fins, could be a challenge.

 

[Hawkwood]

How is it a standards violation? (padi I assume) -NO hook in that question I genuinely want to know. Is it the floating part or the not changing tanks part?

Yes it is a violation under the Standards (PADI) for conducting "Open Water Dives":

7. Conduct skills outlined in the Course Instructor Guide and include:

a. Briefing covering dive objective, safety and care for the environment.
b. Equipment assembly and predive safety check
c. Entry
d. Exit
e. Debriefing and equipment disassembly
f. Logging the dive – sign each student diver’s log book.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I am a very new diver--15 logged dives to date--and I too was grossly over-weighted by my instructor both in the pool and in the lake for my OW dives. I didn't fully realize the extent to which I was over-weighted until my first boat dive off Maui. I was unsure of my weight and asked the DMs advice--it was my first salt water dive, and my first dive in a 5mm full suit--and he happened to put the perfect amount of lead in my belt. I had a hard time getting down at first, but I used the anchor line and made it to depth, and from there I was able to dive with a nearly empty BC; I only added a small amount of air once after passing 60 feet. I had no trouble maintaining depth at my safety stop.

This experience was a revelation to me, though I didn't fully comprehend it until after the dive. My trim and buoyancy were spot on, and the dive in general was far more pleasurable.

Later that week, we booked another dive with a different outfit. At the beginning, when listing our desired weight, I stated that I was unsure since it was my first time in a 3mm shorty, that my requested amount was potentially too much. The captain of the dive boat shrugged this off and said, "Well you can always add air," like my concern was trivial. Proper weighting clearly took a backseat to getting me on the bottom. This was a large dive operation that, I suspect, caters chiefly to inexperienced and/or infrequent divers on holiday; it is doubtless easier to throw on lead than to expect good buoyancy skills.

It sounds like you had an excellent DM that had a lot of practical experience and knew his stuff. I hope he got a fat tip because that was probably some of the best advice you could have gotten as a new diver. I wish they had a hand clapping icon to celebrate your revelation.
Make Sure you write this stuff down so you remember what tank/suit/amoint of weight you ise with a particular wetsuit. Every suit will need different weights and that also depends on any other added components like hooded vest etc. In the case of the 5 mil to 3 mil shorty, that was an opportunity to do some thinking and make an educated guess on your own and figure that a three mil shorty would need quite a bit less weight. I know you're new, but given what your experience was in OW with gross overweighting you will need to become an independent thinker and have to figure some of this stuff out for yourself. In this day and age of so many incompetent superiors and supposed dive proffessionals in the field of proper weighting you really need to self educate and bypass a lot of the current misinformation.

 

[Bob DBF]

I disagree. What if the diver is trying to do a stop with less than 500 psi and a boat comes over with propellers turning? They may well float uncontrollably to the surface. I prefer to keep a little air in the BC. If the diver is wearing a thick wetsuit and is neutral at 15 feet.. they are going to be quite buoyant at 5 ft. The ascent from 5 feet should be slow, NOT floating up.

Another reason to have some extra lead is deployment of an smb on a reel or spool. It will take 2-4 lbs of downward force on the string to make the float stick up and be functional.. maybe even more force. So who wants to be trying to swim down and not inhale too much as they struggle to stay submerged and hold the float down? What do you think this would do to a diver's comfort level and exertion level and enjoyment of the dive. They are much, much more likely to say "screw it" and float to the surface and skip or abbreviate their safety stop. If they have accidentally gone into deco, this could have more serious consequences.

It is not a contest who can use the least amount of lead. I guess?? because FAT people need lots of lead and thin, fit people need considerably less, this tends to make people think that you are a better diver if you use less lead? It is a ridiculous fallacy.

It is always better to be too heavy, rather than too light and the BC perfoms marvelously to compensate for a few extra lbs of lead. The additional bubble of air is more to manage, but unless you do the whole dive in very shallow water, this is really not much of an issue for a somewhat skilled diver.

As for being able to float on the surface with a failed BC?... that is a completely ridiculous reason to try to minimize your lead. The correct response to a failed BC and simultaneously running out of air and also not having a snorkel to allow the diver to rest comfortably on the surface with the head submerged... is to ditch some lead - NOT carry too little.

It may just be a matter of local conditions. Although I agree with Eric and dive in a similar manner. If I started diving in your neck of the woods, I'd start talking with divers in the area to find out what works there. There are usually good reasons that diving differes from one place to another.

In my case here, there is not boat traffic nor do I normally use a DSMB, I do weight a pound or two over in case I need to breathe the tank dry or want maintain a depth less than 15'. There is more than one right way, however know what neutral is before adding more weight, and have a reason for the addition.



Bob
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There is more than one way to skin a cat, but the cat never likes it.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

The Evolution of Overweighting.

Back before BC's were invented, divers had to weight themselves properly to be able to dive comfortably and be able to "swim" around underwater.
It was extensively taught that weighting had to be spot on because there was no device to cover up for an overweighted diver.
When the first BC's came out they were only intended to be used at depth to compensate for the heaviness caused by wetsuit compression. Other than that all the same weighting rules applied as it was before BC's. BC's were actually considered a luxury item for a time.
Somewhere along the line, maybe during the big push to get as many new divers run through OW classes or whatever, the concept of proper weighting began to erode because at the same time BC technology really began to take off, and bigger more padded up jackets hit the market with larger lift capacities. This made it really easy to load up a student with "a little extra" just to make life easier for the student and the instructor. A little becomes more and more. Time for classes was also reduced in an effort to streamline and speed up the process, so proper weighting was made into a specialty they could take later if they wanted, but apparently wasn't considered important enough to be taught thoroughly anymore in OW courses.
This is also where "elevator" diving was born. The BC is holding up an overweighted student on the surface. Dump to sink, inflate to rise, pretty simple. This also means 100% reliance on a mechanical device that can fail. This is precisely where overweighting was born. It's a warped evolution and an abuse of a tool that was never meant to be used in such a manner. To add to that, many of the designs of the modern BC have the 'wrap around' high lift capacity aircell feature that holds the diver high up out of the water in a vertical position making it even easier to overweight someone and get away with it.
Part of the problem I see is we have an entrenched manufacturing base of conventional gear that is out of touch with reality and is producing gear that is getting further and further away from what's practical. They're designing and making gear that hardly even resembles real dive gear anymore. I have my doubts that the designers of such gear are even divers themselves. Because of the way the modern BC is designed it almost has become acceptable to grossly overweight students simply because the gear allows for it. I hate to say it, but in many ways it's become an unofficial standard of practice now by so many instructors that don't know any better. All the prior knowledge of proper weighting from the pre-BC era has been rinsed out and is gone.

I was elated a few posts ago to read about the new diver that stumbled upon the DM that weighted him perfectly. This to me is magic and I wish more new divers could experience such joy so early on. I think more divers would probably stick with the sport if they knew how magical diving can be when properly weighted. The misery of being overweighted can ruin the sport and be cause for people to leave.

BTW, when people ask about how divers managed to dive with no BC's back in the day, well this is pretty close to how it was done. Think about it, you had just enough weight on that you had to fight to get down slightly. This also means that you could have floated on the surface with no air in your BC with a full tank. Then when you got to depth you cruised around "swimming" freely and you never had to touch the inflator except for when you got down to around 60 feet or so. Then as you came up you dumped all your air and could make a stop no problem. The only time you had to inflate was at 60 feet, so a diver diving with no BC could easily dive to 60 feet and control buoyancy with breath control, this is how they used to do it. In your case the BC was used exactly as it was first intended, only for BOUYANCY CONTROL at depth, not as a surface support device capable of holding up an engine block, then doubling as an elevator machine.

 

[tursiops]

BTW, when people ask about how divers managed to dive with no BC's back in the day, well this is pretty close to how it was done. Think about it, you had just enough weight on that you had to fight to get down slightly. This also means that you could have floated on the surface with no air in your BC with a full tank. Then when you got to depth you cruised around "swimming" freely and you never had to touch the inflator except for when you got down to around 60 feet or so. Then as you came up you dumped all your air and could make a stop no problem. The only time you had to inflate was at 60 feet, so a diver diving with no BC could easily dive to 60 feet and control buoyancy with breath control, this is how they used to do it. In your case the BC was used exactly as it was first intended, only for BOUYANCY CONTROL at depth, not as a surface support device capable of holding up an engine block, then doubling as an elevator machine.

This is not really how it worked, before BC's. Your paragraph mixes up without and with BC's in any case. There were several strategies to managing one's weighting, without the use of a Buoyancy Compensator. One was to carry removable weights that you would unclip and leave at the bottom of the anchor line, so you had weight to compress your wetsuit, and could then swim around fairly neutral. Another strategy was to pull yourself down, sometimes coupled with the need to pick up rocks to put in your pockets to balance out as needed. And don't forget there were no safety stops, so you just came up, perhaps rather quickly, when the time came....no need to hold neutral at 15 ft.

I think a case could be made that overweighting actually started when the guidance to never be too light at 15 ft at the end of a dive changed from guidance to a rule to an obsession.

 

[Eric Sedletzky]

I've never heard of dropping weights at depth to pick up later. Not to say it wasn't done, I've just never heard of it.
Most people who dove with no BC that I know including myself (but I'm a modernist) never mentioned this either, they just went down, swam around, and came up. I have heard of hanging on to rocks though, I've even done it. I've also heard of hanging onto a kelp stalk to maintain a stop, and have done it. And I know they didn't used to always do a stop back then. Many times I dive the profile of the hard bottom out and back in and use the bottom typography as a natural guide for ascent. But a 15' stop can be achieved these days by divers choosing to dive with no BC, just as it could have been achieved back then if divers knew it was important, but the importance wasn't fully realized then. The other thing is depth and wetsuit thickness have everything to do with the depth range in which no BC diving can be done. I can go deeper and maintain good buoyancy with a thinner suit more so than with a thick one. I know the limitations of every suit I own.

I don't want this thread to turn into a no BC diving thread. This is aimed at new divers who have been trained in modern equipment including the BC's of today. My point was only to illustrate that with proper weighting of any system, it is possible to use the BC part to a minimum, even to the point of not needing it at all down to a certain depth dictated by the thickness of a particular wetsuit.

 

[Pullmyfinger]

Here is what I do with students to get them properly weighted.
I do this on the second day in the pool; They are wearing the same wetsuit that they will be using during the open water dives.

At the end of the pool session (14 ft. pool) ,with the tank at 500 PSI, I have them fully deflate their BCD.
I make sure all of the gas is out of their BCD, then have them inhale and see if they rise. If they don't, I remove weight until they do.

From that point, we work on rising and falling using only an inhale and exhale.

From this point onward, pool sessions or ocean, they do not touch the bottom.
We add some weight and confirm again in the ocean.

I am of the opinion that if you have students focus on being in control of their buoyancy from the beginning, then that is exactly what they will do.
They don't know any different.

Around here, if you roto-tilled the bottom, it would remain suspended in the water for awhile. A lot of areas have a muddy bottom composition, so it's essential to teach new divers buoyancy from the beginning.

For me, and the new divers I'm teaching...it is time well spent.
During the ocean dives I stop multiple times and hover with the class, do some skills, and just have them get comfortable hovering, and doing nothing.
Anyone can stay at the same depth while finning; the trick is to have good control while motionless.
I feel they now have a great foundation to build their future diving on.....but that is up to them, of course.

Here is a video of my recent class and I.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvmr2SO07Ug

Cheers,
Mitch