Math question - am I an air hog?

[TexasKaren68]

I have serious doubts about your instructor now. It is never "normal" to have bubbles coming from your inflator connection. An LP hose has a large internal diameter and can empty a full tank very quickly if it blows an o-ring, splits, etc.

Sadly, things like that are all too common for rental gear and is the reason most people who dive regularly purchase our own.

My friend, who I did my first two OW dives with in Cozumel, also had the exact same kind of leak on her BC connection.

I'm still in the stage where I don't trust gear very much. It's what's keeping me alive down there. I noticed the bubbles from the connection immediately upon descent and got the instructors attention right away. He had a slate and wrote "normal" on it. Shrug. OK, at least we were shallow. I probably wouldn't have been comfortable using that BC/reg combo on a deep dive and would have requested a different one if we'd ended up going out the next day (scrapped due to unsafe ocean conditions).

I do have my own reg and BC (which don't leak) but didn't feel like lugging them all the way to Hawaii (and considering I only ended up doing two dives instead of five I don't regret leaving them at home). However, for my next two vacations I will probably take them along - both will involve three or four days of diving and I'll be traveling on American Airlines which loves me so much they let me check two bags for free

 

[furby076]

You'll get better with air consumption.
You may also, if you don't already, start going to the gym. Cardio exercise, as well as muscular strength/endurance training, will give you dramatic differences. The slower your heart rate the better and exercise will end up making your heart more efficient and thus reducing your air consumption. Weight loss, assuming you are over weight, is also key. Essentially - the better shape you are in the better your air consumption.

When I first started diving I weight about 280 lbs, and not that much muscle (comparatively speaking). Now I weigh 210 lbs and have a lot more muscle then before....my breathing rate has gone down. Previously I was the first (or one of them) to come up, now I am coming up with half my tank's PSI remaining (1500 psi) while my dive buddies are at 750. I once dove a single 100 with 3000 psi. My dive buddy had double tanks (al80)....I had more air remaining then he did.

 

[temet vince]

We would start with 3000 psi in our tanks at the pool, and I would typically end class with about 2000. Other students would be around there (some lower). Our instructor would end at about 2500 if I recall correctly.

However, the girls in our class used smaller tanks than the guys did.

And those numbers could be really messed up, since I've slept since then (2 days) XD.

I know I don't have depths, tank sizes, or times, but having an experienced instructor there to compare with definitely helped me see the difference.

I asked him in class if the dive tables were even necessary, and he said that usually when you first start diving they can seem unimportant because you run out of air before you ever hit the ends of the table. But he said that as he dove more and learned how to lower his air consumption, the tables were what started limiting his dives, not his air. I don't think he even bothers to worry about enriched air diving.