Dogbowl
Contributor
I am normally a warm water Caribbean diver - skins and 8lbs of weight with no air in my BCD and my buoyancy is near perfect.
This past weekend I decided to try some local diving, which required the use of a 7mm wetsuit, hood, and gloves.
I knew going in it was going to be a little more difficult due to the buoyancy and compression of the wetsuit and the addition of about 20lbs of weight, but I had no idea it was going to be as difficult as it was.
I felt I needed to overweight by a few pounds in order to get down under 15-20', but once I dropped below 30' I seemed to require what I considered to be a SIGNIFICANT amount of air in my BCD to stop sinking. I was able to level out at depth, but on ascent as I reached the 20' mark I couldn't dump air fast enough to not bottle rocket to the surface.
Kicker is when I did my buoyancy check at the surface, I was nearly perfectly weighted.
Is there a trick to adjusting to the compression / decompression of a wetsuit to make it easier?
Over 2 days I just couldn't get comfortable with it, to the point where in my mind today I will never try diving a wetsuit again.
Any advice from the diving gods would be appreciated.
Yup! That was my experience first (and maybe last) time diving Tobermory. I figure I’m going to give it more time before trying cold water diving again, and it will be in a drysuit. I highly admire cold water drysuit divers. Cold water diving is a different beast altogether.