Do you think that with a little more weight it makes buoyancy easier? Does a few extra pounds help not make the added air not so touchy a greater margin for error?
This is one of those places where Boyle's Law helps make diving counterintuitive. You would think that extra weight would help you stay down. But your goal is to be neutral during the main, touring portion of the dive. Every pound you carry that you don't need to counteract some unavoidable buoyancy (like your exposure protection) means you have to put some air in your BC or dry suit. The bigger that bubble of air is, the faster it expands as you go up, and the more unstable you become. (Google dynamic instability for a good essay on this.) The most stable condition is the one where you are carrying precisely as much weight as you need to counteract the floatiness of your exposure protection and any padded gear, plus a few pounds to compensate for the gas you intend to use out of your tank.
Now, having said that, I will add a caveat. IF you weight yourself with your suit as squeezed down as it will be if you have been standing chest-deep in water, then you have committed yourself to achieving that same degree of squeeze at the end of any dive where you use all of your usable gas. That can be VERY hard to manage. For this reason, I prefer to weight myself with my suit comfortable -- enough squeeze taken off to be able to move, reach valves, etc. This means I carry a couple of pounds more than the absolute minimum I could get away with, but also ensures I'll be able to vent the suit easily on ascent. It DOES mean I carry a bigger bubble. I have enough experience to do that.
To tell you how long it took me to learn to manage a dry suit . . . I got certified in one. At 20 dives, I could swim up a gradual sloping ascent just off the bottom without corking, most of the time. At about 30 dives, I had an uncontrolled ascent from 70 feet. On my 50th dive, I held my first safety stop in a dry suit. At about 100 dives, I didn't cork any more (unless someone incited it
) but I still yo-yoed badly sometimes while trying to hold stops. At about 700 dives, I could move around in the water column with no visual reference and handle some significant task-loading without moving off depth. A couple hundred dives later, I'm finally actually getting some CONFIDENCE in my ability to do that.
I have worked insanely hard on my buoyancy skills. Almost every other diver in the universe has gotten these things more easily. Which is what I meant when I said, if I can do it, anybody can!
