Well I've just returned from my Easter break filled with diving and completed my drysuit course! I think in all honesty a person needs more dives to get that card. It took 8 dives for me to really dial in the buoyancy and weighting and auto exhaust valve dialing but I finally managed. The different between wet and dry it huge and buoyancy strikes again; it's a lot harder than it looks. My biggest problem was staying neutral in the first 10 feet of water without popping up, I found this to be quite difficult all weekend until my last dive where I was hovering in only 10 feet in a very shallow neutral, navigation night dive. I found that most of the time I didn't use my BCD at all yet I figured I would. I only really used it once I was doing 70+ foot dives and especially my deepest 98 foot wall dive. I needed the extra lift from the BCD to prevent myself from descending into what seemed like an infinite abyss. I was diving Nitrox on that one and needed to watch my MOD carefully and therefore used my BCD to assist but otherwise I mainly used just the drysuit and it worked well.
The conclusion to the whole story and initial question I had really comes down to the type of diving being done and the situations encountered. Thanks for all the input!
The conclusion to the whole story and initial question I had really comes down to the type of diving being done and the situations encountered. Thanks for all the input!
