You're a big dude, Eric. With 4-5 liter lungs, you've got 11# of buoyancy adjustment just by breath control alone.
We should all be so lucky.
Did your buddy ever decide what he wants me to build him? I've got four sets just about ready to look at. PM me. My Mk5 tools are sitting by the door.
Rob
My buddy has still not mentioned moving forward, but I’ll kick him and get him moving. The season is coming up.
Ok you got a point. Big deep rib cage, years of freediving, packing air into the lungs, etc.
But what we should probably do is get more specifics on what the diver in question was using. Al 80?, wetsuit and thickness?, the type and brand of BC? Familiarity with gear?
From that it would be easier to try and pinpoint why he had such struggles beyond just possibly being incompetent. I’d bet 99% it was overweighting.
There was a gal on here that I heard about, she was diving somewhere warm. At the end of her dive she somehow got into distress on the surface and slipped back down underwater and drowned.
Several years back two guys were shore diving in San Diego. One of the divers drowned in the surf zone as they were coming in on the surface. His inflator elbow broke off the BC bladder and all the air escaped sending him to the bottom. He couldn’t find his weight releases on his integrated BC or find a reg to breathe off of. He panicked and drowned in 15’ of water 50’ from the beach.
The one thing these two cases had in common was overweighting.
My whole point is that a BC is not supposed to be a giant lift bag that holds an overweighted diver on the surface so they can elevator dive and do feet first descents. The BC was invented as a device of convenience in the case where it has already been mentioned, to keep divers from bouncing off the bottom.
It was originally used to take the edge off at depth. Somewhere along the line it has become the industry standard to abuse it’s capabilities and use it as a lift bag and surface bouying device.
IMO, overweighting and then overcoming that condition with another gear fix like these huge air cells in these modern BC’s is very dangerous. All it takes is a catastrophic failure at a critical connection for a BC and down you go. Some of these new BC’s I saw don’t even have a quick release system, you have to try and squeeze a clip to undo the weight pocket to pull it out. This was in response to too many people complaining that they were inadvertantly losing weight pouches. So the companies answer was to come up with a locking system.
Brilliant!!!