At the beginning of a dive, when the gear is completely dry and just splashed, there is air trapped in between the gear and in the different types of fabric. It takes a while to get all gear soaked completely and push out all trapped air.
For example: my wing has two little holes on the top to purge the air trapped between the bladder and the outer layer of cordura. At the beginning of the dive I can hear the bubbles. It’s just like having a leak somewhere around the first stage because you can’t see where the bubbles come from exactly.
Another example: my drysuit is crushed neoprene with the outer layer being some sort of fabric which gets soaked gradually. I can actually observe the microbubbles coming out during the dive.
When a drysuit has the socks with rockboots configuration, there is air trapped in between the socks and the rockboots which comes out gradually during the dive because of water pressure and movement.
And there are more examples like air in padding, webbing, soft lead,…
All these factors make the difference in weighting which you are experiencing. And for the same reason the difference isn’t that big at the second dive; gear is already soaked from first dive.
For example: my wing has two little holes on the top to purge the air trapped between the bladder and the outer layer of cordura. At the beginning of the dive I can hear the bubbles. It’s just like having a leak somewhere around the first stage because you can’t see where the bubbles come from exactly.
Another example: my drysuit is crushed neoprene with the outer layer being some sort of fabric which gets soaked gradually. I can actually observe the microbubbles coming out during the dive.
When a drysuit has the socks with rockboots configuration, there is air trapped in between the socks and the rockboots which comes out gradually during the dive because of water pressure and movement.
And there are more examples like air in padding, webbing, soft lead,…
All these factors make the difference in weighting which you are experiencing. And for the same reason the difference isn’t that big at the second dive; gear is already soaked from first dive.
