"Safe" weight distribution? Weight ditching question.

[dmaziuk]

it nullifies my ability to drop my weight in an emergency, allowing me to quickly rise to the surface i.e. emergency assent? Distribution

Who told you to ditch weights for emergency ascent anyway?

 

[Landau]

If I had a flooded drysuit and/or punctured bladder ditchable weight would come in handy for an ascent.

 

[Doby45]

If I had a flooded drysuit and/or punctured bladder ditchable weight would come in handy for an ascent.

Man you are planning on a lot of dying. In your situation if you had a punctured bladder use your drysuit, if you drysuit flooded use your wing. So you are planning for a flooded drysuit AND a punctured wing?

 

[dmaziuk]

In your situation if you had a punctured bladder use your drysuit, if you drysuit flooded use your wing.

But what if an asteroid size of Texas hits my wing while I am having a heart attack from all that ice water flooding my drysuit?

 

[decompression]

If I had a flooded drysuit and/or punctured bladder ditchable weight would come in handy for an ascent.

Neither would make you "more negative", if both happen, which is extremely unlikely, its still possible to add air to one or both to get some buoyancy. Further, if you are balanced, those big lungs you have offer a lot of buoyancy.

 

[Storker]

Read up on accident reports. A sizable number of the victims are found with their weights in place. A sizable number of the victims manage to surface before they go under again. Simple physics tell us that the more positively buoyant you are, the higher you'll ride on the surface and the less is the risk that you'll sink back below the surface.

Those simple facts make me believe that it might be a good idea to have some ditchable weight. For me, hard data trump (pun not intended, I'm not using a capital "T") speculation and rationalization. As always, YMMV.

Besides, being able to hand up a few kilos to the boat tender before climbing aboard IS rather nice...

 

[dmaziuk]

Read up on accident reports. A sizable number of the victims are found with their weights in place.

I believe @boulderjohn looked at them recently and found they included e.g. a guy who collapsed on the boat before taking his belt off. It does not follow that those victims died because they had weights in place.

 

[Storker]

I believe @boulderjohn looked at them recently and found they included e.g. a guy who collapsed on the boat before taking his belt off. It does not follow that those victims died because they had weights in place.

Don't be silly. I said 'found'. To me - at least - that doesn't include victims "found" on a bench on the boat after suffering a heart attack.

 

[boulderjohn]

A sizable number of the victims are found with their weights in place.

I have responded on this issue many times, and I will keep responding.

I once went through several DAN fatality reports, reading the descriptions of the fatalities carefully to look for dropping weights being an issue. I don't remember the exact numbers I came up with, but only a very tiny percentage of the cases of people having their weights on included the possibility that ditching the weights might have made a difference. The largest classification issue involved people who had cardiac issues, usually passing out or dying suddenly. In some of those cases, the people died on the boat after the dive. People who succumbed to oxygen toxicity did not remove their weights, either. Dropping weights would not help in the handful of entanglement issues. In the largest category of deaths due to diver behavior, the divers went OOA, sprinted to the surface in panic, and then died of an embolism on the surface.

IIRC, I determined that in about 10% of the cases, it was possible that dropping weights might have made a difference. Those cases were pretty much all cases in which the diver was found dead on the bottom, with no known reason for the demise. In only a handful of cases was the failure to drop weights clearly a factor in the fatality.

 

[Storker]

I once went through several DAN fatality reports

There might be a difference across the pond. Ever read up on BSAC's accident reports?

In only a handful of cases was the failure to drop weights clearly a factor in the fatality.

Well, it's rather rare that one factor alone can be determined "clearly" to be determining for the outcome. AFAIU, a fatality is usually caused by a combination of factors, unless it's a clear-cut medical issue, like a heart attack. Even though "the failure to drop weights" weren't clearly "a factor in the fatality", who can tell if it was the straw that broke the camel's back?.