Russoft
Contributor
Being a "vacation" diver there are sometimes long intervals between diving for me. As such I've adopted a method of checking my buoyancy at the end of my check-out dives on day 1 dive 1. At the end of my dive and safety stop, I make sure (usually by bleeding gas out of the octo) to get down to 700 psi and verify I can hold position. Again, I do this at the end of my safety stop so that if I get buoyant all I've done is sign up for a bit of a surface swim to the ladder.
With my weight loss (personal) every dive trip is an adventure in lead calculation. This past trip I started with 2 pounds less than I finished with in June. I had no problems and managed to drop a total of 7 pounds over the week, though to be fair I didn't really get close to the 500 psi gas level except for one deep dive earlier in the week.
To give you an idea... I started with a 2XL BCD and carried 28 pounds of lead 26 months ago. Last week, I wore a ML BCD and had 9 pounds of lead. (1.5 in each trim pouch and 3 in each drop pouch). I was originally diving a 100cf tank and lucky to get 60 minutes out of it. Now I dive an 80 and at 60 minutes come up with 1200 psi.
Keep diving, practicing, and it will improve.
Generally speaking the first dive in a trip, or after a long absence, or at the beginning of a dive season, should probably be kept pretty easy. I like to start on a shallow, non-challenging dive. Not only does this give me an opportunity to do a weight/equipment check before more challenging dives, but statistics from DAN seem to show that most diving related fatalities occur on the first dive of a trip.