OP
rmh84
Contributor
This is what I'm hoping for. I'm a girl by the way. When I get the cash together I'll give DSS a call for sure, I like the looks of their stuff
small wing BCD's - Educate a newbie?
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This is what I'm hoping for. I'm a girl by the way. When I get the cash together I'll give DSS a call for sure, I like the looks of their stuff
I think the floatiest BC I've seen was about 3 lbs positive. If he really NEEDs 16 lbs to get down, then he has probably 13lbs of buoyancy he can lose underwater, and a 17 lb wing is cutting it too close for my liking.
Needing 16 lbs of weight in warm water either means he's a cold wimp like me, and is wearing a thick wetsuit, or he has a lot of bioprene. The other possibility, of course, is that he's a new diver and hasn't settled in yet, and is fairly significantly overweighted.
Even when your ballast is in a backplate, you still have to have enough lift in the wing to keep you neutral when your wetsuit has compressed.
Needing 16 lbs of weight in warm water either means he's a cold wimp like me, and is wearing a thick wetsuit, or he has a lot of bioprene. The other possibility, of course, is that he's a new diver and hasn't settled in yet, and is fairly significantly overweighted.
Even when your ballast is in a backplate, you still have to have enough lift in the wing to keep you neutral when your wetsuit has compressed.
OP
rmh84
Contributor
3mm full wetsuit, and about 30# overweight ( I used to dive with 12# of lead before I gained weight). By the end of my trip I probably could have dropped 2 more pounds of lead, but didn't feel like messing with it on the last day of my trip.
cool_hardware52
Contributor
A reg is worth about 2 lbs also, so a diver with 16 lbs of lead really has about 18 lbs of things that don't float. If they are properly weighted, using an inherently buoyant BC and a buoyant cylinder (al 80) it implies that their suit is 18 - 4 (empty al 80) - 3 (buoyant BC) = 11 lbs positive.
11 lbs is a reasonable number for a 5 mm suit on person of normal stature. It's way high for a 3mm suit.
The move from Jacket BC to BP&W often see's the diver reduce their ballast by 3-5 lbs more than the effective ballast provided by the back plate.
Jacket BCs can be inherently buoyant due to compressible foam padding, but some designs can also be hard to fully vent, and that can lead to more lead.
Newer divers are often over weighted, their move to a BP&W can be the first time they have looked closely at weighting.
Tobin
11 lbs is a reasonable number for a 5 mm suit on person of normal stature. It's way high for a 3mm suit.
The move from Jacket BC to BP&W often see's the diver reduce their ballast by 3-5 lbs more than the effective ballast provided by the back plate.
Jacket BCs can be inherently buoyant due to compressible foam padding, but some designs can also be hard to fully vent, and that can lead to more lead.
Newer divers are often over weighted, their move to a BP&W can be the first time they have looked closely at weighting.
Tobin
Shftrdog
Contributor
If you are diving only warm water, I would recomend the Oceanic BioLite. It is light weight, back inflate, and has non dumpable wieght pouches in the back to spread you wieght around
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