"I can give you the tools to make that choice, but you have to decide"
But if they don't agree with your choice, you won't sell it to them.
Tobin, you can keep misrepresenting me all you want. I've laid out the "specifics", but you want to make this personal rather than be objective about it. "Pete the Pious"? Rly? Isn't that kind of name calling a bit juvenile, even for you? Look at your comment about me recommending "Huge" wings. Oh, the drama! Now, define huge. You offer wings from 17 to 57 pounds of lift. Which of your wings would you consider to be huge? Why do you carry huge wings, then if they are so dangerous? If not, can you please provide where I've recommended "huge" wings? As you're so fond of demanding: Specifics, please. You call it education: most of us call it selling. You're educating them about your products, about your backplates and about your wings like any infomercial does. Again, there's nothing wrong with that and I think it's a good thing for the most part. But please, let's call a spade, a spade. You're here to sell and promote Deep Sea Supply and we welcome you. However, I don't educate people JUST to sell them a backplate or a wing. In fact, I teach divers how to use the gear they already have efficiently. I throw education at the problem without expecting a sale at the end of the class. That's the harsh reality of it. Now, can you please stop with the character assassinations?
As I've posted before, the biggest problem with larger wings is wing control: will they taco? Tacos are great to eat, but not so good as a BC. Tobin's answer to this is to keep his wings as small as possible. That's a pretty effective solution for warm water, but it encourages divers to select wings that don't have enough lift if they take them into cold water as well. I've heard divers brag on how small a bladder they are diving and I worry that they are sacrificing safety to get there. You should have enough buoyancy in your BC to accommodate a dry suit failure if you dive with one. FWIW, there's more than one way to prevent tacos and keep sufficient buoyancy. Many other manufacturers use strategic bungees to control their wings so you can have control and sufficient lift. You can now have a wing with more lift and you don't have to worry about creating a BC taco. You can dive easily with or without a drysuit and not compromise your safety. This becomes critical if you start diving non-balanced systems where you don't have ditchable weights.
Finally, it's no doubt that overweighting is a huge problem. I see it here in the Keys all the time. Simply asking divers to use smaller wings is throwing gear at a training problem. We have witnessed too many cold water divers come dive our beautiful warm waters, who failed to adjust their weights to reflect a change in their exposure protection and have died because they were so overweighted. A smaller BC would not have helped them, but education would have probably prevented their demise. They definitely needed less weight diving here in warm water, but they would have also died up north if they had lost the buoyancy from their dry suit. IOW, their BC was too small for Cold Water diving and they used way too much weight for warm water diving.
