You can't really get your weighting right in a pool. It's fresh vs. salt water. You will need more weight in the ocean than in a pool. It is beter to be overweight then under weighted Also the required weight changes depending on what type of tank you are using
Reason is that you need to be able to hold a saftey stop with a near empty tank
THe only way to get your weight dean-on correct is to go out into the ocean with a nearly empty tank on and see (with no air in the BC) if you can slowly sink by exhaling and float at eyelevel while holding a deep breath.
Once you have the total weight desided then you can deside how to distribute it
Either move all of it up or down or move just some of it. Moving some of it my by easier.
I've seen diver trad two pound of weight from thier belts to a two pound ankle weight and then attach the ankle weight to either the tank valve or the tank boot or in the worst case thier ankles.
wieghts on the anklescause you to use more energywhen you kick so they are kind of a last resort
Just f go out and dive. make one small change at a time. It will take tie to do the fine
tunning
19 pounds vs. 16 pounds is only three pound difference which is very close if the instructor just estimated by looking at you he likely estimated correctly then added a couple pounds because it is better to error on that side I think it is normal for it to take a dzen or so dives to sort it out.
Gidds:
I did a scuba review a week or so ago and I'm pretty sure I was overweighted. The instructor had me put on 19 pounds. I usually wear 16 pounds when snorkelling while wearing the same wetsuit. Anyway I thought I was overweighted because I kept nose-diving into the bottom of the pool when I stopped swimming. After messing around with my BC a little I could get neutral by adding a teeny bit of air. Another thing was that my feet and lower legs kept floating and I don't recall ever having this problem before. The more I thought about it I wondered if it was the BC, which was a SeaQuest with integrated weights (I can get the exact model if you insist). The weights were up fairly high on my body as compared to when I wear my weight belt. This could be due to the BC model or because I have a short torso, I'm not exactly sure :06: Anyway I was wondering if anybody else has had a similar experience and/or if maybe I should stick to my weight belt instead of an integrated BC?