Trying to Decide on First BCD

[KJ.]

I will agree that you will get many suggestions to go to a BP/W BCD. However, several of us dive Puget Sound with a conventional BCD. I do because of injuries, other do due to convenience. I will agree that a steel backplate removes the need for ballast weight. I dive both integrated weight and a weight belt. Primarily to move weight off the jacket and near where I have excess buoyancy. My suggestion is to wait until you can rent a BP/W and decide for yourself if you like it as much as your TUSA. If your LDS will not service the TUSA find another LDS, that is just greed and not true service. That being said, there is not much to a BCD other than the inflator valve, release valves, and flushing the bladder. I am not sure what part of WA state you reside but there are good groups all over the state that can help as well. The Seattle area has many shops and several clubs/groups that dive together. I am in central WA but travel to Seattle area for diving. I am more than happy to help if I am close.

If you decide to stick with a weight belt, get a rubber one - the kind favored by freedivers. They stretch a little when you put them on so they contract when your suit compresses at depth. And the rubber is naturally "grippy," so they don't slip on neoprene like a nylon belt.

I went to another dive shop yesterday and got a bench check on the Tusa and it looks like it is good. The staff member there seemed to want to steer me away from back inflate as well as weight belt. I like the suggestion on renting a BP/W. I may decide to rent either that or a weight-integrated BCD for my dry suit Specialty course and that should give me a better idea. The Aqua Lung Patriot for sale that I posted earlier has 50 lbs lift and I thought that might be too much but I need to calculate lift and respond to seller to see if this is a viable option for my setup or not. @Still Kicking And I love the reminder for the option of a rubber weight belt. Right now I just have cordura with 18 lbs soft weights and nothing else.

@KenE Thanks for the offer! I live in Kent and would like to find a good group/club/buddies to join in dives with in the summer (I know, there are a lot out there)!

Thank you to everyone for your active replies and advice (even if it seems that everyone's opinions of what works and doesn't for them are as varied as personalities), I appreciate and am reading and trying to consider them all!

 

[inquis]

The staff member there seemed to want to steer me away from back inflate

What was their rationale?

 

[KJ.]

What was their rationale?

He is an instructor and he said he sees too many students on the surface pitching their heads forward and back out of the water/struggling to keep their head up (the analogy he used was that Dippy Bird novelty toy. I'm guessing people reading this are rolling their eyes right now). I was skeptical that I would be like that myself but haven't tried one so what could I say?
I'm not sure but think he also said something along the lines of, like in a spirit level, the air will naturally travel around in the bladder to the highest point and, if pinched or obstructed one way or another, may cause an undesirable shift in trim or balance then he somehow connected this as it relates to BCDs. This was opposed to a jacket with side inflation and not jacket with back inflate only. Again, not sold here but just taking in information.

 

[NW Dive Dawg]

I went to another dive shop yesterday and got a bench check on the Tusa and it looks like it is good. The staff member there seemed to want to steer me away from back inflate as well as weight belt.

I guess weight belts are a side topic, but since you brought it up........

Some of us drysuit divers here in the PNW....including me..... choose to wear a weight belt. I wear ten of my total of 28lbs on a belt basically because if for any reason I need to doff my rig at depth, I want some weight on my person.

 

[KenE]

I would also advise to use a weight belt. I use the Mako rubber weight belt with a third of my ballast weight. As NWDD said, if you need to remove your rig at depth, you will want some weight on your body to counter the suit buoyancy. I use a wetsuit and the rubber belt stays tight after suit compression, will never go back to a standard belt.

 

[MidOH]

Absolutely get a rubber belt. But get an extra buckle.

Your leftover bpw webbing makes a decent belt. Sometimes I like rubber better, sometimes stiff webbing. Weathered soft webbing is worthless though.

 

[KJ.]

I guess weight belts are a side topic, but since you brought it up........

Some of us drysuit divers here in the PNW....including me..... choose to wear a weight belt. I wear ten of my total of 28lbs on a belt basically because if for any reason I need to doff my rig at depth, I want some weight on my person.

What material do you dive for your belt? Yes, the shops and I realize that partial of total weight on the belt is allowable. At least in an emergency you will not be ditching your total weight and increasing risk of uncontrolled ascent.

 

[NauticalNick]

He is an instructor and he said he sees too many students on the surface pitching their heads forward and back out of the water/struggling to keep their head up (the analogy he used was that Dippy Bird novelty toy. I'm guessing people reading this are rolling their eyes right now). I was skeptical that I would be like that myself but haven't tried one so what could I say?
I'm not sure but think he also said something along the lines of, like in a spirit level, the air will naturally travel around in the bladder to the highest point and, if pinched or obstructed one way or another, may cause an undesirable shift in trim or balance then he somehow connected this as it relates to BCDs. This was opposed to a jacket with side inflation and not jacket with back inflate only. Again, not sold here but just taking in information.

This is maybe fair to a certain point there if it's your first time ever wearing a BCD in a pool, and you understandably have no idea what you're doing, figuring out how to lean backward in a back-inflate might take some getting used to.

I would definitely agree that for discover scuba classes and maybe even open water, jacket-style might be the way to go for students but past that I think that other options should be viable.

 

[lowwall]

He is an instructor and he said he sees too many students on the surface pitching their heads forward and back out of the water/struggling to keep their head up (the analogy he used was that Dippy Bird novelty toy. I'm guessing people reading this are rolling their eyes right now). I was skeptical that I would be like that myself but haven't tried one so what could I say?

There's a grain of truth in there, but it is something you can easily avoid. If you max inflate on the surface starting from vertical with a BCD with front air bladders, you will more or less go straight up. Try the same thing with a back inflate or BP/W and you will pitch forward. So don't do that. Lean back a little and put in just enough gas to make you comfortably positive. You can put more air in, but you'll want to get your legs out in front of you and lean further back. BTW, if I have to surface swim with my BP/W, I mostly do it on my back (or on my front with the regulator in my mouth). If you expect you'll have a long surface swim, bring a snorkel. But that's true of a jacket BCD as well.

It's much easier for the instructor to deal with the entry level students who make up most of their customers if the students can bob around on the surface like little navigation buoys instead of having to think about position and getting the right amount of inflation. That's why the jacket BCD was very quickly adopted by dive shops when ScubaPro first introduced it. Well, that and the profit per unit was much greater than any of the other alternatives.

More advanced divers and even beginners who have decent swimming skills learn to handle back inflation very quickly and most end up preferring it to a wraparound jacket. However a minority of folks that try a bp/w or pure back inflate really like the ability to get well above the surface without thinking about body position or they just like the feeling of being coddled by a jacket and so switch back.

I'm not sure but think he also said something along the lines of, like in a spirit level, the air will naturally travel around in the bladder to the highest point and, if pinched or obstructed one way or another, may cause an undesirable shift in trim or balance then he somehow connected this as it relates to BCDs. This was opposed to a jacket with side inflation and not jacket with back inflate only. Again, not sold here but just taking in information.

This is a obsolete issue that goes back to the earlier days of the bp/w. Since the bp/w was developed for technical diving, the wings were sized for two tanks and were mostly horseshoe shaped. Early single tank adopters who used these wings could find themselves with all the gas in one side of the wing which was floating a foot above them. This would obviously tend to roll you towards one side. But this was solved when narrower, donut shaped dedicated single tank wings were introduced.

 

[BoltSnap]

I really like it so far. Just moving from back inflate from jacket style really frees up the front of your body which feels great and I can't say enough about the comfort of the BCD. Trim and buoyancy is great. Build quality all around seems really good and all of their marketing (quick drying, binding-style ratchet camband, quick-release weights etc) lives up to the billing of nice really well-designed features for a premium BCD.

The only "cons" I would say is it's certainly not the lightest BC, although I don't think it's the heaviest either. I had no problem dragging it across the world to Asia in my duffel bag of dive equipment. I was also a bit nervous about checking my bag (fourth element expedition bag, which is not particularly padded or protected) that something might break but not an issue at all. Lastly, because of the red bands at the side that prevent the bladder taco, it's a bit wider and doesn't fold up as small. Again, I did 20+ hours of flying, multiple layovers so I would like to think travelling doesn't get much more painful than that and it managed fine.

TLR if you're looking for a travel BC that will fit in a lunch pail, definitely check it out in person first, but if you're okay with the size, it has been excellent.

How's the fit? Is the sizing accurate and forgiving?

I have plenty of travel bc's, thinking local but occasional travel,