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> > Now, how much air do you have in your BC to maintain > >neutral buoyancy? If you have them inflated more than "just a little > >bit", then you're overweighted. > > Kevin, if you ever take a set of double 104, you'll be overweighted! You > don't need any weight on your waist to accomplish that. That's why you should use aluminum 100s instead of steal 104s. The BC should only be used to compensate for wetsuit compression and gas mass. Even though my rig is very close to neutral, and I seldom wear a wetsuit (never worn a drysuit), I prefer to have at least two means of bouyancy control (yup, George, that's my "personal preference"). With the OC trimix rig, that was a dual bladder BC. With the rebreather, I have one BC and the counterlungs. Fortunately, because I have the rig very nicely balanced, when the BC is empty and the counterlung volume is at the low end of the range, I am a bit negative. When the counterlung volume is near the high end of the range, I am neutral or very slightly posative. Deciding what things to have redundancy for is very easy. Ask yourself this: Will I likely die if piece of gear X fails? If the answer is yes, take a backup. If no, then the only reason to consider a backup is if you'd have to abort the dive if piece of gear X fails, and you don't want to abort the dive. The trick is optimizing probability of survival and probability of accomplishing a task. That's all there is to it. In general, it is best to take with you the least amount of gear possible to achieve this, because superfluous gear can often adversly affect your chances of survival. Obviously, the things that are important to backup will change with the dive paramters. I know this is oversimplified, but I don't have the time right now to elaborate further. Rich
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