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To follow up on what Jim is saying, You guys who are planning to ditch your big weight belt while wearing a drysuit. Are you REALLY positive you can lose your weight belt at say 250 ft in open water and not end up in a ballistic missile ascent? Are you positive you can dump gas fast enough from your drysuit to bring a buoyant ascent under control? Can you burp your suit through the neck with the gloves and hood you are wearing? You better be sure you can. I though Wrolf had a story on his site about some such horror. Johnny Mack obviously knows nothing about cold water drysuit diving. Iff you follow his advice and you wear a weight belt heavy enough to be neutral while wearing a drysuit, heavy thinsulite or fleece, hood, and dry gloves, you will end up with a weight belt in the 20-30 lb range minimum. Which of course means you will need to dive with your wings massively inflated to balance out your tanks, manifold, light, and backplate. In fact you are guaranteed to be overweighted if you start out a technical dive with a weight belt heavy enough to make you neutrally buoyant while only wearing the drysuit. Now when you are having your personal cluster at 250 ft and you go to pull your rig off because you know you can. Are you positive that you won't mistakenly grab the wrong buckle and drop your 25 lbs of weights instead? In fact, are you positive that there is no way you can accidently lose your weight belt under any circumstances? I have personally witnessed at least half a dozen divers either lose their weight belts at depth or nearly lose their weight belts. It's not a fun thing to deal with in a drysuit. For doubles I dive with drysuit, steel tanks, v-weight and no weight belt at all. I can take my rig off underwater without major problem. With the drysuit hose attached the rig is not going anywhere. I would not want to try it in mid-water but on the bottom it's not a big problem. Am I worried about ditchable weight? Not at all. I can always ditch my light but would never plan to. I am positive that my wings provide way more than enough inflation to deal with a flooded drysuit. How do I know this for certain? Because my wings have enough lift to float my entire rig on the surface and I know for certain that no matter how much I flood my drysuit I will still be positively buoyant with the thinsulate and trapped air. I don't care how much you flood your drysuit, you won't end up negatively buoyant because water is neutrally buoyant in water. Likewise, I am positive that I can get enough inflation out of my drysuit to accommodate a wing failure at depth. How do I know this? Because I have tested it. It's a simple thing to dump your wings completely empty at depth with full tanks and see if you can get enough lift out of your drysuit to stay neutral. Everyone should try this just to see. If you need to do this for real it helps to tighten down the exaust valve on your suit and then deflate manually. You can get more gas in your suit that way. If I have such an unbelievable cluster that I lose both my wing and my drysuit I can still get some serious lift out of my jet fins. I can swim my doubles rig up with full tanks and empty wings and drysuit. I know because I tested that too just out of curiosity. On top of that I carry 2 lift bags. Either one of which can be used for emergency backup buoyancy. By my count, that gives me five independent sources of buoyancy when I'm wearing my doubles. On the other hand, I have absolutely zero ways to add weight in mid-water if I happened to find myself positively buoyant through accidental or intentional loss of a heavy weight belt. Kent Lind Juneau, Alaska -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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