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Hi. I've been reading this site for a while, and I have found some very useful advice here (someone said "A wise man does not learn from his mistakes", and this must be true for technical diving as you often don't survive your mistakes). For background, I have about 4 years open water experience and am a keen (and OK) photographer. This year I started cave diving (intro to cave in Mexico, in a wetsuit), which was an eye-opener. I am sorting out my gear in a local quarry for a return trip to Mexico and hopefully full cave, and then I hope to try Florida (do the whole course again in a drysuit?). My kit is basically configured DIR style, but this is because it seems to make sense to me and I can't see any obvious fatal flaws, not because of "religion" (but I do rather like the idea that I have the WKPP team testing "my" gear configuration "for me" at 300 feet at no risk or cost to myself - thanks guys!). I would appreciate views on two questions: (1) I have a DUI CF200 drysuit, and I think I was originally taught not to use the wings underwater for buoyancy control, just the suit. I have seen the occasional reference here to using the wings underwater, but I have done a search and couldn't see any definitive advice. A couple of times (but not always) I have felt that I couldn't get enough buoyancy on the drysuit alone, and have got through a lot of air inflating the suit and then having it blow out of the neck seal (I've never had any water come in). Was this the wrong body position, overweighting, neck seal cut too loose, or just bad diving? Should I have put some air into my wings? Basically, I think I'm asking "how do I dive (properly, in the real world with big buoyancy changes during a dive as air is used) in a drysuit?" (2) My buddy wants a drysuit and her funds are limited. She is looking at something called an "Otter", which is a laminate I believe. I think George Irvine has recommended DUI TLS on this site, but she cannot afford one. Does anyone have any good or bad experiences with Otters? You can see that we are a long way off doing any serious dives yet, but we would like to get there slowly over the next year or two and to buy the right equipment now. Thanks in advance. Simon Richards -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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