Northwest Dive Club

Up to now I have been using my dil cylinder, but I hardly ever use the wing for buoyancy.
Normally I use my drysuit for buoyancy, running my drysuit inflation from my bailout.
Got a new undergarment, I had to add 4 more pounds and I still had a terrible dive yesterday (legs very floaty).
Now I am thinking to go back to my wing for underwater buoyancy but the thought of using my valuable dil .

Is anyone using their bailout for wing inflation?

It sounds like you may have been forced to add too much air to your suit, did you have a migrating bubble that made your legs floaty? I wonder if adding the extra weight actually forced you to add exesive air to your suit making buoyancy a pain in the ass. I also use my bailout for suit and only use my BCD for emergency surface buoyancy. I would probably use bailout or an alternate "suit bottle" for whatever my primary buoyancy needs are but I would think that if your suit (inflated to a comfortable level) does not give you enough lift to make you neutral you may have to much weight. One of the things I love about rebreathers is they dont change their buoyancy throught the dive the way all open circuit does. This allows you to weight yourself to be perfectly neutral at the beginning and end of the dive without having to add exessive gas to suit or BCD.
I have noticed that diving with my bulky video system is a lot more of a pain than it used to be on my doubles rig. Even though it only weighs about five pounds under water (better than the twenty plus it weighs on the surface) that makes a huge difference in how comfortable it is to dive and I find myself leaving it behind most of the time.

HydroGirl wrote:Up to now I have been using my dil cylinder, but I hardly ever use the wing for buoyancy.
Normally I use my drysuit for buoyancy, running my drysuit inflation from my bailout.
Got a new undergarment, I had to add 4 more pounds and I still had a terrible dive yesterday (legs very floaty).
Now I am thinking to go back to my wing for underwater buoyancy but the thought of using my valuable dil .

Is anyone using their bailout for wing inflation?

*** Disclaimer - Not a RB diver***

I'm assuming you guys dive with argon systems when diving He the way OC divers do. Why not just use a bigger Ar bottle, and 2 whips, one for wing, one for DS?

Nwbrewer wrote:

HydroGirl wrote:Up to now I have been using my dil cylinder, but I hardly ever use the wing for buoyancy.
Normally I use my drysuit for buoyancy, running my drysuit inflation from my bailout.
Got a new undergarment, I had to add 4 more pounds and I still had a terrible dive yesterday (legs very floaty).
Now I am thinking to go back to my wing for underwater buoyancy but the thought of using my valuable dil .

Is anyone using their bailout for wing inflation?

*** Disclaimer - Not a RB diver***

I'm assuming you guys dive with argon systems when diving He the way OC divers do. Why not just use a bigger Ar bottle, and 2 whips, one for wing, one for DS?

Not a RB diver either, but it seems to me that you'd want redundant inflation sources.

HydroGirl wrote:Up to now I have been using my dil cylinder, but I hardly ever use the wing for buoyancy.
Normally I use my drysuit for buoyancy, running my drysuit inflation from my bailout.
Got a new undergarment, I had to add 4 more pounds and I still had a terrible dive yesterday (legs very floaty).
Now I am thinking to go back to my wing for underwater buoyancy but the thought of using my valuable dil .

Is anyone using their bailout for wing inflation?

Pretty much every CCR diver I know uses the dil tank for wing inflation, including me. And, like you, I rarely use my wing at all- I orally inflate it before I jump off the boat, or walk into the water, and inflate again on the surface, after the dive. And I use my suit for buoyancy during the dive. I do use a separate bottle for dry suit inflation. Or, sometimes, I use my bailout bottle.

I struggled to get my buoyancy down on my CCR for quite a while. On OC, it was very easy for me- I had it dialed in. Took me the better part of a year on my Meg, though. Truth be told, it doesn't take much to screw me up to this day- small changes seem huge on CCR, at least to me. Some of my friends don't seem to have any problem with this.

I tried going back and forth between using my drysuit and using my wing for buoyancy when I started diving my Meg- and ultimately, I really hated having a third gas bubble to manage- suit, loop, AND wing- so I just kept tweaking my config until I came up with something that worked for me.

I guess I would suggest a few things- like maybe adding just a little bit of gas to your wing at depth (and remembering to vent it on ascent!), or possibly running a higher loop volume to get some buoyancy into your counterlungs. And maybe wearing gaiters or something like that to keep the gas bubble in your DS out of your feet. I wear those finkeeper deals that look like stirrups to squeeze my slightly oversize drysuit boots.

I guess you could be right, I should just keep working on this new configuration or go back to my old undergarment
It is very possible that I over compensated and added too much weight.

Thanks