Dan Safety Stop

[Pavão]

Me too, when I start to get happy feet, it's time to dump some air from the suit.

As for managing both suit and wing on ascent, you're doing it gradually anyways, come on, it's pretty simple. On a run away ascent I can see how it would be hard, but, how did you get yourself in that situation in the first place?

[Shocky]

By the by, my dive store owner buddy pointed out to me, that every new dry suit he has sold, on about page 3 of the owners manual states, "should not be used for boyancy". Sounds pretty definitive to me!

[coldwaterjake]

I posted a thread on this on scubaboard and it has gotten rather contentious, but I think the situation is very different in a single AL80 where you are only ever offsetting 5lbs of air, and in a set of cave or deep wreck gear where you can be offsetting up to 25lbs of air in backgas alone. Because of that I advocate to put as much air in the suit as you want to be comfortable, but use the wing for what it is designed for which is adjusting for the weight of air in the tank since the suit buoyancy should be independent of depth.

Agree. Btw, if you have a lot of air in the suit, and lift your head too much, the neck seal can burp. That's not the normal diver position , but ascending can be an opportunity for this. It can get complicated.
It's proper practice to use the wing for buoyancy, but if you get really cold, it's desirable to vent the wing and fill the drysuit for warmth.

[RGU]

The recent Safety Stop had a paregraph that recommended using the dry suit as a primary means of boyancy vs. a wing. I thought this was a Northeast wreck diver practice?

Standard Great Lakes practice from "back in he day". The only time I use the wing is when I'm slinging a lot of extra tanks, or on the surface. If you started with Poseidon, you learned about controlling the bubble in a dry suit as all the BCs then covered the valves.

[aquadog196]

After reading the Dan statement it seems to me that they consider the drysuit as primary buoyancy to be an absolute as no exceptions were made. Could it be that either Dan is not aware of how the majority of cave divers use their drysuits and bc's or that Dan does not approve or is our community so small that they simply chose to ignore.

[RGU]

After reading the Dan statement it seems to me that they consider the drysuit as primary buoyancy to be an absolute as no exceptions were made. Could it be that either Dan is not aware of how the majority of cave divers use their drysuits and bc's or that Dan does not approve or is our community so small that they simply chose to ignore.

Not sure why Dan would worry about it as buoyancy works either way.

[bamafan]

You have to consider the target audience for the article. The ow stroke crowd is the large market and thus who most articles are written. On ow dive boats most of the divers do good to control their ascent in a bc now throw in s drysuit and you are asking for a disaster. Hopefully they can manage one volume of gas and not kill themselves is probably the theory. They will add gas to the suit to stop the squeeze so I guess they figured it was safer to write what they did. It isn't like their buoyancy or trim is any good anyway. I guess as long as they don't get inverted it will work. And with split fins the floaty feet won't be an issue because they don't have any thrust anyway.

[LCF]

I think it's silly to be dogmatic. In a single tank setup, you are just about neutral when you have lofted your undergarment (at least with OUR undergarments), so running the suit tight and being cold just so you can put air in the wing is kind of counterproductive. In doubles, trying to put all the air in the suit would result in a very unstable situation, where you'd either have to close your valve (risky, with that much air!) or every time you moved your arm, the suit would dump. And in caves, I run the suit as tight as I can and still reach my valves, because when the cave insists that you go head down to follow the passage, it may NOT subsequently allow you to drop your feet and get the air out of them

[rddvet]

I've always said drysuit inflated for comfort and as backup buoyancy but also inflate the suit to adjust trim. A couple people got bent out of shape when I duggested it because they said it should just be enough to offset squeeze.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Shocky]

It appears I got some incorrect information. Looking at both the OS Systems and the DUI owners manual, the only warning is to not use the dry suit as a lifting device for heavy loads.