How much weight?

[jvoets]

How much weight should you carry when doing constant weight dives?

I mean to say, if you plan to have a lot of dives to 10 meters, should you be neutrally buoyant at 3, 5, 8 or 10 meters? Differs a lot in the amount of weight you have to carry.

Is there a general rule of thumb for this?

 

[Jesper Juul]

Weighting

As a roule of thumb, you should weight yourself in such a way that you have neutral boyuancy at the half of the depth you plan do dive.

That means if you plan to dive to 40 meters, weight in such a way that you are neutral at about 20m.

You must always have positive boyuancy at 5-10 meters. This is to ensure that you will return to the surface in case of shallow water blackout (your buddy will be able to rescue you at the surface).

When I practise for constant weight in a 32meter lake, i use 1 kilogram of weight. I use a 4mm suit. I am 175cm heigh and my body weight is 63 kilogram.

In the same suit in salt water i use 2kg.

When i make recreational diving in salt water at about 10 meters depth, using a 7mm suit, I use 3 or 4 kg weight.

Some freedivers prefer less or more. This is just the weight I prefer. Please comment if you disagree on this.

Dive save
Jesper Juul Pedersen
Copenhagen, Denmark

 

[Pekka]

I have dived with no weights at all and it was ok but as I went diveing in the sea I put on some weights and I noticed that for me best rec. reef diveing weight was set so that I was boyant with full breath but if I exhaled all the air from my lungs I started sinking...it is bit too much for deep diveing but for reef diveing it was good to me!

 

[Bill]

less weight

Jesper
Just a few thoughts on the subject.
For deeper diving, I was advised to be neutral at 25-35% of target. That seems to work well. Another thing to consider is positive at the surface with the lungs empty. Remember that less than one percent of the divers that get in trouble will drop their weight belt. Note: the one percent is my guess.
In Calif, where I spent a lot of time at 20 feet (6M), that seemed like a logical neutral but I seldom went below 60. In Hawaii, they wear a lot of lead and some are negative at 10 feet. Last year I tried to adjust my lung volume to be slightly negative on the bottom. It worked OK during one meet and didn't have much affect on my bottom time.
Bill