When a Dive Guide is Wrong Make Sure Your Weight Belt is Not Impeded

Dear Undercurrent,

Last October, I went on the Aggressor Red Sea II. Overall the trip was fine, but when I started using a weight belt instead of the weights in my BCD (I kept losing one), the divemaster insisted that I put the weight belt on before my BCD, even though it would go under my crotch strap. When I raised the question about an emergency ditching of the weight belt, they said "Why would you ever do that?"

I contacted the NAUI training department, and here is their unsigned response:

"The current manuals do not dictate the release's specific order or direction. It heavily discusses awareness of the hazards and communication with your team/dive buddy about how to release it and that it must be free of any obstructions that would prevent its release.

"The example you gave in this message would be a clear obstruction, so the belt should be placed over the top to ensure if it was removed, it would fall away easily.

"We left this to the leader and the diver. As you know, NAUI has always taught people to think like divers instead of simply handing them a specific procedure to follow.

"The typical justification for belt first is that you don't want a diver bending down to pick up a belt wearing the gear..."

- Donald Banas, Santa Fe, New Mexico

As we all know, properly weighted divers need only to exhale fully to descend from the surface. On the way down, they only need to add a puff or two of their to BCs to compensate for the loss of buoyancy as their suits compress.

To ascend, a few fin strokes will move them toward the surface as the air in their BCs expands. A properly weighted diver may never need to drop weights.

Yet, bad things happen. You only need a catastrophe such as the corrugated hose becoming detached from the buoyancy cell of the BC, or its aging dump valve spring not being strong enough to keep closed under the pressure of depth (I've experienced both), or for some other BC failure, for this comfortable way of diving suddenly to become problematic and you must dump your weights to surface.

Take the 2002 death of David Graves, a diver and famous British newspaper journalist, who ran out of air and made it to the surface, but there he was either unable or didn't have the presence of mind to drop his weights. It became a story with a moral after he dropped below the surface and drowned. It's more common among lost divers than one might think. (See Undercurrent February 2020.)

The Aggressor dive guide asked why he would ever need to dump his weights? Apparently, that guide has yet to suffer the unfortunate series of events that might require dumping weights as the last and only recourse. Finding a weight belt hampered by a crotch strap is the last thing you need in an emergency.

Dumping weights might lead to a fast ascent, but it's better to be injured at the surface than dead on the bottom.

- John Bantin