Weights, Nuetral Bouyancy, and Freediving

[Freedive WI]

It depends upon what suit I have on and where I am diving.

In shallow water spearfishing, max depth around 15'-20', with a full 6mm suit I wear at least 22 pounds. This makes it much easier to lay and the bottom and wait for dinner to come swimming on by. ;D

If I use that same suit for freediving the wrecks on Lake Michigan I will drop that weight down to 10 pounds for wrecks in the 60'-70' range. When I dive wrecks in the 80'-90' range I will only wear about 8 pounds. If I dive that suit with my scooter I will wear no weights at all.

Last weekend we were up at Wazee doing some 100'-105' freedives (I emailed you but got no response :'() and I was only wearing my 3mm farmer John suit. I wore 6 pounds for most of the diving, but dropped to 4 pounds on the deeper stuff.

My buddy, Ted, Likes to go heavy. He would rather push a little extra weight up from depth than have to struggle on the way down.

I have read the Herbert "The Flying Fish" Nitch likes to weight himself a bit heavy for his attempts, but he is wearing a monofin which makes it much easier to swim UP than with bi-fins. I guess it must work for him since he is doing close to 300' in constant ballast dives.

I have been looking into one of those ELIOS wetsuits, like you have, and will probably just go with a high-waisted model. I think that would allow me to drop a bit more weight if I wanted to. Using no wieght at all would be fun with a rope to use for free-immersion.

Jon