Once you start getting your buoyancy and trim dialed in, then think about replacing the flutter kick that everyone starts out with with a nice, relaxed frog kick. Kick, glide, kick, glide,...
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To address my original question...
I'd love to own a big honkin' tank but I have to fly to dive and I've only seen 80s for rental at the dive shops. I just wasn't sure if it's possible to bring gear to convert rental tanks into doubles versus the rare chance that I can find a larger tank to rent.
I'm doing my first wreck dive in a couple weeks. I don't think it's possible to not be excited. But I'll try to come back with more precise numbers. But for example, I did my AOW staged deep dive on 32% O2 - 30M for about 5 minutes, 20M for 10 min., 10M for 8 min., 5min safety stop and left with about 45 bar in the tank that started with about 195 bar.
On a recent trip to Cozumel my girlfriend that's 1/2 my size was burning through air much faster than me - like I had 1750 and she was at 600! After we got back on the boat, she was quite upset, as you can imagine. It turned out that it wasn't her.
The issue, we found, was a slow leak in her HP hose! We had the shop swap it out and she was back to normal. Her stuff was less than a month old, and Scubapro was awesome - they sent us a new HP hose to keep w/o charging us. Now we have a backup that we've added to our save-a-dive kit.
Best,
If your numbers are right, then she lost almost as much air from her HP hose as she breathed during the dive. You would definitely have noticed that much bubbling. I would imagine something else was also going on during that dive. The amount of air you lose through a leaking HP hose is very small. If you severed the hose completely, it would take over 20 minutes to empty the tank, and typical HP hose failures are not nearly as dramatic.
Why did you put a bad hose in your save a dive kit? If you have a dive where something has already gone wrong, would you really want to do a dive with HP hose that is known to be on it's way out; especially if it's spent several months/years in a dive kit getting worse?
Tom
Why did you put a bad hose in your save a dive kit?