I'm a hoover and I'm always the first to run out of air

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Location
Anchorage Alaska
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spoiling the dive for my buddy(a sipper) and others. I do a 80 in 20 minutes and a 100 in 30 minutes about?? At 300 lbs and 6 ft 6 and 61 yrs old I just suck it down.What to do? I need options-THANKS
 
Slow deep breaths both in but especially out. Stop excessive hand finning. And most importantly... DIVE, DIVE, DIVE. Practice will help most.
 
there are quite a few threads with similar questgions and lots of advice. in general as a newer diver, work on getting your weighting and bouyancy correct - if you're sucking down you air your working too hard. As someone whose quite big you may always use a bit more than smaller people, but plenty of big people, once relaxed with good trim/bouyancy breathe slowly and hence make the tank last. Keep working at it and you will improve. Also make sure you try and do some fitness type of things above water - the better at recovering after short periods of effort, the more it will benefit you underwater.
 
You will get better over time as you learn better breathing technique, but you will probably not see better than 45 mins on a 100cf tank. I'd recommend a 120cf tank in your future. The extra dive time will make it with it.

spoiling the dive for my buddy(a sipper) and others. I do a 80 in 20 minutes and a 100 in 30 minutes about?? At 300 lbs and 6 ft 6 and 61 yrs old I just suck it down.What to do? I need options-THANKS
 
In descending order of priority:

Accept that your air consumption is largely dictated by your physiology (muscle mass, lung volume etc).

Accept that increasing experience allows relaxation and enables some reduction to air consumption.

Accept that worrying about air consumption causes stress which increases air consumption.

Work on your fundamental core skills; weighting, buoyancy, trim and propulsion to reduce physical demands.

Get a bigger tank.

Work to increase your cardio-vascular fitness.

Ask your buddy to be tolerant and accept those limitations. Pay them back with tolerance over their own shortfalls.
 
Being new is a lot of it, better SAC will come in time. Proper weighting is improtant as well as learining to be neutral. If you stop swimming, do you drop or do you just hover there, at least for a minute or 2? If not then you are not actually neutral and need some work on buoyancy.

And you need at least an L frame in Alaska. :) (old 586 here )
 
Do shops in your area deal much with steel tanks? You could get a steel tank larger than 100cf pretty easily nowadays, such as a HP130, or a HP149. At 6-6 you could probably handle the extra weight, but that would depend on your lifestyle and exercise, I suppose. Alternatively, consider doubled tanks that are smaller, such as HP100's, or aluminum 80's. That would require buying more regulators, and perhaps taking a short skills class to make sure you understand doubles and how to dive them safely.

Bigger people tend to have bigger air needs, but practice and time does tend to help.
 
First spending more hours in the water will make you more comfortable and you will use less air. Second stop using your BCD for anything other then an emergency. Weight yourself properly and you should be able to go through you whole dive without having to waist air using it. This will mean that you will need to swim a little more but the air you use doing that will be far less then what you put into a BCD. This will also result in a smaller silhouette so swimming will be easier and you can use a smaller BCD.
 
well, i'm 6' 2" and 215lbs and i'm 53. and i can get 45 minutes to 60 minutes on a 100HP tank. But as others say, it takes practice for a new diver. When i started diving after a 15 year layoff, that same 100 lasted me 20 minutes. after about 6 dives i was more dialed in and my time steadily increased.
so dive, dive,dive. watch your weighting and have someone (an experienced diver) help you with it.
general fitness is also huge. run, bike, etc. work on that cardio workout and you'll use less air.

you also use more air with depth. shallow reef/shore dives are good practice for fine tuning. where i am we have reefs 100 feet from shore in 15-25 feet of water. a qucik 1 tank dive was awesome practice and has now turned into a regular weekly dive run.
 
I'm 6' , 260 lbs and 65 years old. I will never be able to match my sons on air consumption, but I have gone from 25-30 min on an Al80 to double that with increased experience. So, it will get better with time.

For my local diving, I purchased Steel 120's. At first this just allowed me to stay down with my sons, now I always surface with 500-1000 pounds more than they have.

DevonDiver said it best - Accept it for what it is and keep diving.
 

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