It would also cease to be an issue if instructors would stop overweighting students in the first place and instruct them that they do not need to have all of their weight ditchable. For someone properly weighted dropping 2-4 lbs is more than sufficient to get positive and stay that way. When you have students wearing 20-30 lbs in a pool and they are not carrying alot of excess "natural buoyancy" that is just pure laziness on the part of the instructor. Teaching proper weighting from day one will also eliminate many issues. If a student does not know how much weight they need and where to put it by the time they get to OW for their checkouts the instructor has failed to adequately address the subject or the student was not paying attention. In either case they are not ready to be certified.
I'm not sure if it's laziness or stupidity.
I have never seen students with that much weight in the pool, but I know it happens.
I was diving with an operator in St. Maarten once, and I noticed that one of their instructors, who was supposedly doing some kind of AOW dive with a female student (
not PPB), had turned it into a buoyancy dive instead. I later asked the instructor what was going on, and she told me that the student had so little buoyancy skill that it was useless to work on anything else. She told me the woman had requested a huge amount of weight at the beginning of the dive and had to be talked down to something reasonable.
By an incredible coincidence, I sat next to that woman on the flight home. She told me she had been recently certified by a large and well known chain of shops in Southern California. (No, I don't remember the name, so I can't tell you.) They put 20 pounds on her 100 pound body for the pool, and all other students were weighted about the same. I told her I could not believe they could do the required buoyancy skills, like fin pivot and hover, with that much weight. She told me that no one in the class was able to do them, but they all passed anyway.
Overweighting a student to that degree does not serve the purpose of laziness, for it is much, much, much easier to teach students how to dive when they are properly weighted.
Similarly, several people in this thread noted that he was wearing a 3 mm suit and might have been weighted for a 7mm suit without realizing the difference. Maybe, but maybe not. I have seen people overweighted to that degree in 3 mm suits in warm water as well. I have seen many cases in warm water resort diving in which a new diver asks for advice on weighting and is told by the DM to use 10% of his body weight, which is generally much too much in a 3 mm suit. I have seen posters on Scuba Board give that advice and more. I even saw one poster recommend 20% of the body weight for a diver in a 3 mm suit!
On a dive in Bonaire, I was taking my gear apart on the boat when a young woman came on barely able to walk with all the weight she was carrying. Every diver in our area immediately offered to help, and we talked her into trying less than half the weight she had on the next dive. She was fine, and we got her to use even less on the next dive.
