Hokay, update to this situation. We recently got back from Roatan, and I gave this system a real workout. At first the four arm float setups were too much, and I took off two of the float pairs. That was not enough, so I put half of a float pair back on each side, and that was just about perfect. Just a tiny bit of negative bouyancy, which is what I wanted. The zip ties worked great, by the way, and held things in place without a hint of slippage no matter how deep I went. The thing looked a little weird with only half a float on two of the arms, so I will have to machine these floats down to about half their size (on the two float pairs in question) and then they will fit back on and look better. One slightly odd thing I noticed. The entire camera rig seems to want to rotate slightly backwards in my hands, and I was able to compensate for this somewhat by pulling the strobes way back on their arms to position them a little behind the camera. I had the full floats on the bottom arms (next to the camera) and the half floats on the upper arms, next to the strobes. I think that if I had reversed this, I would put more floatation out with the strobes and help increase the effect of positioning the strobes back a little. I bet this would have helped improve the tilting issue, but I will have to wait for the next trip to test this out. Overall, however, this was a resounding success, and these foam floats did the job very nicely. They came off with a small wire cutter to the zip ties, and packed away separately in my other baggage (as there was no more room in my camera case for these bulky little fellows). A fairly cheap solution to a nagging little problem. Woody