As you know we use lead during diving to counterweight ourselves, our suits and any other equipment.

It is very important to make sure you are correctly weighted.

Being underweighted will mean that you will struggle to get down or stay down.  This can be dangerous if you pop to the surface out of control.

But being overweighted is one of the biggest problems we see in diving.  

Being overweighted in SCUBA, we have to add more air to our buoyancy systems to stay neutral.  If we start to rise, the air in our system will obviously expand.  But because we have so much extra air to compensate for being overweighted, we will quickly end up shooting to the surface if the air isn't expelled quickly enough.

Being overweighted free diving we may not be able to swim back to the surface or doing so we use up extra Oxygen.

Too much lead can also cause us to be non streamlined and give us back pain.

So we want to be correctly weighted at all times.  How do we do this?  A weight check.

In water too deep to stand you can float at eye level holding a normal breath and not finning in your gear (for scuba your bcd and drysuit must be empty of air).  Then be able to breathe out and descend.  

If you are scuba diving with an aluminium tank.  You will need to add about 2kg of lead to account for the buoyancy of the tank towards the end of the dive.

To achieve this we need to be correctly weighted, so we have a selection of weight options.

Lead designed to thread onto webbing and rubber belts.

Lead best suited for weight pockets and pouches.

All of our 1kg options will go onto webbing belts, but if the belt gets dropped, the lead being malleable may bend and be permanently attached to the belt in that position.

0.5kg Vest or Trim

1kg Dumpy

1kg Bullet

1kg for belts

1.5 Comfy

1.5kg for Belts

2kg for BCD weight pockets

2.5kg curved for belts - To sit on the hips