Is There Anything Weight
Belts are Good For?
Things are seldom entirely good or entirely bad. So it is with weight belts. They are good for something. For example:
- Just about every diver knows how to use them (most divers just don’t know how to use them correctly).
- They are the perfect ballast system when you are breath-hold diving.
- They make a good fall-back position should you lose one of the weight pockets from your weight-integrated BC during a trip.
While weight belts are a poor alternative to a well-designed integrated weight system, they may still be a better choice than a poorly-designed weight-integrated BC. For example:
I recently saw a BC from one manufacturer where, in order to drop weights, you had reach down below your arm (where you could not see), locate a Fastex®-style slide-release buckle and unfasten it. Only then could you remove the weight pockets. (Imagine having to do that in cold water with gloved hands!)
This having been said, it’s difficult to imagine any significant advantage weight belts have over intelligently designed integrated weight systems. Now consider this bit of irony:
If weight-integrated BCs had come along first, and someone were to have introduced weight belts later, the dive community would most likely have rejected them as being “unsafe” — for all the reasons you’ve read about in this article.
For all intents and purposes, recreational divers have rejected weight belts. The typical diver buys only weight-integrated BCs, and has for the last several years.
The only holdouts seem to be dive stores and instructors who, for reasons known only to themselves, persist in teaching students to use a piece of equipment that is archaic, uncomfortable, inconvenient and, arguably, unsafe. And, even though you can justify making students aware of weight belts because “you never know when that’s all that will be available,” there is no excuse for not instructing students in the proper use of weight-integrated BCs as well.
For this reason, this issue’s Bronze Turkey Award goes not to the lowly weight belt, but rather to those dive stores and instructors who insist on beating this dead horse — while at the same time refusing to educate students in the safe and proper use of the very equipment they are most likely to buy or rent.
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