Weight appropriate for wetsuit?

[pfriedel]

I have yet to do a better (more controlled) test with the gear, but I had my first chance to try out my new hooded 7mm shorty over my full 7mm in Nagi yesterday.  The only hitch was that to get under I needed 28 lbs.  That seems like a heck of a lot, but with 28 I could only get under by kicking down to 15' where the neoprene compressed enough to get me neutral with no air in my BCD.  Down to 30' and I needed to give a fairly strong blast of air in my BCD to keep off the bottom.  I'm pretty good about grabbing my fin tips to prevent sculling and exhaling completely to sink those first few feet normally.

  Now, with that much weight, I'm definitely looking to buy a weight belt to spread out the load a bit to prevent a nautilus-style ascent if I need to dump a weight pocket.

  I'm a bigger guy (6', 230-240), and I had between 7 and 14 mm of neoprene all over.  Should I not worry about it so much?  After coming back from Cozumel and diving with some of the fish down there (the "I only need 5 lbs to balance out the tank's buoyancy and can stay down the full no-deco time at 40' and still come up with 1800psi" type), I'm not sure if I'm seriously overweighting or not.

  Otherwise, the neoprene kept me so toasty at 52F (estimated - my Vyper doesn't update temperature more than once every few minutes) that I suspect I could dive even colder without much discomfort.  And the fit was so snug that I don't recall my trunks being very wet after surfacing, so I'm pretty happy with the gear until I go dry in a few years.