Buoyancy Control is the single most important skill that you as a new Instructor or Dive professional should instill proficiency beyond the norm to make sure you have trained the perfect diver correctly! As an experienced Instructor one of the best tips I can give Dive professionals in training in making their students great divers is amplifying the importance of good buoyancy control.
Don’t be overweighted.
There are a few guides available that will allow you to estimate how much weight you require for diving with differing levels of thermal protection. I’d say that these are merely a guide, in practice the only way of really making sure that your weighting is correct is to do a buoyancy check. I know for a fact that if I dived with what weight some guides estimated for me, I would be completely overweighted.
Descend don’t drop.
The first few metres of a descent may be tricky if you are correctly weighted for diving and many divers make the mistake of over weighting themselves so that they can easily get down. Remember to descend you need to stay completely still, relax and breathe out. Think about breathing out for at least 4 times the amount of time you take to sip a breath in and don’t take a big breath in until you are a few metres down. Until your wetsuit compresses you will be more buoyant in those first few metres so keep breathing out. Some divers may find holding onto a descent line and easing themselves down the first few metres is preferable. However, this should not be necessary with practice.
Achieving Neutral Buoyancy.
Once you are down, changes to your buoyancy via your BCD should be minimal if you are correctly weighted. Diving should be easy, you should not need to constantly be adjusting the amount of air in your jacket, if you do need to do this, you are overweighted. A good test for weighting on a dive is to hover motionlessly for a moment. You can practice this whilst checking out the marine life on a wall quite easily. If you need to constantly kick to stay at the same level, again, this is a sign that you are overweighted.
Streamline
If you see another diver that is at an angle in the water, with their feet lower than their head, this is another sign that diver is overweighted. A diver with good buoyancy and correct weighting will be horizontal in the water.
You now have the knowledge to get weighted properly. So next time your instructor or dive guide hands you some weight, don’t assume that they know better than you, you now have the power to check for yourself and get properly weighted. How much weight do you really need? Are you the next Biggest Loser!
Don’t forget on your Advanced Course to do the Peak Performance Buoyancy Dive to really get in trim and stealth like mode!
