When I had a few hundred dives completed, I thought I was a total master of buoyancy. My first technical diving class taught me I was a raw beginner.
The reason was that I was just learning by diving, and the diving I was doing was the typical recreational diving in which true mastery of buoyancy is unnecessary. Once I was forced into a different environment with a different set of standards, I realized how much I had to learn.
Once I had gone down that path, I saw how much a true beginner can improve when taken out of the typical basic recreational diver domain and shown what true buoyancy really means. A good instructor is critical to that development. In that learning environment, a student can pick it up much more quickly than through simply diving; in fact, it is quote possible that it can never be learned that way.
A couple of years ago I was diving with a very experienced group of recreational divers in Ni'ihau, Hawai'i. We went into a room in a coral formation. There was an unusual specimen in a corner of the room. I swam over to it, my chest in inch or two from the ground, my tank nearly touching the ceiling, and my head about 6 inches from the wall. I topped there and hovered there motionless, watching the specimen (a rare species of lobster) for a while. I then backed up until I had a little more room, turned around in place, and swam off, never touching anything in that environment.
When we returned to the boat, that maneuver became an object of discussion. For me, it was nothing--I couldn't have passed Intro to Tech without being able to do that. For the others it was something they had never seen. I repeat that story with some trepidation. Some people will see it as bragging, but anyone who has really learned advanced buoyancy skills will know how really basic and unimpressive that moment really was and wonder why I bothered to mention it.
If you take the advanced buoyancy class I teach, you will learn those skills and more. You will need to practice them, because they can't be learned in a day. On the other hand, you can take a class that calls itself advance buoyancy but teaches little more than you learned in your open water class.
Find out what the class is teaching before you decide how worthwhile it is.
The reason was that I was just learning by diving, and the diving I was doing was the typical recreational diving in which true mastery of buoyancy is unnecessary. Once I was forced into a different environment with a different set of standards, I realized how much I had to learn.
Once I had gone down that path, I saw how much a true beginner can improve when taken out of the typical basic recreational diver domain and shown what true buoyancy really means. A good instructor is critical to that development. In that learning environment, a student can pick it up much more quickly than through simply diving; in fact, it is quote possible that it can never be learned that way.
A couple of years ago I was diving with a very experienced group of recreational divers in Ni'ihau, Hawai'i. We went into a room in a coral formation. There was an unusual specimen in a corner of the room. I swam over to it, my chest in inch or two from the ground, my tank nearly touching the ceiling, and my head about 6 inches from the wall. I topped there and hovered there motionless, watching the specimen (a rare species of lobster) for a while. I then backed up until I had a little more room, turned around in place, and swam off, never touching anything in that environment.
When we returned to the boat, that maneuver became an object of discussion. For me, it was nothing--I couldn't have passed Intro to Tech without being able to do that. For the others it was something they had never seen. I repeat that story with some trepidation. Some people will see it as bragging, but anyone who has really learned advanced buoyancy skills will know how really basic and unimpressive that moment really was and wonder why I bothered to mention it.
If you take the advanced buoyancy class I teach, you will learn those skills and more. You will need to practice them, because they can't be learned in a day. On the other hand, you can take a class that calls itself advance buoyancy but teaches little more than you learned in your open water class.
Find out what the class is teaching before you decide how worthwhile it is.
