Any helpful tips for bouyancy?

I hate to bring up an old topic, but I thought I'ld ask for some advice before I take my ow test.
-I found that I could do the hovering in the pool in a sitting position.
-Found out that rate of breathing affected it and tried to take equal breaths...not too small or to large. (always breathing, of course).

-this was done in a 10 foot pool, and I have heard that at 50 feet it is harder to maintain bouyancy.

--any advice from people that passed the ow test would be appreciated.

thanks

Michael

Actually, it is easier to regulate your bouyancy at 50' than it is at 10'. When I was certified (shortly after dinosaurs ruled the earth), I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier the skills were in the lake than in the pool.
My best advice is to relax. No, really. Relax. You can do it. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is to maintain the proper buoyancy.

Mibaro --
As Sue already mentioned... the deeper you go, the less complicated buoyancy control is. Think of it this way.. changing your depth from the surface to 33fsw doubles the pressure around you. But going from 66 fsw to 99fsw is only one quarter change... so mild changes in the airi n your lungs, etc. will have a smaller impact at depth than they will near the surface. If you can master it in 10' at the pool, the rest is easy.

The trick is to make very small changes and give them time to have an impact. People tend to add or dump too much air when adjusting their buoyancy and they tend to do it too quickly between changes. Give your power inflator just the tiniest tap to add air and wait a couple of seconds before you do it again. Don't dump your BC to let air out unless you're trying to halt an out of control ascent. Just trickle a little air out of the inflator or the tiniest tug on the dump valve.

Learn to slow down to make small adjustments. If you learn to get truly neutral, just changing the amount of air in your lungs is all it takes to rise or fall.

SueMermaid once bubbled...
Actually, it is easier to regulate your bouyancy at 50' than it is at 10'. When I was certified (shortly after dinosaurs ruled the earth), I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier the skills were in the lake than in the pool.
My best advice is to relax. No, really. Relax. You can do it. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is to maintain the proper buoyancy.

Click to expand...

I agree with all of this.

And, practice makes perfect. You'll get better as you dive more.

Sean

OK just a quick reality check then I'll give some great ( IMHO !!) advice on how to master it !!

Nobody is ever going to say to you - "hey, fancy going diving this weekend and we'll do some hovering for a laugh"

Nope - ain't going to happen - same applies to fin pivots

These aren't skills to "pass the test on" but an introduction to basic buoyancy control.

Yes there are certain criteria to be assessed upon but I encourage my students to put it in to context. Imagin that you are taking an underwater photo - in fact even pretend to hold a camera - you will need to be still in the water - HOVERING !

Also, hoving is a vital skill for saftey stops but ask your instructor about this.

In open water I get my students to hover whilst looking at underwater stuff. OK I need to ensure they don't drop or surface, but this is reality and is IMHO better than the rather false "hover for fun" thing.


So how to master this skill.

Most problems are caused by 2 issues which are connected.

Firstly - not enough air in BCD
Secondly breathing too deeply.

You need to inflate the bcd a little more than when you fin pivot or swim around. The action of swimming keeps you in trim - think of a submarine moving through the water.

If you don't have enough air in the BC you will compensate by taking really deep breaths. This works at first until you have to breath out - bang, you are on the bottom again.

So you inflate the BCD a little more and take another deep breath
whoops - you are on the surface.

So,

More air in BCD

sit on the bottom of the pool ( assuming this is C/w) and try pushing up with your hands - you should start to rise then fall very slowly.

Before you start to fall take a breath and see what effect it has - visualise your chest expanding like a BCD. If you still fall add a little more air to the BC and repeat process.

Take small breaths - experiment with buoyancy by breathing - go up, go down

One further point - sometimes the weight system can pull you backwards - this is OK but will make you take a deep breath and you will get in to the circle above.

So a quick cheat if this is an issue - move the weight to the front - just until you get the knack of it, then shift it back where it belongs. - DO NOT do this in open water. This is just a cheat for the pool to help you get started. By open water you should have this well and truly sussed.

Practice this skill at ever opportunity - after about 20 mins max you will have hovering covered - don't view it as a test to pass.

hope this helps

cheers

Why don't you try to hover while being horizontal in the water? You will more likely be horizontal in the water (I hope) rather than in a sitting position when you are diving in the future.

I agree you can use your breathing to aide in bouyancy control but don't see the need to go to shallower and less effcient breathing to do it.

Large or small breath, you will rise and fall as you breathe and if properly bouyant you will average out at the correct depth. If you are swimming and have any forward motion you really won't notice the rise and fall either.

The problem is not really compensating for inadequate bouyancy with a really deep breath and then overcorrecting but rather the problem is just over correcting with the power inflator.

Some of this just comes with experience in knowing how much air to add to the BC after a quick descent to variuos depths to get your bouyancy in the ball park and then developing a "feel" for fine tuning your bouancy with a neutral lung volume.

The other thing that helps is to make small corrections to your bouyancy before you need a large correction. Again it is an issue of feeling if you are starting to rise or fall. To work you need to actually be still in the water with no hand or leg waving. Most new divers simply cannot just lie there in the water, they are fanning their hands or finning their feet to stay stable or crank their bodies around.

Done properly, most additions or subtractions of air to the BC while just crusing along or establishing a hover will be very very small - just bleeding a little air into the BC or just barely nudging the dump valve. Dumping air is also best done during a pause in your breathing as then you can actually hear how much air you are dumping and will develop the ability to add pressure to the dump until it just dumps a single bubble before you release pressure. Most new divers pull way to hard on the dump valve because they are not tuned into feeling the more subtle effects of dumping air and this usually results in slamming into the bottom.

There is a natural point where your lungs are at rest, neither holding air in or having to force it out and this is close to where most people will be truly neutral, it's a good place to pause when fine tuning bouyancy and with prqactice you will be able to make the adjustment on the first shot in just a second or so. Until then you can take another breathe and adjust again on the next breath.

I do agree that learning to hover and to pivot on your fins is critical. Doing it properly (Thanks to DIR I will never be able to use the phrase "doing it right" without implying something I do not always want to imply) will aide in eliminating all the extraneous movement that interferes with feeling your bouyancy.

In some situations like moving just over a silty bottom (within 6 inches to a foot of the bottom) I will maintain a very slight positive bouyany and use the thrust of the fins (frog kicking of course to avoid kicking up silt) to keep me where I need to be. Then just stopping and inhaling will be enough to lift you higher off the bottom when you are done or if the need arises.

Similarly, if I want to pick an item out of the silt, I will approach much more head down and slightly positive, then I just need to ick up the item, stop fining and rise back away from the silt. Then when I am a few feet up I can dump a bit of air to regain neutral bouyancy.

Thanks for all your replies. As for why I was in a sitting position while doing this...I guess the pool was pretty crowded and when lying out flat I kept hitting people , or they would hit me.

When I was in Costa Rica a few (I guess several ) years ago, I was bouoyant in a flat position, marveling at the animal life. But it was so much easier there than in the pool. And thanks to the person in this thread that explained to me why.

One last question...I heard that establishing bouyancy is harder for women. Actually, my wife had a hard time doing the exercise in the pool. She would be at the bottom of the pool, with no air in bcd, and when she took a normal breath...she would be at the surface
I hope for her sake that won't happen on the OW test. Maybe more weights would help her also?

Thanks. I take my OW test in 10 days.

Michael

and then comes dry suit diving....

One of the biggest things that makes bouyancy a pain to master is improper weighting. If you have too much weight and then compensate for it by inflating you BC you create a big problem for yourself. This is real common in new divers. You have seen that as you inhale and exhale, you rise and sink. Consider that the air in your BC expands and contracts as you rise and fall in the water column. As it expands/contracts it quickly changes your bouyancy and always in a counterproductive direction. You rise a little with a lot of air in your BC and you just added a LOT of positive bouyancy due to the large volume of air in you BC expanding and as a result, you have to dump a lot of air to compensate.....or shoot to the surface, not a good thing. Conversely, if you decend some you have to add a lot of air to compensate for the air compressing in you BC. If you watch a lot of divers, you will see them constantly adding and dumping air and the main reason is they are overweighted. No doubt the there are times that you have to add or dump air, for example, the compression of wetsuits make it necessary but a BC pumped full makes bouyancy control much harder
Do yourself a big favor, get your weighting at least close to correct for the equipment you are using before even bothering to work on hovering.