How long to master buoyancy?

[vinegarbiscuit]

Proper weighting is a huge step toward ensuring success. A private session or two with an instructor or a mentor is also great for tweaking the placement of your weights and adjusting your equipment, so you can ensure your position in the water is as balanced and streamlined as possible. Just keep diving, and you'll notice improvement with every dive.

If it makes you feel any better, even experienced divers who pride themselves on their buoyancy and trim can receive a rude shock when they make changes to their set-up. Some changes are relatively minor - say, a thicker wetsuit - whereas others can be a lot more drastic, like diving with a bigger/smaller tank (or twin tanks!) or learning how to fly a rebreather. I felt like one of the world's biggest berks when I first donned doubles: I exited the water feeling very small indeed (and positively certain that I could hear the fish snickering to each other as they dissected my less-than-stellar performance). My fiance - who's a pretty accomplished techie - had to re-learn buoyancy control all over again when he acquired his rebreather. As you can see, everyone's constantly learning. Hang in there.

 

[danvolker]

My suggestion is to use two steps....all your gear minus tank/bc/reg, you are snorkeling in the pool. Play with your weight , losing or adding until you can swim down a foot off the bottom and be almost dead neutral using a half breath (normal breath in). While you are doing this, swim very slowly, barely moving, and try your best to stay perfectly horizontal. If you are head heavy or feet heavy, you will need to think of your body like a see saw, and the weight belt is really like a seat on one side, your neck and upper back could be seen as the other side seat. Some people will need to distribute weight off of the" weight belt seat".
When you can swim flat easily, try a kick and a big glide.....this is how a verdicts moves around, and it is also exactly the way a diver in a slick gear configuration like a backplate and wing will be able to kick and glide....this being impossible if you don't have the perfect neutral buoyancy.

When you perfect this, 2nd step is getting in the water with your tank bc and reg .... and getting it dead neutral. You may need to redistribute weight, but now that you have experienced perfect buoyancy and flat horizontal trim snorkeling, you know what this feels like--- and should be able to replicate this with your scuba set up.

 

[danvolker]

Then, when near neutral with scuba gear on near pool bottom, experiment with how large your breathe is, and the effect on buoyancy. You want almost no air in your bc...just enough to compensate for when you exhale.

When you take a full breathe to go positive on buoyancy and make yourself lift up, be aware in a shallow pool you can't hold a full breath for more than a foot of climb without overtopping your lungs from expanding air....but at 45 feet down, you could take a full breathe and let it rise you up several feet safely before a significant expansion of air in the lungs occurs.
For safety sake, don't take full breathe to mean jamming your lungs absolutely full...

 

[boulderjohn]

I know I'm probably overweighted. I was wearing 16 pounds in freshwater (I weigh about 160 and was wearing a 3mm shorty) and if I let all the air out of my BC I sank like a stone. However, with less weight I couldn't stay on the bottom. I was awful at doing the fin pivot and trying to hover.

The more you are overweighted, the harder it is to have proper buoyancy. With that much weight, it would be very, very hard for a new diver to do a fin pivot or hover. Every extra pound of lead requires air in the BCD to balance it out. The more air you have in your BCD, the less ability you have to control it with your breathing. I have never put 16 pounds on any student of any size in a pool in a shorty--not even close.

I weigh 210 pounds. With a 3 mm shorty in the pool and a standard BCD, I don't need any weight whatsoever. I normally wear about 6 pounds when working with students though. With that much weight and the necessary air in the BCD, I can control by depth from the top of the pool (12 feet deep) to the bottom by the amount of air I put in my lungs. In contrast, when I practice skills in the same pool with steel doubles and a steel backplate, I am by necessity greatly overweighted by quite a bit, and I can only overcome all that extra air in the wing (BCD) through my breathing for a few feet.

By the way, there is no reason for you to stay on the bottom. Why do you want to? When my students are doing all their final skills in the pool, I don't want them touching the bottom at all.

As for when one has 100% control of their buoyancy, I will let you know if I every feel that way.

 

[LenC]

One of the things many instructors do (and I think this is a shame) is intentionally overweight their students. This is purely for the benefit of the instructor so they have you glued to the bottom and don't have to chase errant students. So yes, you were overweight.

In my experience, the average diver has bouyancy fairly well down within 20-25 dives - assuming those dives aren't years apart. As others have said, the first thing you need to do is get your weight right - and that means making your first dive on any trip a weight check. Your needs will change with your body, water conditions, equipment, suit, etc. A good rule of thumb, if you let all the air out of your BC and immediately drop, you are overweighted. With your BC empty and your lungs completely full, you should float at the surface with the top of your head just out of the water.

 

[Teamcasa]

Mastery is the goal but the real pleasure comes in the small victories along the way.

Keep diving, experimenting, practicing and you too will have that ahh haa moment when it all starts to make sense.

 

[pjhansman]

As a new diver myself, I'm painfully familiar with the weight issues.

One thing that I really struggled with was not the amount of weight so much as the distribution. I find that moving a higher percentage of weight to my upper body (trim pockets on my BCD) makes me much more comfortable with buoyancy. Fighting both trim and buoyancy at the same time is what makes things even more difficult.

Just my $0.02 worth....

 

[cocoajoe]

Like it's been said, some get it faster than others. I was getting frustrated about dive 12. Really concerned by about 19. I hired a DM to do some pool work and a 3 tank dive and voila! No more crashing into the reef. No more scary uncontrolled ascents.

Not saying I mastered it but let's say I got over the hump. I think a lot of it is anxiety. You may not realize it but it's there sometimes. Confidence has to replace anxiety....jusy my opinion.

 

[MauiScubaSteve]

Look at the bold-ed portions of the OP; buoyancy control is first about breathing control. If one always takes a "very deep breath" one will never have buoyancy control. The proper breathing pattern for optimal buoyancy control is to breath in when you need to breath in and breath out when you need to breath out; breathing control is what fin pivots and hovering are about.

Our lungs only process a max of 6% of the oxygen in a normal breath; as long as fresh air makes contact with the lung membrane the blood leaves the lung area fully oxygenated. Taking a larger breath does not significantly increase the blood oxygenation. The most important part of the typical recreational diver's breath cycle is the exhalation; getting the carbon dioxide out.

My questions to the OP, before www crystal ball prognostications, are;

What is your height and fitness level?
What are the reasons your normal above water breathing is taking very deep slow breaths and then long slow exhales?

 

[oreocookie]

I think comfort has a lot to do with it. I remember during OW, my left hand was never too far from the inflator because if I was going to move, I was probably going to rocket up or plummet down, or at least it felt that way. I knew I was getting somewhere when I was swimming along and wanted to go over something and thought to inhale a bit more instead of reaching for the inflator. It's still definitely a work in progress and I'm like a yoyo on night dives (but those have been shallow, which didn't help).

I guess when somebody begins to have "good" buoyancy probably depends on comfort, how they were trained, how often they dive and probably a bunch of other things. Good luck, you'll get it in time.