First Certified Dive

[Saboteur]

Congrats on your first OW dive. The eye roller is a wanker. There is a really good buoyancy and weight spreadsheet calculator created by Scubaboard member rsingler. It's interesting to play around with for different scenarios. That should put you in the ballpark for your next dive and you can fine tune with a weight check.

 

[mac66]

hope you can take a tidbit of the book i just wrote lol

One of the reasons I posted my first time is because I knew I would get some great suggestions from everybody.

 

[Barnaby'sDad]

One thing to check if you find yourself a bit floaty is your bottom air dump. Invert (face down) and pull the cord.

I’ve had more than a couple times that I thought my wing was empty and doing the maneuver above resulted in a bit more air releasing from the wing.

 

[Streydog]

I have taken a Go Pro with me on almost all of my dives. When I started out I used a lot of air as well. When I listen to my breathing while watching older videos I was taking at least twice the breaths per minute than I do now. I didn't do anything to change except kept diving.

 

[purbeast]

Congrats on your first non-training dives! I am hoping to do mine next month down in the Keys.

I went to Grand Cayman in March to do my OW and AOW dives. The AOW dives were a lot more fun and more like 'real' dives than the OW ones big time.

I think doing those dives immediately after my OW with instructors was a VERY good idea for me.

After my 3rd AOW dive one of the instructors (we had 2 instructors for the group of about 10) noticed that I had too much air in my BCD and thought dropping weight would be useful for me. So I went from 12lbs down to 8lbs.

On my next dive I felt better but I ended up running out of air quite earlier than others. This was the navigation dive which involved a lot of waiting around at 50ft while the other groups did stuff, but while I did my navigation stuff I felt quite flustered and think that made me use up more air than I really needed.

But even after that dive, he thought I could drop a little bit more weight and I went to 6lbs for our 5th AOW dive.

And thankfully, the 5th dive was supposed to be feeding the stingrays at stingray city but it was too rough to get there, so we did our fish ID one at a reef about 40ft down. He told me to concentrate on my breathing as well as going in with 6lbs of weight. He said to me that he wanted me to come back with 800psi and he'd be happy. So I really conentrated on my breathing and slowed down quite a bit.

While on the dive, I also had a zen like moment where the whole controlling your bouyancy with your lungs "clicked" for me and it was surreal. I got to the point where I was neutral and about 5 feet from the ground and there was a ledge on the reef that I wanted to look under, so I just took a little more of an exhale than usual and I dropped like 1-2 feet. It was just unreal how it all "clicked" at that moment. And then when I wanted to move up I just took a deeper breath and moved up a foot or two.

Then when I got back to the boat, I had 1200psi left and the instructor was super happy with that as well. So I think the decreasing of the weight and myself controlling my breathing a bit better helped with that I also wasn't using as much air in my BCD at all and barely used any. In hindsight I was glad the stingray city trip was cancelled because that was our last dive and I got that experience.

I did bring my camera with me on my AOW dives and never felt like it got in the way. But I wasn't fiddling with it too much. It was cool to have it on the reef dives though and I video'd some swim throughs we did and in the videos you can see how a lot of us were finally getting it and horizontal right off the ground not kicking up any sand.

For the record I'm 5'11 and like 200lbs. But I don't have much body fat myself and I'm very naturally negatively bouyant. Like the treading for 10 minutes was nearly impossible for me because I just sink due to having a lot of muscle and not much fat. I also wear a 3mm full wetsuit too. And I must say I kept record of the weight in my log book so that for sure next dive I will start with 6lbs of weight and won't forget lol!

 

[Kimela]

@mac66 - If you think the camera is too much 'task loading' then don't use it. However, I found it helpful to carry a camera from day one because it kept me from hand sculling. So if you don't take a camera maybe you could take a flashlight or commit to holding your hands together to prevent the dreaded sculling. Just tell yourself "fish have no hands and they do fine"! It's all about that fancy foot/fin work.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Hold your own hands to keep from sculling. Keep them tight to your body (though some divers like to hold their hands out front of themselves as you can see in some, if not all of the technical diver videos).

As Kimela said, it's the fancy footwork

 

[Seaweed Doc]

Lots of good advice here.

One question I don't think was answered (but might have been; apologies if it has) was regarding breathing deeply or shallowly. Remember there's dead air space in your bronchi, trachea, mouth, and reg 2nd stage. With shallow breaths you're just re-breathing that dead air. Generally better to take deep, relaxed breaths.

 

[arcticat99]

congrats .another thing you can check on being from the cold territories are splash sessions at a local pool that your local dive operator holds .i have 25 open water dives but probably the same amount of pool dives .great place to hone your skills and learn the proper weighting of your stuff you just have to add roughly 4 pounds going from fresh water to salt i do about 4 pool dives for buoyancy practice and a great place to play with a camera
before going on a trip to the caribbean(i too do excursions from cruise ships )i like them you get to dive a bunch of different islands

 

[JasmineNeedsGills]

Eye rolling is stupid. There is not a single diver in the world who didn't have to take their first dive. We should be welcoming people into the sport and sharing that sense of exploration and looking forward to something new.