dsteding
Contributor
Hank49:Rick, would you agree that the biggest trick to mastering this skill is equipment selection, especially weight distribution, suited for one's body type?
For what it is worth, I think this is part of it-but I'm starting to think it is more about body awareness.
Here is what I mean:
When someone is a newer diver, having your gear dialed makes it easier to achieve good trim and to quiet down in the water. For instance, adjusting the harness on a BP so it isn't flopping around on your back can help a lot. Likewise, proper weight placement (and the right amount of weight) can allow you to stay horizontal and helps to minimize buoyancy issues.
But, as you get further along, I think a perfectly quiet hover is more about positioning of your own body. There are all sorts of things that you can do to shift your center of gravity and center of buoyancy without adjusting your rig: hand position, degree of knee bends, head position, back-arching, all this stuff helps achieve good, motionless hovering. The truly skilled divers I've observed seem to have an intuitive grasp of all these tools, so that if something needs a bit of tweaking, they can do it before dynamic instability sets in.
That, to me, means that being perfectly motionless (and I'm talking ABSOLUTELY still) means being very aware underwater regarding your body positioning. If that awareness is there, imho, gear selection becomes less of an issue.
My one experience with this is in diving different double tanks. It used to be that my trim would go to hell if I switched from one tank set to a different type. It would take a bunch of dives to get things back. Now, with a bit more of experience, I find it takes about half a dive to get things dialed back in. I'm not saying I'm perfectly motionless yet (errr, ask my dive buddy about my struggles at 20 feet with air in my boots last Saturday . . .) but I do think that I'm starting to develop an understanding of the tools at my disposal in terms of body positioning to achieve that goal.