Weighting:

If you improve your buoyancy control, everything else will follow. Buoyancy control gets better the more you dive, practice makes perfect. Yes you can take a buoyancy workshop and it will help but at the end of the day you just need to dive as often as possible.

The main reason for poor buoyancy is over weighting. It is common for instructors to over weight students on their dive courses, it’s safer to have the students anchored to the seabed rather than floating off all over the place. Being over weighted means that in order to become neutrally buoyant you must add a lot of air into your BCD to compensate for the weight. Adding that air at depth is a waste and the more air that you have in your BCD underwater, the more it expands and contracts due to pressure changes as you change depth. A small decrease in depth results in a large change in BCD air volume which starts an unwanted ascent. You then have to vent your BCD to descend. As you descend and the air volume reduces again you need to add air to your BCD again to stop from descending too far. It becomes a vicious circle of up and down and often results in divers keeping themselves over weighted and constantly finning to maintain buoyancy. This effort obviously uses a lot of energy and therefore air.

By contrast, correctly weighted divers rarely need to use their BCD’s to adjust depth underwater, they simple use their lung volume.  A breath in raises them up, a breath out sends them back down again. Big breaths move you further in the water column than little breaths. If you want to stay in one place you take smaller breaths, ignore for a moment what your instructor taught you about long slow deep breaths. Once you can maintain your buoyancy with just your breath control you will not need to fin as much. You will use less energy and less air. Dives will become more relaxed and you will find that you can swim slower over the reef or simply hover and drift in the current rather than racing along too fast to see anything. The coral should also benefit as you will no longer be bouncing off it.

So you need to reduce your weight. All you need is just what it takes to get you under water at the start of the dive and enough so that you can maintain safety stop depth at the end of the dive when your tank is lighter.

On a normal breath of you should be able to float on the surface at eye level with no air in your BCD. Then to descend all you have to do is breathe out and you’ll be under. If you need a full BCD of air to float at the surface before the dive you are over weighted.

Many divers struggle to descend at the beginning of the dive so they over weight themselves. Only to find that once underwater they are far too heavy.

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