Trying to compensate for feet down trim when wearing no exposure protection and little weight

[CT-Rich]

what are you willing to bet? I can record it to win..heck, lets do 20 mins, and record with multiple cameras so you know no cheating

Here is a tech diver demonstrating good trim. Note his feet never stop moving. He is actively maintaining his trim. He looks good doing it, but he never stops moving.

With practice trim gets easier, but the ideal of perfection implies something that doesn’t exist. The reason you can’t make a dead bird into a glider is because the bird must actively control its flight despite 60 million years of evolution.

 

[cerich]

Here is a tech diver demonstrating good trim. Note his feet never stop moving. He is actively maintaining his trim. He looks good doing it, but he never stops moving.

With practice trim gets easier, but the ideal of perfection implies something that doesn’t exist. The reason you can’t make a dead bird into a glider is because the bird must actively control its flight despite 60 million years of evolution.

You said "The idea that a diver can sit for fifteen minutes perfectly trim midwater and can maintain that is absolute BS", I offered a bet.

That diver is pretty good, I've seen better. Anyhow, take the bet or not, your call.

 

[ReefHound]

For some reason I've always been rather inflexibly geared towards the least possible amount of weight being better.

I get it, but I've enjoyed diving much more since I quit trying to be the perfect diver. I've also come to realize that no one else is watching me and admiring my trim and buoyancy. If it really takes a minute for the feet to sink, you are extremely close to perfect balance as is.

That said, get a bigger camera to hold in front of you.

 

[MichaelMc]

@Ayisha, I was replying to this statement, reinforced just above, that a diver can not be perfectly still and horizontal.

The idea that a diver can sit for fifteen minutes perfectly trim midwater and can maintain that is absolute BS

In the general case, I agree completely that one uses subtle movements to maintain orientation, as CT-Rich goes on to describe, and as I assume is your point as well.

you remain trim in the water through subtle movements of fins, arms and body. Those that do it well will make it look effortless.

But you can be perfectly still as I described. And we are discussing this in the advanced forum.

If you dial back the belly-ward bias to be just a little belly vs back heavy, like I describe above to be diveable, then maintaining stable horizontal trim will be almost as easy as with a big belly-ward distribution. You just have to keep arms and legs still so as not to mess it up! And a hair belly ward trim still lets you maintain a vertical, or inverted orientation, with a bit of corrective finning or leg placement. Just like the corrective motions you and CT-Rich are describing for the more common face down horizontal orientation. But now relegated to use for the less common orientations.

That none of those you know with easy trim have no weight forward may be equipment dependent. Do they have heavy steel tanks or steel plates, possibly leaving them with no lead to move as they desire?

 

[CT-Rich]

Going back to the OP, a diver in tropical shorty or no thermal protection at all will have his legs sink unless he actively maintains trim. Even with knees bent almost all of his air will be head and chest. Being completely still his legs will pivot towards the bottom and head up. This can be minimized, but I seriously doubt it can be eliminated by moving gear around on your torso.

Perfection is the enemy of good. In the effort to obtain perfect trim, there is this myth that perfect trim can be obtained my changing you gear around. Perfect trim is obtained by diving. The more you dive the less the gear matters. You will assemble your rig in a configuration you are comfortable with, you won’t have to think about orientation, spacial relationship to the bottom and other divers. You won’t even think about the movements you need to turn or maintain position.

To be honest, the guy in the video is doing an excellent demonstration, but it doesn’t look like fun diving to me.

 

[DeepSeaExplorer]

I have seen other tech and cave divers that could hover perfectly motionless in the water, though it’s a very small minority. Probably something about not being strung out on caffeine I bet.

I can hold a deco stop pretty well, but with my caffeine level, I’m going to be fidgety. Heck, I can’t even sit motionless in my chair at the office.

Anyway... I don’t like to sit still even on land, even more so in the water. As soon as the water hits me in the face, it’s game on and I want to be swimming.

So yeah, you won’t see me motionless, but I can certainly hold my stops, most of the time anyway.

 

[kelemvor]

I'm in the middle of a week long vacation in Little Cayman along with several ScubaBoard members and it's been some real nice diving so far. Tomorrow we're doing the day trip to Cayman Brac to do the Tibbets wreck, but I'm already off topic and at risk for derailing my own thread before I even get to the point.

I'm diving with no exposure protection in 84-86 degree water and I'm always looking to fine tune my trim. I find that if I remain perfectly motionless, after about a minute my body swings so I'm in a feet down position. I clearly need more weight higher up.

But I'm only using 6 lbs of weight and there's no 1 lb weights available. I've moved the tank up as far as it can go without banging my head so as far as I know, I'm out of options unless I want to swap the 3 lb weights with 2 lb weights and add 2 lb weights to the rear shoulder weight pockets, but then I'm overweighted by 2 lbs simply to compensate for a mild trim issue- doesn't seem worth it. I guess I could also move all the weight up to the shoulder pockets but I expect I'd then be head low and all my weight would now be non-ditchable.

Any other suggestions that I have not considered?

I had the same problem. Switched to fins that were positively buoyant and bob's your uncle. I'm not a fan of extra shoulder or ankle weights, but I guess you could use shoulder weights if you wanted.

I went with Deep6 fins. The deep6 have an oddly shaped foot pocket and it took me a long time to get them comfortable - but the concept of positively buoyant fins can solve your problem. I think that other DIR agency in California makes some fins similar to Jets that are positive as well. For some reason the name escapes me just now.

Mares X-Stream also work fine for this purpose, but they don't provide very much power and they're kind of fragile. There's probably lots of fins out there that are positive.

 

[MichaelMc]

Going back to the OP, a diver in tropical shorty or no thermal protection at all will have his legs sink unless he actively maintains trim. Even with knees bent almost all of his air will be head and chest. Being completely still his legs will pivot towards the bottom and head up. This can be minimized, but I seriously doubt it can be eliminated by moving gear around on your torso

The OP has 6 lb of lead. And described that if they put all at the shoulders they likely would be head heavy. So clearly they felt that in their case their legs would no longer sink down. So somewhere between the two they would be level. That they do not have small weighs on hand to achieve that is a separate issue.

Perfection is the enemy of good. In the effort to obtain perfect trim, there is this myth that perfect trim can be obtained my changing you gear around. Perfect trim is obtained by diving. The more you dive the less the gear matters. You will assemble your rig in a configuration you are comfortable with, you won’t have to think about orientation, spacial relationship to the bottom and other divers. You won’t even think about the movements you need to turn or maintain position.

There are lots of videos on the net of those who just go out and dive. With crappy results. Perfection is an enemy of the good. But so is making no effort to do better.

 

[caruso]

The 2+2+2+2 has got me pretty close. I also pushed the tank as far down as it can go, and I'm at the point where it takes a good 45 seconds for my feet to shift down, and even then I'm still a bit more than halfway between vertical and horizontal (closer to horizontal).

Works for me.

P.S. It's not about being the perfect diver. A lot of my diving is simply hovering motionless and simply watching stuff go by, and I find that lots of stuff comes to me, the less I move and the less I breathe and exhale noisy bubbles. It's about being relaxed and not making unnecessary movements and expending more energy and using more gas. Nothing more.

 

[Ayisha]

...To be honest, the guy in the video is doing an excellent demonstration, but it doesn’t look like fun diving to me.

I find that the diver in the video is not even trying to maintain static trim. Even when he should be motionless, like when doing demonstrations, he is unable to maintain static trim.

There are many DIR agency videos of static trim while task loaded, like on GUE TV, but this video of Trace Malinowski, a GUE Tech 2 diver, is very good: