A beginner's take on buoyancy / trim

[Progen]

1. Proper buoyancy and trim is VERY important. If you get them wrong, you'll never be able to progress far as a diver.

2. It's something which will often be intentionally started off wrong with many instructors (especially those on the resort style fast and durious 2 - 3 day courses) overweighting students so that they can move on to practicing skills underwater instead of having to pull floaty students down every now and then which is why all the more the student needs to experiment with different weighting and trim on their own.

3. There is a whole new world down there which you cannot enjoy if you're always swimming like a seahorse with your legs finning downwards (I know seahorses don't but that almost upright position just makes me think of seahorses ) to compensate for your incorrect trim / weighting.

4. Correct weighting is not a pin point figure. Once you've gotten your breath control sorted out, being off by 1 or perhaps even 2kg can still be corrected with your breathing alone ALTHOUGH it's preferable to get it right because you don't want to go down with unnecessary weight. I brought this up because I used to put trim weights everywhere around my BCD thinking that the reason I wasn't horizontal was because of weight distribution when it was just me being all fidgety and sculling away unnecessarily. In the end, I went from a 4kg to a 2kg and then to none. The more the weights came off, the better my diving experience became.

5. Again, PRACTICE and EXPERIMENT. It's not something unattainable and it's not something for 'professional' or 'experienced' divers. It's something which EVERY diver should know and practice. When you're in control, you become a friend of our friends underwater instead of a threat to them by breaking off stuff with your fins or hands.

 

[spectrum]

I think it's also one of theose things where a role model, in person or even in video form goes alog way. If you don't have a vision of what you are after it's a tough goal to reach for.

Part of what I think you experienced Progen is that once you are in the ballpark AND have a little experience you can tolerate a signficant discrepancy. In most cases we would frown on carrying say 4 pounds that are above and beyond anything you need. However I have carried that sort of "extra" weight in case someone doing a test may need it and my world did not got to heck.

I dive MANY combinations of suit and gear and to me a poor trim configuration is much more disruptive than being overweight. Being underweight is just plain ugly and your best guess when you must estimate should always hedge against being underweighted.

Pete

 

[Progen]

I think it's also one of theose things where a role model, in person or even in video form goes alog way. If you don't have a vision of what you are after it's a tough goal to reach for.

...

Good thing I did a lot of hunting around on the Internet before and after getting certified. I was seahorsing around during my first few sea dives thinking that was normal but luckily I learnt fast enough that that wasn't. My instructor told me I had to watch my buoyancy and my position in the water column but didn't elaborate on how to do it and neither were my weights checked. :depressed:

 

[DanLW]

My 5th and 6th dives in low viz water underlined for me the importance of bouyancy control. I spent way too much effort trying to be controlled underwater, and would have enjoyed the dives much more if I didn't have to mess around with bouyancy as much.

Your point about the 2-3 day courses is an excellent point. Probably a lot of instructors don't take the time to get each and every student to their ideal perfect bouyancy. That's why I'm glad that PADI will start training student in a horizontal position next year.

I've determined that one of the things I'm going to do is get my bouyancy figured out as precisely as I can. To that end I'm getting all my own gear to eliminate rental gear as a variable. The local dive shop said I could rent air and pay the pool fee, and putz around in the pool when they do their pool dives for OW classes. One of the first things I'm going to do is spend some quality time with a variety of weights and figure out exactly what I need. My plan is to find my neutral point with a full tank/empty wing, and then add 6lbs to account for the 6lbs of air which I won't have towards the end of the dive. Then, once I get down to 50bar/500psi, I'll check my bouyancy at the end to see how close I am and adjust from there.