Buoyancy control is the most difficult skill a new diver has to learn. It is especially difficult in shallow water since the percentage change in volume (and thus buoyancy) with respect to a change in depth is much greater there than it is when your deeper. So if you can do it in the pool you can do it anywhere.
What you need to do in the pool is forget about your BC and just work with your lungs. You should be weighted so that as you inhale you will start up and when you exhale you sink. In the comfortable middle of that cycle you should be neutrally buoyant and able to hover. Getting properly weighted can take some time, especially if you have small lungs and remember that when you move to the ocean you will have to add a little weight.
Let’s take a few minutes and discuss what you’re being taught and some of the recommendations that you are receiving from others here on the board.
Buoyancy control is difficult for students to learn and thus it is difficult for instructors to teach. It takes time and care; often more time than is available in a short class and more care than many instructors are willing to give. PADI’s solution to this has been to require instructors to teach a completely useless and counterproductive “skill”
the fin pivot. The only good thing about a fin pivot is that it is easier to teach than real buoyancy control. The PADI program has you learn this “skill” that you will never use and then learn real buoyancy control in a later class, the so called “Peak Performance Buoyancy” class. I fell that the fin pivot just develops bad habits in divers and puts them in a frame of kinesthetic sense that they drop back into whenever they are stressed or confused. I seen many new divers, in mid water, try and do a new skill or get stressed by something and revert to a knees down, head up attitude, loose all sense of buoyancy control and start to sink. If what we call the Law of Primacy in the Ed biz, what you learn first is often what you learn best. It’s too late for you to do anything about this. I’d recommend that whatever time you can get with your instructor you should spend in the water column with a completely empty BC.
superstar:
Only add air to your bc when you exhale. If you add air when you inhale it's like getting a double blast. It takes a few dives to get it down.
I’d suggest that whilst is the pool there is never any reason (unless you are in a deep pool and wearing a wetsuit) to touch your BC at all. If you must play with it, learn to use the oral inflator because as you exhale into the BC you do not change your buoyancy (air just shifts from your lungs to the BC). You change your buoyancy as you take you next inhalation and that will help you learn how your lungs affect your buoyancy. This approach has the additional advantage of providing remove, replace and purge practice with your regulator.
Dive Right In Scuba:
Wear a bit more weight and compensate with your BC....This will help as you get acclimated to being underwater and can control your breathing better while you get more experience.....Sounds like you just werent weighted properly.
Mike is right, it sounds like you were not weighted properly. But, as I mentioned before, I’d not add so much weight that you need to use your BC, make your instructor take the time to help you get your weighting right.
Superform:
my advise would be over weight yourself then pull 1 weight off at a time over successive dives.. also always do your boyancy checks at the end of a dive when your tank is empty! else you will get half way through your dive and start to gain boyancy through your tank. )
I disagree with overweighting on both operational and pedagogical grounds, but Superform makes a good point. As you get more comfortable with your diving, your breathing midpoint will move lower in your cycle and you will need less weight. For most divers this is just a few lbs., but I have seen rare cases where this shift has been as much as eight lbs. Also, as you dive you will use up the air in your tank and that will make you more buoyant. That will likely account for about 4 lbs. Ideal weighting would be perfect neutral buoyancy at 15 feet with 500 PSI in your tank (your instructor may give you a different depth and pressure, and that’s fine).
Verybaddiver and TS&M are giving you very good advice. They’ve recently solved the problems that you’re facing in one of the most effective ways possible a course called Fundamentals offered through an agency know as GUE. While this is a level of commitment that you may not want to make, their concussions are, nonetheless, absolutely correct.
Superform:
in a practical sense most new ow divers dont sit at the back of the dive deck after a dive trying to weight themselves
i was trying to say make sure on your training dives you have enough wieght to comfortably kneel on the bottom, if you dont know how many wieghts to wear your instructor or DM can help. then after every open water training dive try to do a boyancy check with your current wieghts and see what happens.. if your overwieghted drop 1 wieght and try again on the next training dive.
its a bit rough to say to a new diver... 'just wieght yourself properly' without giving them a guide on how to do it. it is a very tough skill to master and it will change with every wetsuit or tank or piece of kit you wear
gl with it!
If your instructor has not helped you to know how to “just weight yourself properly” you must tell your referral instructor that you need to determine proper weighting and hopefully your referral instructor will do better.
Pete has a good idea. There are many of us who feel that what you’re lacking should be a normal part of every course, but unfortunately it is not, and all our feelings do not help you with your immediate problem. See if you can do a “Peak Performance Buoyancy” (or at least a pool version of it), that could help a lot.
fisherdvm:
A tip to keeping you down on the bottom on a real dive as you start to float to the surface at the end of the dive is to find a rock big enough to keep you down. Hang on to it with one hand, or stuff a couple in your BC. This will let you stay down and not bubble to the surface where hazards can await you.
Many DM carries extra weight, you can gently tap them and request a few pounds for your BC pocket.
This is, I fear, completely inappropriate (at least for the ocean) you can't count on rocks or DMs and you should not be disturbing the bottom anyway. Just request that your instructor teach you the things that you clearly know you will need to dive comfortably.
Best of luck, let us know how it all comes out.
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PerroneFord:
I can say without question, that at no time, on any dive, did I ever have a need to hover upright. When do you find this skill helpful?
This is the only place that I disagree with you and Lynne. There are times when I have to hover upright, at various angles and even upside down (e.g., collecting delicate jellies). I do not dive like a deep submarine staying level all the time, my body moves in the direction that my head leads and for me, true trim and balance is the ability to be able to hold most any conceivable attitude in that water, not just the horizontal one that you can trim your rig to stabilize at.
SparticleBrane:
...what the heck is a 'fin pivot'?
I've never heard of it.
Is this something close to a helicopter turn? I'm guessing it isn't...
You don’t want to know … it can’t be done in the bath tub.
Superform:
mikeferrara you sound so jaded...
the reality of the situation is that not everyone going through there OW course is a potential Navy Seal. you need to accommodate the ability to teach all types of students with the necessity of teaching them properly. maybe your just PADI bashing under your breath, but until the system changes you have to work with what your given, thats why DM's assisting a PADI instructor will say .. add more weight! it helps the class over all... are people better divers for taking this road? maybe so and maybe not.. as long as they know the fundamentals of what they are doing they have a chance.. and most learning is self learning and its what the students take away with them that matters most imo.
buoyancy is a personal thing.. guides like buoyancy checks help people work out there personal buoyancy. if you have another way to do it.. feel free to tell people how you do it.. and let people make up there own minds. as long as they get there in the end its all good in my book.
remember diving is meant to be fun.. to call in the fire and brimstone because something doesnt go your way just shows that you maybe should have quit the diving industry awhile ago.
While the rules let any fool post any opinion, I’d suggest that perhaps, if you want to be taken seriously, you not insult folks that are far more qualified than you are.
