Do I "Need" a BC
- Thread starter gmerick
- Start date
Please register or login
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
- Ability to post and comment on topics and discussions.
- A Free photo gallery to share your dive photos with the world.
- You can make this box go away
Chavodel8en
Contributor
And I was about to haughtily respond "maybe you can get away with that in tropical waters, but lets see you try that in the chilly waters of California, with a thick wetsuit."
****
My only input would be - you have to attach your tank to you somehow. A little buoyancy bag is not that much extra drag. Maybe you do not absolutely "need" it, but its very nice to have.
Eric Sedletzky
Contributor
If you want to learn to dive with no BC I highly recommend doing a lot of skin diving first.
Why? you ask. Because freediving (skin diving) preps you for the form you need to use. Modern scuba diving relies on a BC to suspend you like a puppet on strings. You'll see divers hanging around like sky divers suspended by their wings and in some cases drysuits. You have none of that with no BC diving.
When scuba diving started, basically what happened was you took a skin diver and strapped a tank on them with 1" straps a double hose breathing loop and that's it. They might have dropped a few lbs. off their belts to adjust for the added hardware.
So in essence they were still skindiving with all the same gear as before but the only difference is they could now breathe underwater.
Weighting is the critical factor in no BC diving.
Most modern scuba divers and modern scuba training overweights divers from the very start in my opinion. If you're wearing any neoprene you need to shed enough weight that you will actually have to tip forward and kick down like a freediver to get deep enough that squeeze will kick in and relieve some of the lightness.
I weight myself different ways for no BC diving.
I'm using a 7mm suit too.
So, for deeper stuff down to 50-60' I weight myself so that I start getting getting light at the end if the dive at 20'. If I need to I'll grab a rock to stay down shallower than that. No BC diving is not something you do if you're getting into deco or doing some sort of deep dive, use a BC wing for that.
The other thing you may want to use for no BC diving is a snorkel. The dynamic changes, you have no wing to inflate to rest on at the surface, so for surface swims, face down with a snorkel is the best way to go.
As the suit mm gets thinner the more leeway you will have with depth. That's also true with suit density. So with a 3 mil you will have a lot more depth range than with a 7 mil. With no suit the range becomes way more.
I've had a few Rubatex suits in the past, and yes they crush down but not like the spongy stuff they have nowdays. The first 33' all suits will crush because the pressure doubles, but after that not as bad, and Rubatex seemed to have a limit on crushing better than any other material.
All of this other technical info becomes a bigger deal with no BC diving because you have no air bag to hide behind.
I always said, if you want to give someone a crash course about proper weighting and watermanship dynamics just take their BC away.
I'm currently diving with no BC doing urchin collection. I just use a back pack plate that I made and a steel 120 with a single second stage and an SPG. It's shallow work, only down to 20', but we have to go in a little heavy to stay put. The commercial guys are using hookah from a boat, and they are using 10 mil or thicker suits and they obviously have no BC's.
Once you get into it and understand it, it gets easier.
oldschool45
Registered
Dam, you can still get the old time tank harnesses off of Amazon for around $30! When I first got into SCUBA and still doing a lot of freediving off of the beach I occasionally slung a 30cf pony with an ancient 1st & 2nd stage (no SPG, octo, etc.) for extra bottom time if I saw something interensting. Not the safest practice but.
My newly certified OW wife who has never done any freediving doesn't understand why I consider the fully rigged poodle jacket to be cumbersome. Might have to order that harness for playing in shallow springs next week.
My newly certified OW wife who has never done any freediving doesn't understand why I consider the fully rigged poodle jacket to be cumbersome. Might have to order that harness for playing in shallow springs next week.
Do you need a BC to dive?
No.
Eric's comments are spot on. Watermanship, familiarity with skin diving skills are the basic building blocks. I have found that your confidence and watermanship will increase as you get used to diving unencumbered by a poodle jacket or wing. I was first certified in 1977. Horse collar manually/oral inflatable BC with CO2 emergency pull tab, SPG, no octo, lots and lots of swimming and skin diving during the 12 session long course. We were basically instructed at that time to use the BC as a surface flotation devise rather than a means to obtain neutral buoyancy while diving.
No.
Eric's comments are spot on. Watermanship, familiarity with skin diving skills are the basic building blocks. I have found that your confidence and watermanship will increase as you get used to diving unencumbered by a poodle jacket or wing. I was first certified in 1977. Horse collar manually/oral inflatable BC with CO2 emergency pull tab, SPG, no octo, lots and lots of swimming and skin diving during the 12 session long course. We were basically instructed at that time to use the BC as a surface flotation devise rather than a means to obtain neutral buoyancy while diving.
Eric Sedletzky
Contributor
The most successful spearfishermen are still the freedivers, so there's something to be said for that.
Think about this:
What's the no limits freediving record now, 600'? IDK
This is one breath. And then there are other categories like unassisted, etc.
The safety divers for all these meets are on heavy mix and need to do all sorts of deco, etc. quite a contrast. Here's comes this person with nothing but a mask suit and fins going right past them down down down. They go to a depth that very few technical divers will ever get to.
Do I really "Need" a BC (and by "I" I mean me, not the OP)?
My answer is Yes, for now, especially after reading all the posts in this thread.
(What follows is a bit of rambling/musing, by all means feel free to stop here
)
For one thing I recognize that I need more experience diving with the extra safety features of the BC before pushing my limits by learning to dive without them. And I will need to do some groundwork by skin diving and improving my watermanship (that was a new word to me, BTW) skills first.
The analogy of walking to the grocery store resonates with me too, but probably not in the way intended. The store we usually do the majority of our shopping is a half mile away, and I usually walk. Often (but not always) I can get there faster walking than I can in a car due to one-way streets and traffic etc etc. Does walking limit what I can bring back on that grocery run compared to if I drove? Yes. Would I walk if it were three miles? Not likely. Do I walk when we need groceries and one of those classic tropical thunderstorms has just started or is about to start? Not a chance. Have I gotten caught on the way back in one of those thunderstorms and wished I had driven instead? You wanna believe I have... Does any of that stop me from walking instead of driving when it seems the conditions are suitable? Nope. I believe that walking instead of driving brings many benefits.
So, someday - no time soon, but someday - I hope to learn to scuba dive without a BC, safely, in the appropriate conditions and to appropriate depths. Certainly I can see advantages for "work dives" at shallow depths like Eric is doing trying to rescue those kelp beds from nasty spiky purple invaders, and for my own growing interest in coral restoration in my area I wonder if shedding the encumberance of a "poodle jacket" (or even a BP/W or other more "minimalist" setup) would be of benefit.
Won't know for certain until I try. Someday...
My answer is Yes, for now, especially after reading all the posts in this thread.
(What follows is a bit of rambling/musing, by all means feel free to stop here
)For one thing I recognize that I need more experience diving with the extra safety features of the BC before pushing my limits by learning to dive without them. And I will need to do some groundwork by skin diving and improving my watermanship (that was a new word to me, BTW) skills first.
The analogy of walking to the grocery store resonates with me too, but probably not in the way intended. The store we usually do the majority of our shopping is a half mile away, and I usually walk. Often (but not always) I can get there faster walking than I can in a car due to one-way streets and traffic etc etc. Does walking limit what I can bring back on that grocery run compared to if I drove? Yes. Would I walk if it were three miles? Not likely. Do I walk when we need groceries and one of those classic tropical thunderstorms has just started or is about to start? Not a chance. Have I gotten caught on the way back in one of those thunderstorms and wished I had driven instead? You wanna believe I have... Does any of that stop me from walking instead of driving when it seems the conditions are suitable? Nope. I believe that walking instead of driving brings many benefits.
So, someday - no time soon, but someday - I hope to learn to scuba dive without a BC, safely, in the appropriate conditions and to appropriate depths. Certainly I can see advantages for "work dives" at shallow depths like Eric is doing trying to rescue those kelp beds from nasty spiky purple invaders, and for my own growing interest in coral restoration in my area I wonder if shedding the encumberance of a "poodle jacket" (or even a BP/W or other more "minimalist" setup) would be of benefit.
Won't know for certain until I try. Someday...
I learned to dive without a bladder and have done dives recently without one. You're right that diving with no/hardly any air in the BC is liberating. It's what I've always done. My BC is used after my dive is over to float on the surface. If I surface at the boat, it's no biggie, but if I have to wait on the surface very long, then it's a wonderful device.
Case in point: I remember in the 70s surfacing in the middle of a large lake with no air. We had J-Valves, not an SPG. Swimming to shore without a bladder was fatiguing.
Been there, done that. Fun factor 0.00 Learning experience Priceless
Similar threads
