Do Witches Sink in Water?

[oya]

You know that moment when you're trying to hold absolutely still, but you wind up swimming around in circles?

Or when you get to a safety stop and you know that you've been absolutely neutrally buoyant for the whole dive, but for some reason 15 feet seems especially tricky today?

Yeah. You're not alone.

I'm not going to lie, it's not the easiest fix, but it is fixable. Blog post HERE.

(I know there are some folks who get techy when I post links to the blog instead of copying content to here. But every time I have tried to copy content the formatting goes so utterly haywire it renders the material unreadable. More unreadable than it already might be.)

 

[iliketopetsharks]

 

[The Chairman]

Trim and buoyancy solve this issue. If your trim is off, then the buoyancy you have while swimming changes when you stop. Yes, even tiny amounts of bad trim can cause a problem. The worse the trim, the worse the sinking.

A friend with a camera will help you discover how bad you are. Here's a fun way to improve your hovering and the use of your lungs to control your buoyancy:

Underwater Jenga...

6 or more 2-pound soft weights​

Try to build houses with two weights as walls and one as a roof​

Try for a second level​

Laugh every time you fail!!!​

Don't run out of air.​

Repeat as long as it's still fun!​

Fails include landing on the bottom or floating too high as you pick up and drop the two-pound weights, swimming over the Jenga, or watching your Jenga collapse. Best done in a shallow (6 ft) pool. Remember to breathe and also to laugh each and every time you mess up. Frustration is counter productive.

 

[Wookie]

Very small rocks

 

[The Chairman]

Very small rocks

If you want frustration. My first brush was on a rebreather in Blue Grotto. Trim is still very important, but you can't easily breathe yourself up and down.

 

[iliketopetsharks]

The real question is: how heavy is the duck?

 

[Vicko]

If they are from south east asia they do.

 

[Wookie]

Build a bridge out of her

 

[Dan G]

Many people here are wise in the ways of science.

I found that my buoyancy was way off after I got turned into a newt.

 

[tmassey]

Very small rocks

Don’t mind Pete, I got your joke…

@The Chairman I’m confused by *soft* weight. How do you do anything other than make a pile? With hard weight, you could actually build a house by leaning blocks against each other and putting a roof. But I’m unclear how you do that with bags of shot?

There are a couple of guys I work with on buoyancy. We do the typical things you might imagine. The first thing we try to do is simply *stop*. Don’t move your fins at all and see if you can do that for 30 seconds. Crazy how hard that is. Then things like the Basic 5 (very basic mask and reg movements). Just that tiny bit of task loading is great for moving you around when you don’t want to.

But building hoses of weights underwater sounds quite fun. And whimsical, which has its own value, too. Don’t forget about the laughing…