When to adjust BC?

[CJ Waid]

And with no air in your BC you are suppose to be negatively buoyant, that is the point. You hold a NORMAL breath and you float eye level, you exhale and you sink, if you take a deep breath, you start to bob around like a buoy.

That is how you are SUPPOSE to weight yourself.

 

[cummings66]

I think the topic has been covered pretty well for now. One thing I'd add to the discussion is that over time you will come to get a feel for how much and when to add the air to the BC. I find myself just barely hitting the button for a quick pop of air as I descend every so often. I kind of feel the speed as I go down and keep it to the limit I've set and I know by feel and other clues when to add air. There is no formula for it because it varies depending on my dive buddy and what I want to do, how my sinus's are doing that dive, etc.

The object most of the time is to use as little air as possible in the BC saving it for breathing. You do that by not chasing yourself in the water column, i.e. add air go up, remove it drop down, add it to get a bit higher and then find you're still too high and remove it. That yo-yo action wastes more air than a person realizes. So the lungs are great for minor depth excursions and the BC is used to maintain neutral at the chosen depth.

 

[SNorman]

I've gotten buoyancy control down pretty good with my breathing, however my problem is this. In the class, we were taught that slow, deep breaths were most effective in scuba (dead air space, work required to breathe, staying calm, etc). Well, I natually have slow, deep breaths. However, they last too long and during the inhale, I would float to the top of the pool, the on the exhale sink to the bottom. So, I quickly had to make my breaths shorter to stay (pretty much) at the same depth, but I was left confused as to the recommendation for deeper breaths. So, basically should you breathe as deep as possible, while still keeping buoyancy under control?

When we first entered the pool in class 1 and sat on the bottom, this really didn't matter At that time I'm thinking I took about 4-5 breaths per minute, full inhale to full exhale. Now I limit each inhalation/exhalation point as other posters have said to control buoyancy. But, sometimes I just feel like my breaths in that case are too shallow.

 

[Thalassamania]

Try playing with your bouyancy this way

 

[plot]

I'm a new diver and here's what I do: when ascending I always dump air and fin my way up. Whenever I feel myself floating up without finning, I dump more air.

Descending I pretty much do the same thing, I dump a little bit of air, start exhaling, and down I go. When I'm getting close to the depth I want to be at, I start inhaling more and adding air to my BC until I'm around a neutral state. From that point on, I just adjust the angle of my body and breathing while swimming at a certain depth.

I havn't gotten the perfectly neutrally bouyant while suspended in water thing down yet, but I can get close enough that a bit of finning and breathing patterns can keep me around the same depth while hanging. I'm told that it's not uncommon for people to spend years figuring out how to get perfectly neutral bouyant, so it's not something I'm worried about at the moment. I just keep practicing...

 

[Thalassamania]

Try playing with your bouyancy this way

----------------------------------------------------------------------

 

[cork2win]

Just thought I'd share since so many here were so gracious with their help on this subject....

Thanks to a wonderful fellow SBer who volunteered his time to help me with this yesterday, we were able to knock 9lbs off my weight belt (and could probably still lose 2 more. Hell, I could stand to lose about 80 more but that's another story! ). This single change was monumental in my ability to keep control under water with my breathing. For the first time I was actually able to just hover in the water and not feel like I was constantly fighting to keep neutral. I hardly ever needed to add or dump air from my BC and it was really amazing. Now I have to get used to not swimming with my finger on the inflator hose the whole time (as I was doing before so that I could constantly be ready to add or dump air in a flash!).

I know there's tons more practice ahead to really get the hang of it but the weighting issue seemed to be the biggest contributor to my problems. Chris, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to work this out with me in the water. I'm continually amazed by the generous nature of so many in the diving community. :sappy: