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Written by Administrator
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Saturday, 28 July 2007 14:29 |
Bouyancy Control | | If you like this little beauty you can take her with you where ever you go. Click the image to visit the beach babe store. |  | | Buoyancy control, Buoyancy control, Buoyancy control. If you were sitting in one of my classes on this topic you'd hear those word till you were ready to scream. I'll try and keep it to a minimum here. It's just to hard to type. | Of all the skills you will learn as you become a scuba diver buoyancy control is one of the absolutely most basic core skills you will learn. Learn to do it anytime and anywhere and everything you do diving just got a thousand times easier. The nice thing about buoyancy control, at least I consider it nice, is the only way to learn how to do it is to do it. That means you have to get wet and the more time you spend in the water the easier it will get and the better you will get at achieving it.
Neutral buoyancy should become an automatic thing. Start your descent, add air to become neutral. Descend a little more, add a little more air. Ascend, let air out.
Good buoyancy control is just that automatic. No thought just action and while you are doing that automatically you are concentrating on something else like setting up the perfect picture or chasing that monster amberjack. | Achieving Neutral Buoyancy - The Right Way
Any idiot can make themselves neutrally buoyant but it doesn't do you much good unless you do it the right way. Doing it the right starts with proper weighting. Remember from the discussion on weighting the idea that the proper amount of weight on a dive is the minimum amount of weight needed to safely make the dive?
That is the key to achieving neutral bouyancy the right way.
The right way starts with the minimum amount of weight and ends with the minimum amount of air added to your BC. It's as simple as that. | Neutral Buoyancy Tricks
Just like a trained seal you can perform some magical tricks with neutral bouyancy. When you are neutrally buoyant the right way you can make depth changes simply by adjusting your breathing cycle. We already know we never hold our breath while scuba diving but that doesn't mean we can't manipulate our breathing cycle to our advantage.
If you need to go up, to clear a coral head for instance, all you have to do when you re neutrally buoyant is not exhale completely after taking a breath. Try exhaling only a third of your lung volume before you start inhaling again and do this for a couple of breaths, if you were neutrally buoyant to start the extra bouyancy in your lungs as a result of not exhaling completely will give the slight positive bouyancy you need to fly over that coral head. On the other side, to descend to your original depth you do just the opposite.
To descend, after exhaling take only a shallow breath back in before beginning to exhale again. The small negative bouyancy created by the shallow breath will start you descending to your starting depth.
The beauty of this technique is the graceful way you change your depth and the lack of effort = energy = air that was required to do it. | Neutral Buoyancy at Deeper Depths
Deeper depths do not really create a problem with respect to buoyancy. You just need to understand the deeper you go the more air, in your BC, it will take to make yourself neutral. The real problem with deeper depths comes on the ascent. You've got to purge your BC as you ascend to keep yourself close to neutral and control your ascent rate. For more on neutral buoyancy during ascents please visit the page dealing with ascents. |
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 11 April 2009 22:38 )
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