Buoyancy Control: Scuba Dive Like Professionals

For a minute, let’s go back to chapter 1 of your PADI Open Water Diver course. What is neutral buoyancy control? It’s that fantastic feeling you hope to achieve while scuba diving that brings us as close as we will ever get to being astronauts. Neutral buoyancy occurs when an object’s weight is equal to the fluid it displaces. Therefore, the thing neither floats nor sinks. So why are we on the subject of neutral buoyancy, you ask? Unfortunately, I see too many certified divers with inadequate buoyancy control to keep these thoughts to myself any longer at the risk of sounding like a tired dive instructor.

In this short tutorial blog, we are going to discuss how to achieve proper neutral buoyancy. Usually, access to insider tips and tricks comes at a cost, but today I am releasing some extreme knowledge hoping that divers will read this Blog and put these methods into practice. As visitors to a sensitive ocean environment, we are responsible for leaving a dive site the way we find it. Protecting the coral reef starts with good buoyancy habits.

3 Professional Buoyancy Control Tips

Tip #1: Dive Properly Weighted

Divers have to use lead weights to sink. The amount of weight you need is dependent upon your weight, the thickness of your exposure suit, even muscle density plays a factor. The more you weigh, the more weight you will need. The thicker your exposure suit, the more weight you will need as well. Someone diving in tropical water in a 3mm suit will need less weight than diving in the Pacific Northwest in a 7mm wetsuit. The air pockets in neoprene add an immense amount of buoyancy, and therefore a 7mm wetsuit requires substantial extra weight. I often find that divers trained in cold water with the burden of thick wetsuits and more gear typically have more advanced neutral buoyancy control than divers trained in temperate waters. The practice in cold water with a lot of weight forces good buoyancy habits. But you don’t have to be a cold-water diver to learn buoyancy control!

The most common mistake we see is people diving with or requesting too much weight. Diving with extra weight will undoubtedly make you sink easier, but various habits get formed by diving overweight. First, the bottom half of your body tends to tilt downward. Second, your fins will kick up the sand behind you if you dive close to the bottom. Your finning not only obstructs the visibility of scuba divers behind you but also disturbs the sea life living in the sand. The best game you can play while diving is to see if you can make it through an entire dive without touching or grazing ANYTHING, including the sand. If you are swimming higher in the water column with your legs tilted downward, it may cause you to “yo-yo” dive. Since your legs are beneath you, you end up picking up with each kick instead of kicking forward. This motion counteracts the lead weights pulling you down, but it is an incredibly inefficient way to move in the water and cause you to use the air in your tank much faster. Not only is your kicking inefficient, you will undoubtedly have to rely more on your BCD to achieve neutral buoyancy, which also wastes your air.

Be sure to do a buoyancy check at the surface before you begin your dive. With an empty BCD and holding a normal breath, you should float at eye level, if not slightly below. If you have an empty BCD and are floating far below the surface as you hold your breath, then you need to remove some weight. If you are floating above the surface with an empty BCD and a normal breath caught, then you need to add some. Diving with too little pressure is very tiring as you compensate with your breathing and kicking in an attempt to keep yourself down. This scuba diving style is far the most challenging way to dive and be avoided at all costs. There is no shame in scuba diving with more weight because comfort is always the key!

Tip #2: Lungs and Legs!

You will hear multiple times from Banyan Tree Divers instructors, our famous Lungs and Legs reminder. Once you descend, your breathing and kicking control your neutral buoyancy. The closer you are, the more buoyant you are, so it is not uncommon to begin a dive feeling like you aren’t sinking quickly. The trick is to stay vertical with your feet down and completely deflate your lungs. A short inhale followed by another long exhale will get you down that first few feet.

Once you have started your descent, you must position your body horizontally in the water. Remember, you don’t want to keep swimming with your legs down and start yo-yo diving. It doesn’t look cool at all! When you dive, you should almost feel like your feet are above your head as they extend behind you. Long kicks from your hips with your knees slightly bent will allow you to move efficiently. If you can frog kick, that’s even better. However, diving is not about moving fast. The less work you do to swim, the longer your tank will last. Move slowly and efficiently.

Using only the lungs and legs also means keeping your arms still. Often at the beginning of Maui scuba diving, people need to steady themselves by using their arms. This action is quite natural, considering that we learn to swim this way. However, if you watch a diver with impeccable neutral buoyancy control, you will NEVER notice arm usage. Diving with your arms is not only inefficient (and looks uncool) but wasteful for your air consumption. It increases the risk of you smacking your buddy or, worse, smacking a sea urchin. Keep your arms tucked in, and only use your Lungs and Legs!

Your breathing is perhaps the essential aspect of neutral buoyancy control. During the PADI Open Water Diver course, we learn that you slowly rise when you inhale and slightly sink when you exhale. Your entire dive is an exercise in controlling your breathing to maintain the depth you prefer to dive. Fast, shallow breathing will pull you up toward the surface. Continuously exhaling when overweighted without compensating without using your BCD will cause you to crash into the bottom. Of course, that’s assuming you have an area to land. Often dive sites are hundreds of feet deep, and without monitoring your depth gauge, it is relatively easy to dip below recreational dive limits without even noticing.

Tip #3: Be Aware of Your Ocean Environment

I cannot stress enough how important it is to be aware throughout your dive experience, whether above or below the water. Awareness is not only crucial for safety reasons but also for how we achieve perfect neutral buoyancy control. You want to be sure to stay close to your dive leader with your BCD fully inflated on the surface. They are often trying to get to a specific descent area, and if you are swimming in a current far away, others have to wait for you to catch up.

Use the technique mentioned above to descend as you maintain eye contact with your dive leader and buddy. Your dive leader will be trying to ask if you are okay. If you or your buddy have ear issues upon descent, it is crucial to communicate that immediately to continue until everyone is ready. If you are waiting for other people to get down, practice hovering instead of sinking to the bottom. With that said, stay close to your dive leader. If there is current, then the bottom might be the safest place to wait for other divers.

As you float along the coral reef, pick out visual references. Tell yourself that you are not going to rise above or below your visual reference. If you appropriately positioned your body, then your breathing should do most of the work. If you sink too much, take a big breath; if you rise too high above your reference, then exhale fully. After a while, your eyes will naturally pick out connections that keep you aware of where you are in the water. This technique is crucial for maintaining neutral buoyancy, keeping you focused on having zero contact with the coral reef.

Buoyancy Control pertains to scuba diving professionals as well as recreational divers. But unfortunately, too many unaware scuba divers damage the coral reef. For example, divers crash into coral reefs during uncontrolled descents, kick up sand with their fins, bang their tanks into coral, and hold onto live corals while taking photos.

Next Step: Perfect Your Buoyancy Control

If you are interested in perfecting your neural buoyancy control, we invite you to join us for our Peak Performance Buoyancy Specialty workshop. You will work with us to achieve complete weightlessness like a pro. We conduct this specialty over two dives and count toward completing your recreational PADI Master Diver certification. Contact BTD for more information.

Final Thought

According to a Philippines study, scuba divers have at least ten interactions with coral on every dive. If you think about each day that thousands of divers worldwide explore thousands of dive sites, that is a lot of tampering with delicate and finite coral reefs. Reef systems worldwide are in grave peril, and by that, I mean their imminent destruction during the lifetime of anyone born in the early 2000s. Indeed, with 90 percent of coral reefs expected to die by 2050, it is up to scuba divers to be ambassadors for the underwater world. Each scuba dive is an opportunity to exhibit a great example of buoyancy control. Let other people see the right way to scuba dive!

If you see your dive leader being careless with the reef or the sea life, don’t be afraid to speak up about it. Feel free to give them a few hints if you see fellow divers exercising little awareness above or below the water. The more we speak up and call out unacceptable behavior, the more we can contribute to preserving these awe-inspiring eco-systems.

Happy diving, and remember LUNGS AND LEGS!