Buoyancy, buoyancy buoyancy…how do experienced divers stay steady in the water?

Would you like to be able to effortlessly stay still in the water for those moments when you’re closely watching something, learn how to secure your equipment to streamline and protect it from knocks and bumps and improve your air efficiency so you can get longer dive times? Then the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy course is for you.

Let’s set the scene…

You’re gently finning along a reef wall admiring the mix of soft and hard corals, a cloud of small orange fish drifting a little away from the reef, then, sensing some unseen danger, darting back to the safety of the reef when you spot a pair of clown fish protecting their anemone.  

You stop to video them on your camera but struggle to hold your vertical position in the water.  As you start to record, you begin to sink down the reef wall.  You put a burst of air in your BCD to compensate - but now you’ve risen past the anemone and your dive guide is signalling to point something out above you.  So, you dump air and, as you start to drop-down again you start finning just to stay at the same level as the clown fish.  A little later you signal to the dive guide that you’ve only got 70bar of air left and the group is called together for a safety stop before ending the dive.  A buddy pair of more experienced divers signalled they still have 120bar left and the dive guide allowed them to stay down deeper for a while longer.

So, while you’re on your safety stop, you watch that buddy pair go back to the anemone, taking it in turns to video the clown fish while effortlessly hovering almost as still as if they were statues. The next day you see their video on Facebook and you’re amazed at how steady their recordings are compared to your roller coaster recording!

Does this sound familiar? 

The Peak Performance Buoyancy Course takes the skills you learnt in your Open Water course and elevates them to a totally new level of competence, making your diving more enjoyable and safer.  Learn how not only getting the right amount of weight matters greatly, but how tweaking weight distribution can help improve stability and efficiency.  Under expert guidance, you’ll fine tune your breathing to give you better steadiness in the water and enable you to effortlessly make purposeful small variations in your depth. You’ll learn ways of streamlining in the water to better protect both your gear and the dive site, giving you extended dive times and providing a far steadier platform for shooting videos and taking photos.

As a keen underwater photographer, I need to be able to position myself in the water in a wide variety of positions - even upside down!  I need to make sure I don’t drift into sensitive organisms whilst I’m getting close to my subject.  I need to minimise my profile to reduce the risk of frightening away the fish I’m trying to capture.  I completed the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy course in 2014 after my Advanced Open Water - but I wished I’d done it sooner because of the steep change it provided to my diving.  I still use the techniques I learnt from the course today, on every single dive, making these skills second nature.

If you’d like to start your buoyancy journey, contact DiveMania Scuba today!

Tim Howson