Buoyancy is perhaps the most important part of scuba diving, yet for many it is the hardest thing to achieve. Perfect buoyancy enables you to take better underwater pictures, hover effortlessly on your safety stop, prevents damage to the aquatic environment and reduces your air consumption. Once you ‘get it’ it’s very hard to figure out exactly what was so difficult, but until you get it, it can seem like wading through treacle.
Getting the basics right
There are lots of aspects to achieving neutral buoyancy, but simply put, it is the art of getting the right amount of air in your BCD and lungs to balance your ‘weight’ in the water.
There is science behind it, but it’s a skill that can be learned. You can feel it when you’re neutrally buoyant, and once you’ve felt it and learnt how to repeat it, you can achieve it time and again effortlessly.
Peak Performance Buoyancy is a PADI Specialty course that addresses buoyancy underwater, and gives the student an opportunity to polish buoyancy control beyond the Open Water Diver level:
- Positioning and distributing weight for comfort and desired body position (trim in the water)
- Visualisation techniques prior to dives
- Buoyancy checks
- Establishing neutral buoyancy during all segments of a dive
- Fine-tuning neutral buoyancy underwater
- Hovering
- Efficient fin kicks
The PADI Specialty Course requires a minimum of 1 day (2 dives), and from years of experience we’ve learned that students benefit most from doing a buoyancy workshop in the pool before doing the dives.
As overweighting is the most common cause of buoyancy problems with divers, we will spend time establishing your correct weight requirements, learning how to correctly check your weighting, and learning how to manage overweighting if you end up overweighted.
Having completed the pool buoyancy workshop, we will spend the rest of the day out at our beautiful training lake and put into practice what we learned in the pool.
Who is this course for?
The simple answer is anyone who is an Open Water diver and is not yet comfortable with their buoyancy in the water.
During the course:
- We will estimate, and then check the amount of weight that you need to achieve neutral buoyancy throughout your dive
- You will learn to establish neutral buoyancy while diving and be able to adjust your buoyancy using your lungs.
- You will learn how to adjust your buoyancy between swimming and hovering, so that you can stop to take pictures and maintain perfect buoyancy.
- You will be able to hover comfortably for at least a minute without skulling or kicking.
- We will play buoyancy games including going through and over obstacles, ‘pass the weight’ and using varied weight position to hover in different positions and poses
Includes all required equipment
Certification fee included
CONTACT US
If you have questions or would like to book.
