Peak Performance Buoyancy

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 buoyancy right

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.

Effortless hover

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), however, from years of experience we’ve learned that students benefit most from doing a buoyancy workshop in the pool before doing the dives. Our course is 1 1/2 days and includes an extra half day in the pool where we work on lots of aspects of buoyancy and have plenty of time to practice.

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 half day buoyancy workshop, we will spend a day out on one of the beautiful local wrecks and put into practice what we learned in the pool.