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In Scuba Diving You Excel At Weight Selection Only Through Repeated Underwater Adventures

How much weight you need for a dive depends on how you configure your dive setup. When I started diving I only guessed my weight needs, and rarely checked to verify the accuracy of those guesses. I over weighted most of the time, which made me struggle with buoyancy control. On occasion I started dives with too little weight and couldn’t descend, or had problems at the end of the dive, as the tank grew low on air. Often those times forced me to return to the boat, or dock, for more weight – leaving my dive buddy hanging while she or he waited on me.

In certification class we learn to weight ourselves so that (without our BCD on) we float with our eyes at water level. Problem is, some of the equipment you put on after using that method adds or subtracts to your overall buoyancy condition.

One thing I quickly lost track of was that my scuba tank wants to float more as the amount of air inside lowers. We receive that bit of knowledge during certification class too, but hanging onto something so simple, when you’re focusing your mind on getting into the water, becomes a major mental effort. Other items you add to your scuba dive setup cause increases to the negativity of your buoyancy along with the removal of air from your tank. One example is the little bottle of mask defogger I carry in my BCD pocket. I forget to use it before I’m in the water. That bottle is a small negative addition to my overall buoyancy, but when you add it to other “floating” objects among your gear, the accumulative floating effect tries to override your weight belt.

Then we often add accessories to our dive configuration that increase our weight. Most divers carry dive knives in case they get trapped in rope or fishing line. Some of those big dive knives get heavy, though I don’t see the bigger knives carried often these days.

Picking up souvenirs from the ocean floor adds to your weight also. Don’t let me see you doing this. I get somewhat upset when divers “steal” stuff from our aquatic environment because that means I don’t get to see as much the next time I dive that spot. That activity hurts the ecology of the reef too. With experience that comes with more diving you get an intuitive ability to calculate your needed weight accurately. It depends on the gear you include in your setup. Your diving becomes less energy draining from then on. Proper weighting helps lower your exertion levels throughout your dive.

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Source by Joseph Jackson