2 Dive 4 Scuba

6 Tips for Better Bouyancy Control

• Minimize your weighting. Extra air in your BC, to support extra lead on your belt, will change volume and buoyancy with depth, causing you to yo-yo and preventing you from maintaining neutral buoyancy.
• Check it at the safety stop. It's at the end of your dive, not the beginning, that you should be weighted for neutral buoyancy at 5m. That means you'll be about 2kg heavy at the beginning of the dive. (That's the weight of the air you use.)
• Suspend a weight bag. Hang a mesh bag with some 1kg weights from the boat at about 5m. Start the dive with 1kg or so of your weight in a BC pocket. At the safety stop, next to the weight bag, you can transfer weights between pocket and bag to find your perfect weighting.
• Relax. To find neutral buoyancy, go limp. Any sculling with hands or feet will create upward thrust.
• Add and subtract air in small squirts. You must wait a minute for adjustments to take effect before adding or subtracting more. The effect is not instantaneous.

Use your lungs, not your BC. Make slight temporary changes to your buoyancy by holding more or less air in your lungs. That way you don't disturb the correct inflation of your BC.