Making Too Many Bubbles

Do you burn through your air faster than anybody else in your group? Are you always having to surface before the others because you are already low on air? Well here are some tips from me and SCUBA Diving Magazine.

First and foremost in helping you control your breathing is controlling your buoyancy. This is the main problem that my dad has. My dad is not exactly that good at getting himself fit with the right amount of weight. This is mostly because we do not live anywhere near salt water, but we dive mostly on vacation in places like the Florida Keys and Mexico. This makes it hard for my dad to judge just how much weight he needs for a dive since it has been a year since he dove in salt water, and didn't do that much diving at home in fresh water anyway. My dad not having the right amount of weight means that he either sinks or floats and just can't seem to fine that right amount of buoyancy to hover just above the seabed. He really doesn't like this especially when he's stuck floating because he feels like he is missing some the dive. This makes him try harder to get to the right buoyancy. Now that he is trying harder he is exerting himself more and breathing harder. This not only burns through his air supply and causes him to surface earlier than the rest of us, but because of the way my dad breathes while exertign himself he isn't exhaling completely. This means that he is now more buoyant, so all the effort he is making to get down a little farther is for nothing. This is a bad habit of my dad's and we have told that a thousand times. Unfortunately he doesn't do to well on watching himself because he still does it quite often. The only problem my dad really has is that he just needs to relax. In order to get down just a little more where teh pressure will allow him to stay down, all he needs to do is relax. As he starts to kick to get himself down to the higher pressure he should also exhale. This will help in two ways. Now not only is he applying a force to go down but he is becaoming less buoyant as he exhales and this will help him get down to the right level even if he forgot to add a few pounds to his weight belt.

The same is true if you have something like this problem. It is really easy to fix you just have to not exert yourself. If you accidentally didn't grab enough weight just simply flip face down and kick towards the bottom as you exhale. Make sure that you don't try to hard though or you won't fully exhale and you will get nowhere.