Nick Hollis of Hollis Gear showing some skills in swimming pool like conditions…
Few of us learned to dive without the help of a buoyancy device of some sort. Not to say that wearing a jacket-style BCD, sidemount harness, or backplate and wing automatically gave any of us pin-point control over our position in the water column: it certainly did not!
The vast majority of the divers — sport, technical, rebreather, open-circuit, whatever — earned that particular skill with patience, perhaps a little help from a buddy or mentor of some description, and a bunch of practice.
Swimming pools or ‘swimming pool-like conditions’ (warmish, reasonably calm, clear-ish, current-free shallow water), are awesome for gaining something approaching buoyancy control right from the first open-water class: and then fine-tuning that skill by return visits as often as practical. I will still take time, whenever I can, to simply “hang about” in the water. A visit to the pool is a great place to test new gear, adjust weighting, check that old favorites still work the way you want them to.
In fact, if you are an instructor looking for ways to increase student comfort, add to general diver safety, and build on the basic skills your students learn on your courses, you’d do well to offer a few extra hours of pool time regularly. I have a buddy whose open-water students leave her classes with demo-quality buoyancy control and near-perfect ‘cave trim.’ Her secret is additional pool time, which her students gladly pay a little extra for because she’s taken the trouble to explain the benefits of buoyancy control to them. They get it: they know it takes a bit of work: and they are not looking for a fast fix.
So, imagine my disappointment to see an ad for a piece of kit that is such a convoluted bunch of “Heath Robinson” engineering that at first I thought it a joke. The product, and it is real apparently, is pitched as: “An industry standard premium diving jacket, dive computer with connecting links to allow the computer and jacket to manage diving processes according to the selected settings just like an aircraft autopilot.”
What have we come to when the simplest of devices, and a little practice to master its use, has to be replaced by something with Catastrophic Failure (or something else with the initials C-F) written all over it.
Please, if you want to get your buoyancy squared away because it wasn’t taught to you as a beginner, take a cavern or intro-to-tech class from a good instructor. Contraptions that offer instant mastery through technology are like magic pills that promise to shed pounds of belly fat without diets or exercise. The word to describe this type of promise is bullshit.
Doppler's Tech Diving Blog 
Hear hear …
Preach it Steve!
Agreed. I was lucky learning to dive as I did it as part of a conservation diving project where all of us volunteers had to be able to maintain a fixed depth consistently with minimum disruption to sealife, in order to conduct surveys. As a result I think I developed decent buoyancy from more or less day 1, but having dived with other far more ‘experienced’ divers who have only ever done recreational dives, I don’t think there’s enough focus on it in the early stages. Maybe it’s just too time-consuming or requires too much one-to-one tuition for most instructors to be able to manage?
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