No one wants to be one of those photographers or divers who give divers a bad name by trashing reefs while in pursuit of their quarry.

Buoyancy control is the fundamental skill at the centre of diving.

Fine control reduces gas consumption and damage from kicks to the environment, and generally helps divers feel more comfortable under water, and at one with the marine environment.

Photographers need to get closer to their subjects, and often to a reef, just to get a good camera angle on their subjects, all without damaging marine life or stirring up sand that could cloud their pictures.

Many divers think they are neutrally buoyant until something like a training exercise or taking a photograph distracts them, and they start to sink. In fact they are just negatively buoyant, and finning all the time to stay level.

For those not used to neutral buoyancy, being neutral often feels as if you are about to float off. This is quite natural. Neutral buoyancy is the art of maintaining an unstable equilibrium at this point, using as little change in lung volume as possible to keep depth constant.

Another factor that greatly affects the buoyancy is thickness of the diver’s neoprene exposure protection. Neoprene is essentially a porous rubber. Each microscopic pore is a sealed gas bubble. Because of the gas’ poor thermal conductivity, neoprene has excellent thermal protection properties. The thicker the neoprene, the “warmer” the suit. There is, however, a drawback: the increasing pressure under the water compresses neoprene’s gas bubbles making neoprene thinner. As the result, at greater depths, a neoprene wet suit reduces its volume and becomes less effective as thermal protection. While the diver’s weight remains the same, reduced suit’s volume will affect the diver’s buoyancy. The thicker the suit, the more it compresses with greater depth, the less buoyancy it has. The effect of compressing neoprene could be very noticeable. An average air filled neoprene suit will lose approximately ½ of its buoyancy at the depth of 10 m/ 33 feet, ⅔ at the depth of 20 m/ 66 feet. At 30 m/ 100 feet it will effectively become crushed and lose almost all of its buoyancy (as well as thermal isolation properties).

THIS ALL CAN BE REDUNDANT WITH MERMAID PROTECTOR`S #NEOPRENEFREE WETSUITS!

Our wetsuit has neutral buoyancy, so you need fewer weights and the wetsuit will be not compressed like neoprene wetsuits. This is why our wetsuits keep their neutral buoyancy also in the deep water.

Buoyancy control is an absolute foundation for everything in diving.

Buoyancy control is a much less complicated matter if you wear #neoprenefree gear.

Visit our online store Mermaid Protector

© Gerald Nowak