[Woz]

Normally I have pretty good trim but I'm not anal about it- as long as I'm vaguely flat and can see what's going on then I'm happy- in a drysuit I can normally simply scull along gently not moving that much.

However out in t'Egypt on those long coralley fishey dives while sculling along I thought I'd have a play with it just to see what happened.

To get myself proper flat I popped a couple of 1kg blocks off the weight belt into a couple of trim pouches on the upper camband on the cyls (about where the curve started) as I was a bit arse heavy. With the weights in position breathing in pivoted my head up about my centre of gravity (about the buckle on my harness) and breathing out pivoted me back down. Cool. That looks proper trick and impresses the laydees (in my world anyway).

So- while sculling along you can feel the water flowing over your skin (I was in a shortie) and this gave the perfect opportunity to try a few things- different positions in the water, different leg positions and a few different frog kicking styles.

So- what did I find? Well annoyingly that DIR lot might have something. With my legs proper bent I could scull a stroke, glide along and my legs were out of the current tucked behind my arse. Drop my legs a bit and I could feel the drag on the hairs on my legs. Bend them up again and wehay- scull-glide-scull-glide. Piece of piddle and uses much less effort compared to when your legs are dropped.

So arms. What there? Well I found little difference between a "superman" pose and tucking them into my chest under my chin in a sort of "knights death tomb" position, sometimes even hooked "cowboy style" into my waist strap. The superman pose was uncomfortable and really strained the muscles in the back of my neck so the "tomb hands" was my preferred position and it worked nicely with the arms in the "dead water" behind my chin.

As for the frog kick, the power stroke is pretty straight forward- simply scoop water and shove it backwards- but the thing I noticed was if you concentrated on minimising the drag on the bit in between, when you're "resetting" the stroke ready for the next power bit, then you glide much further. I found the best way to do this was to gently rotate the fins out using my ankles, all the time keeping the legs bent and out of the current. Making sure the fins "slice" sideways through the water along the thinnest edge also helps keep the glide up.

So- the idea behind all this is the same as driving a car during a fuel shortage. Try and keep the momentum up rather than letting yourself slow between kicks- gliding along adding a bit more momentum when the glide slows is much less effort than slowing down almost to a stop and using the power stroke to accellerate again.

Dull? Probably. Useful to someone? Maybe. Am I off for a shower? Yes. I smell of burning garden rubbish.