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Advanced Buoyancy Course with Mark Powell

My wife (littlemermaid) and I booked an advanced buoyancy course with Mark Powell back in January to take place today, this is the ‘trip report’.

I thought we really should post a report, as it was previous reports that lead us to undertake this course. Neither of us were overly unhappy with our buoyancy, we both just knew we could be better, particularly when faced with ‘tasks’ – i.e. it was fine when we were swimming along merrily, but could start to become somewhat less than perfect when say launching a DSMB, or making an ascent.

Mark found us in the car park (I am not entirely sure how it knew it was us…) and we went over our reasons for wanting to do the course. Mark was very good at teasing out of us the reasons we wanted to do the course, and made us realise things just by asking the right questions, all very friendly.

A bit of theory (including a few demonstrations by Eric the model diver) followed and then a comprehensive plan of what was to follow, skills to be tried, signals to be used etc. Then it was kitted up and into the water. We entered and descended ok, and headed towards the cockpit, here we started the skills, fin pivots, then hovering off the bottom, rising up and sinking down with our breath, we then, one at a time, swam towards the cockpit, over it, across and back down, using body position and breath to start any manoeuvre, then controlling with BC’s. This all went well so far…

…then it came to swimming out over the drop off and holding position(s) in the water column, at 8m (I think), then dropping down a metre, up a metre etc, we struggled with this a bit at times. Then it was back over the shelf to launch a DSMB, that went ok until my reg free flowed, and I went to the surface… Kelly retrieved for me, and came up ok, until about 3m when she also hit the surface a little before planned…

‘So, how do you think that went?’ to which I could honestly respond that we had done a pretty good job of demonstrating the issues we have. A good 2 hours was spent discussing various aspects of the dive, I won’t go into all the detail here, but we kitted up for the next dive with a specific set of skills to perform concentrating on the areas we had concerns over – e.g. we were happy using buoyancy skills to navigate obstacles etc. and during general swimming about, but less confident in open water doing ascents, and with DSMB’s. Confidence was a ‘skill’ we talked plenty about, and one Mark helped us with a lot.

Second dive started as the first, but DSMB’s up straight away (no problems) then over the drop off where we held in the column at 8m. We would then take it in turns to pass over our DSMB and sink to 9m, then rise to 7m, returning to 8m, using buoyancy techniques. This all went well and was beginning to come together. We did some other exercises, then it was time for the ascent. We started at our depth of about 7m, and went up 1m at a time, holding the depth, before proceeding upwards another 1m until we finally got to the surface. At the start of the course I would not have believed we could have done this, but we both did. The dive therefore finished with us feeling considerably better than the first.

Time to purge our tanks down to 50 bar and do a weight check. We both lost 2Kg to this, so that will help us even more for next time. A thorough debrief followed, and we talked over all the things we can take away and try on our dives.

From the course, I think we got:
• An increase in confidence;
• A demonstration that we can do these things;
• A loss of 2Kg each from the belt;
• A set of skills that we can practice on future dives;
• A different way of thinking.

We can highly recommend this course, the above report really only does scratch at what we covered. So a big thank you to YD for making me aware of this course, and an even bigger thank you to Mark for the course and helping us to improve our diving skills.

Daniel