The first dive of the course is the PPB or the Peak Performance Buoyancy Dive.
Firstly, we did the Buoyancy check. This is to see how much weight I need to keep myself neutrally bouyant in the water. I performed this by deflating my BCD fully, slowly; then take a big breath and hope that I float with the water at my eye level. If not, I would add or take off weight to achieve this. I ended up taking 2kg of weight.
Once that is over, we descend and swim slowly to find a nice open sandy area where we can sharpen up our fin pivoting skills. Fin pivots are very useful when you want to take pictures underwater so that you could relax yourself in your desired position without damaging any of the marine life.
Later on we did some hovering, to brush up my skills on that. The trick is to use your lung capacity, by breathing in and out to adjust your bouyancy instead of your BCD. When you are in the right position, just take small breaths continuosly. This keeps you in the same place. We tested this by going through a ball obstacle. So we had to swim towards the ball, once we're close enough we take a big breath to go over the ball; and after we've past the ball exhale deeply.
All those skills only took about 30 minutes; for the rest of the dive we just looked at some fish and use all of our buoyancy skills to dive smoothly and gracefully.
Firstly, we did the Buoyancy check. This is to see how much weight I need to keep myself neutrally bouyant in the water. I performed this by deflating my BCD fully, slowly; then take a big breath and hope that I float with the water at my eye level. If not, I would add or take off weight to achieve this. I ended up taking 2kg of weight.
Once that is over, we descend and swim slowly to find a nice open sandy area where we can sharpen up our fin pivoting skills. Fin pivots are very useful when you want to take pictures underwater so that you could relax yourself in your desired position without damaging any of the marine life.
Later on we did some hovering, to brush up my skills on that. The trick is to use your lung capacity, by breathing in and out to adjust your bouyancy instead of your BCD. When you are in the right position, just take small breaths continuosly. This keeps you in the same place. We tested this by going through a ball obstacle. So we had to swim towards the ball, once we're close enough we take a big breath to go over the ball; and after we've past the ball exhale deeply.
All those skills only took about 30 minutes; for the rest of the dive we just looked at some fish and use all of our buoyancy skills to dive smoothly and gracefully.