Levitating Luke and Peak Performance Buoyancy

The Lotus Position

As part of the dive trip to Kona, Luke participated in the Peak Performance Buoyancy (PPB) training offered by Kona Diving Company.  Hailey was the instructor for the two dive in-water portion of the course and I was teamed the two of them to complete the group.  We dived at Windows and Aquarium. As Hailey remarked, “every dive destination in the world has a site called ‘the Aquarium’” and I recalled just such a site in the Channel Islands of California and a reef bearing that moniker in the upper Florida Keys.

Achieving near perfect buoyancy is greatly emphasized in the course as the foundation to becoming a competent diver.  Gone are the days of having students weighted to be negatively buoyant for stability on the seafloor and then adding air to be buoyancy compensator to become positively buoyant.  The predictable outcome was divers who plowed the bottom of the sea.  Correct weighting and buoyancy control as a means of being an efficient diver seem to be the goal of today’s training protocols.  It is the foundation of personal achievement in programs such as those that come from the cave exploration and mapping experience of Global Underwater Explorers. 

I have seen over-weighted divers flailing in a movement of arms and legs as they bounce across the reef, leaving a path of broken coral as if blazing a trail for others to follow.  They are more of an air powered anchor with fins rather than efficient diver.  Their disturbance of the habitat is not intentional; the divers don’t set out to destroy the experience they so highly prize.  Rather it appears to be the result of poor fundamentals, inadequate techniques, and lack of practice from infrequent diving.  Training like PPB addresses the first two of the three factors.

The in-water training put Luke through a series of exercises, which started with properly weighting him to be neutrally buoyant when he exhaled at the surface and progressed with exercises to becoming a streamlined and efficient diver.  The first exercise involved an evaluation of his underwater swimming technique to eliminate things like sculling to maintain position. The second exercise involved picking up weight pouches, practiced over a sand bottom so as to eliminate the possibility of damage to the habitat, starting with a single one-pound pouch and progressing to a multiple pouches for a total weight of five pounds.  Next, Luke practiced maintaining vertical and horizontal hover for safety.  The culminating activity--assuming the stationary lotus position in the water column for as long as possible-- seemed to bring all the skills together.  Hailey coached Luke through each exercise using and signals and notes scribbled on a dive slate.  Touring the reef between exercises allowed Luke to incorporate techniques he learned into his routine movement.  I tangentially took part in some of the exercises and noticed a marginal improvement in my own technique.  I guess a return to fundamentals is sometimes in order to rediscover what we know, what we have forgotten, and to eliminate those little nuances of inefficiency that have crept into our technique.

 

Picking up the weight pouch

Luke did great.  He held the lotus position for more than 80 seconds, a very respectable time.  He appeared to pluck the weight pouches from the bottom as if they were very fragile without disturbing a single grain of sand.  He held depth at the safety stop as well as I, a diver of thirty four years.  Most noticeable was the easy efficiency with which he moved through the water, like he was born to it, a natural merteen.  The payoff was the remarkable improvement in air consumption, extending his time underwater by at least 20 percent compared to the beginning of the week.  He is the kind of diver with whom I am pleased to share my dive adventures. Besides, like I said above, you have to use the skills to keep them perfect.

Moving efficiently across the reef

Hover at the 15-foot safety stop