HOW TO "HOVER" | SCUBA DIVING SKILLS

The hover! So this is one of the scuba skills you're going to learn during your paddy open water course. It's a skill that you're going to take with you throughout your scuba diving career because it's something that you're always going to be improving on. The first thing you want to do is remove all the air from your BCD and that is because we are going to be using our lungs first to see if we can find neutral buoyancy with just the aid of inflating our lungs and deflating our So we're going to release the air from our BCD and lay flat on the ground. We're not going to be doing this in reality but this is just a practice skill. We're then going to spread our legs wide at the back and our arms out wide so we're creating that nice balance in the water. We're then going to take a nice deep breath in, inflate our lungs as though we're inflating a balloon and this is where you'll find you'll start to rise. As you rise you might find your position starts to change. What happens here is your legs start to drop. Be aware of that when you're performing your skill. All you need to do is use the upper part of your body to lean forward. So use the weight of the tank to push you back into a horizontal position. Once you're here you can then concentrate on your breathing. So you have your position correct you just now need to take a nice deep breath in, nice deep breath out, in and out. Find a breathing rhythm and you want to be doing this without moving your body. We're just floating in space. We're trying to learn the art of hovering in the water just as a fish does. Maybe when you go scuba diving just check out the fish, check how still they are in the water. They're hardly moving, staring at you like what are you, where are you? So the aim is to mimic the fish and I breathe in and out without moving my body until you'll find I hit the ground. This is a sign that I'm too negative and my lungs are not big enough to give me neutral buoyancy. So if my lungs are not big enough I need a little bit of help from my BCD. Okay and this is what your BCD is for, it's to be used secondly. Okay so what I'm going to do is add two puffs of air. I mean it might be that you might need a couple of more puffs. Better to add little at a time rather than one big burst because if you add one big burst you start to lose control. It might be too much and you become too positive. So two puffs of air to my BCD and I'm going to repeat the exercise. So I'm going to lay flat, take a nice deep breath in again, rise up, you find my legs start to dip so I'm losing my position. So I'm going to get myself back into a horizontal position and again I'm going to concentrate on my breathing. Find a breathing rhythm in and out and you find when you breathe in you go up slightly, when you breathe out you're going down slightly. So that's okay you're meant to be moving slightly, that's going to happen and this just means that you're not holding your breath which remember is the most important rule of diving. So you want to get to the point, it might be that you have to repeat the exercise a few times, you might have to add a little bit of air to your BCD, it might be that you've accidentally added too much, you need to release it. So you're going to complete this exercise until you find that nice neutral position in the water. Just going up slightly as you breathe in and breathing out, going down slightly as you breathe out. Two things to remember during this exercise is using your lungs first and foremost. So be aware of what your lungs are doing as you're breathing in and what's happening when you're breathing out. How are you moving? Are your lungs big enough to give you that nice neutral position in the water? Play around with it as well. Float from side to side, feel your body moving in the water, see how this is changing when you breathe in, when you breathe out. This is probably something that you'll find quite difficult at the beginning, but I promise you it does get easier and you will find it becomes second nature the more you do it. So again, practice, practice, practice. It allows things to become second nature to your body, so that's the aim is to keep practicing. See you next time buddies!