Quote: (Originally Posted by dan@scuba-training.net)
If it takes you more than 30 minutes to get your buoyancy figured out, I will take your NAUI card, your birthday, shave your head and send you back to the grunts.
(Joe is an associate of mine, fellow former Marine, and an excellent diver.)
(He will NOT be making his first CCR dive with 10kg of extra lead, either!)
I should have said "with a dry suit and thinsulate / weasel. With a wet suit you wont need that much but I was assuming the water temp would be similar to UK in North America?
When i first dived the CCR i couldn't believe just how much I had previously used lung capacity to control my diving. I like to think I was pretty good at buoyancy control on OC but in some ways it just made things worse because I instinctively tried to use breathing to do everything.
See a bolder in front of you, breath in to go up and over the bolder, then head butt bolder because you don't go up AT ALL
Thats pretty much my recollection of early CCR diving.
Also there is this thing called minimum loop. This is keeping the volume of gas in the counter lungs at fractionally above what you need for a breath. It takes a while to get used to keeping the volume down to this level. Once you do then it has the same advantages as being correctly weighted in that there is less volume of gas to move you around during ascent.
The Manual is available here.
http://www.apdiving.com/downloads/manuals/
Have fun
ATB
Mark Chase