Wow!  We had a great time up at Blue Lagoon yesterday.  Wade proved once again that he is a master at the smoker and grill.  The wild boar and grass fed brisket were awesome and no one went away hungry.  While the weather threatened and delivered on the ride up to Huntsville, the weather at the Lagoon was nice and we had clear skies in the afternoon. 

Practice your buoyancy skills locally…

I am often asked “do you still enjoy diving at Blue Lagoon?”  I think what they actually mean is, that since I have been all over the world what can I possible find to do at Blue Lagoon or any local diving venue for that matter.  What they fail to understand is that local diving affords you the opportunity to practice and maintain your skills.  There is also a social aspect to local diving which I have often described as a barbecue interrupted by diving.

In order to keep the dives interesting you have to go in with a plan or purpose.  In my earlier diving days I used local diving as a way to improve my navigational skills.  It was a challenge to find all of the objects in the lake and return to the beach without surfacing.  These skills have served me well over the years.  To keep these skills sharp, I still practice underwater navigation in the lakes. 

You can use your time underwater at these local venues to improve your buoyancy.  In an earlier article I talked about using the underwater boats as a fixed point of reference and forcing yourself to hover in place.  Another drill is to swim like a slalom skier maintaining neutral buoyancy and proper trim while swimming in and around rocks, trees, stumps, etc. 

Pick objects on the bottom and swim around them, maintaining your trim and placement in the water.  Work on making the turns without using your hands for steering.  As you improve, try making sharper turns and then introduce changes in depth to your drills.  Remember the first rule of scuba, breath continuously.  Some people start concentrating too much on the drills and maintaining neutral buoyancy that they start violating this rule.  Keep breathing but use your breathing to help you achieve these depth changes (unless you are on a rebreather of course). 

As you do these drills, work on not kicking up the bottom.  The tighter your turns, the more you will need to be in a bent leg diving position using “helicopter turns” and small very specific kicks to move through your course.  If you are unfamiliar with these turns or this style of diving, then you might find an Advanced Buoyancy Control class useful. 

The group diving with me this weekend got to experience this type of diving first hand as we wove through the boulder fields around the lake.  Of course they skipped a few turns because they thought I was just doubling back, lost.  Little did they know we were heading back to our entry point 50 more minutes in the future.