The DIVER buoyancy challenge

One of the hardest things to master is buoyancy.  If you had a good Open Water instructor then this skill was drilled into you from Day 1 and for very good reasons. 
If you are constantly losing your buoyancy underwater you put yourself and your dive buddy in some serious danger.  A couple of immediate things come to mind:

• Damage to reefs by your fins, body, gadgets on your BCD
• Silting out the water and making what may already be low visibility even lower
• risking an uncontrolled rapid ascent
• Constantly grabbing the ocean floor for stability…remember a LOT of little fishes like to lay just below the sand on the ocean floor!

These are just some of the things that make buoyancy control so important.  For many months I dove so over-weighted that I had to fully inflate my BCD on the surface to stay at eye level and then when I shot down to the bottom I had to inflate my BCD to insane levels to stay of the bottom.  Neutral?  HA!  I ended up doing a buoyancy check in shallower water and found out that I was diving with over 4 kg (8 lbs) of excessive weight! 

Over at DIVER magazine they devise a little game or obstacle course where divers were challenged and then judged on their ability to maintain good buoyancy under stress.  One of the obstacles was simply a kids toy where you put a triangle in the triangle shaped hole.  This exercise was meant to simulate a diver messing with their camera or other dive gear and forgetting to breathe properly.  Other activities included swimming through plastic squares at varying depths to simulate swim-throughs and wrecks.

A Sherriff's department in Laclede, Idaho wanted to train their divers on good buoyancy while under stress so they came up with a unique form of training:

Now you may not be doing swim-throughs on an obstacle course or carving up a pumpkin on Halloween but that doesn’t mean you can’t work on your buoyancy every time you go diving.  Of all the things I am thinking of during a dive – breathing, navigation, looking at the scenery – buoyancy is top on the list.

How good is your buoyancy?  Do you find safety stops at 3 m (10 ft) about as fun as going to the doctor for a shot?  Stop in and tell us your story!