Scuba Skills:
Improve Buoyancy, Control, and Confidence
The essential techniques every diver needs to control the dive—not just survive it.
These are the baseline skills. The ones you need to be safe, stable, and ready for anything underwater.
Whether you’re diving from a boat, a shore, or in a cave system, the ability to control your buoyancy, manage your breathing, help a buddy, or descend without stress doesn’t just make you a better diver—it makes you a capable one. These aren’t “nice to have” techniques. These are the non-negotiables.
If you want to feel calm and competent underwater, this is where it starts.
Buoyancy & Weighting: How to Calculate Proper Weighting for Scuba Diving
Before you can control your buoyancy, you need to get your weighting right. This guide walks through pre-dive and post-dive weight checks, how to calculate your exact ballast needs, and how improper weighting affects everything from your gas usage to your ability to hold a safety stop.
Balanced Rig: Understanding Proper Weighting
A Balanced Rig means you’re carrying only enough weight to offset your gas use—so even if your BCD fails, you can swim up without ditching anything. This guide explains how to calculate proper weighting, when ditchable weights make sense, and how to think about real-world gear limitations when building a safe, streamlined setup.
Trim and Body Positioning for Scuba Divers
Get your body flat, your fins up, and your balance dialed in. Trim isn’t about looking good—it’s about diving smart and staying stable.
Controlled Descents: How to Start Your Dive Smoothly and Safely
Don’t crash to the bottom. This guide covers slow, steady descents with early equalization, proper trim, and team awareness.
Recreational Decompression & Safety Stops
Every dive involves decompression—whether or not you have a stop obligation. This guide explains why “no-decompression dive” is a misleading term, how safety stops and staged ascents reduce DCS risk, and why a slow, disciplined ascent matters on every dive.
How to Perform a Proper Safety Stop
A solid stop finishes the dive with control. Here’s how to hold 15–20 feet without bobbing, finning, or grabbing a line.
Mask Clearing and Regain Control Without Panic
A full guide to clearing your mask while hovering in trim—plus what to do when your mask floods completely or gets kicked off.
Free Flowing Regulator at Depth: What to Do & How to Prevent It
A free-flowing regulator at depth is one of those situations that can rapidly go from annoying to dangerous—especially in cold water or when you're far from the surface. The risk of a complete gas loss is real, and every diver should know how to respond when it happens.
How to Share Air While Scuba Diving
In an out-of-air situation, you need to act with clarity and control. Learn both major air sharing methods and when to use them.
Adopting DIR Principles in Recreational Diving
You don’t need to be a tech diver to benefit from the DIR approach. This guide covers how recreational divers can apply DIR principles like standardization, streamlined gear, strong buoyancy and trim, and structured gas planning to improve safety, control, and team coordination on every dive.
Solo Diving: When It’s Taught, What You Need, and Why It’s Controversial
Solo diving is taught by some agencies and practiced by a small subset of experienced divers—but it's a hotly debated topic in the dive community. This page explores what solo diving is, the gear and training it demands, why some divers choose it, and why others, including myself, believe it undermines core safety principles. If you're considering it, read this first.
The Starting Point for All Other Skills
You don’t need to be perfect at these skills—you just need to be honest about where you are and commit to improving them. Every advanced skill, from back kicks to midwater SMB deployment, depends on these basics.
If you’re diving regularly, these are the six things to check in on. If you’re just coming back to diving, this is exactly where to start.