Is Your Diving Equipment to Blame?

Would anyone like to take a guess at how many times I hear statements like, “My buoyancy is bad because my BCD doesn’t fit right”? I hear statements like this many times, from divers of all levels. They blame their poor performance, lack of awareness, bad trim/buoyancy on equipment problems. But the real problem lies in their lack of personal diving skill.

Certainly, ill-fitting or malfunctioning dive gear can affect one’s diving performance. When I was a new diver, between 100-200 total dives, I was quick to blame my gear for not having good performance on my dives. For example, I didn’t have full awareness of where my buddy was or what he was doing and we eventually got separated (multiple times I should add). I would blame this on my leaking mask distracting me. My dive store loved me, because they sold me 10 masks (at a 1000% markup I’m sure). However, the true blame fell solely on my personal deficiency in competent diving skills and general diving comfort. That is, I didn’t have enough awareness to be able to multi-task in order to pay attention to my buddy and clear my mask at the same time.

The truth is that we, as divers, can not allow equipment to replace want can be over come with skill. When we get a new piece of scuba diving equipment, this should have very little affect on how we perform on our dives. This is why we do practice dives when we make equipment changes. This is why it is important for us to get familiar with our equipment prior to doing any big dives.

This is also why we should standardize our equipment. While I mostly dive in the cold waters of the Great Lakes, I have enjoyed many diving trips to warm water destinations like Hawaii, Grand Cayman and cave diving in Mexico just to name a couple. What I’ve found is that my rig works the same in all types of diving. The only thing that changed was I didn’t have to wear a hood, gloves, or thick undergarments. A diver’s skill must be to a point that when making small changes to equipment (like adding thicker undergarments, gloves, hood, etc.) there is very little difference to their performance when compared to their normal gear.

So let’s think about the big picture. If you think there is something holding you back from achieving good diving skills, that thing most likely is not your equipment. It’s probably that thing between your ears. Let’s not blame our poor performance on our gear. Instead, let’s take the time to go out and practice in order to improve our comfort and competency in the water. This will help you handle small equipment changes that you may make.

Dive Safe,
Duane Johnson
Precision Diving

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