Your BCD Is Not an Elevator
Benjamin Hadfield Apr 06, 2026
Your BCD Is Not an Elevator
A slightly loving rant about better diving, calmer diving, and not being “that diver”
By Benjamin Hadfield, Instructor Trainer – Stuart Scuba
There are two kinds of divers in the world.
The first kind looks effortless underwater. Calm. Flat. Relaxed. Like they were born neutrally buoyant and personally mentored by sea turtles.
The second kind looks like they are losing an argument with gravity, their gear, and their own knees.
This article is for the second group. Which, by the way, included almost all of us at some point.
At Stuart Scuba, I care a lot less about how cool you look on the boat and a lot more about how calm, capable, and helpful you are underwater. Good diving is not flashy. It is smooth. Predictable.Proceedure and Team-oriented. It is the kind of diving where your buddy or team actually wants to dive with you again.
So let’s talk about some best practices that make diving safer, easier, more fun, and a whole lot less chaotic.
Team diving beats the “buddy system” when the buddy system becomes vague
I’m going to say something mildly controversial: the buddy system sucks.
Too many divers hear “buddy system” and translate it as, “We splashed from the same boat, entered the same ocean, and at some point today I saw Steve.” That is not buddy diving. That is two independent vacations happening near the same reef.
The phrase “same ocean, same dive” creeps in because the standard gets sloppy. A real dive team is different. A team has a shared plan, shared awareness, shared expectations, and most importantly, shared proximity. If something goes wrong, the other diver is actually there to help, not waving encouragingly from another zip code.
That matters because DAN data have repeatedly shown how often ordinary problems become serious when divers are separated or poorly coordinated. In one DAN case summary, the organization states that 40 percent of fatalities involve buddy separation. In DAN’s broader fatality analysis of nearly 1,000 recreational diver deaths, running out of breathing gas was the leading trigger at 41 percent. Those two numbers should make every diver pause: a lot of emergencies are not Hollywood emergencies. They are basic problems that go bad fast when divers are too far apart, not communicating, or not functioning like a real team.
And as dives get more complicated, vagueness gets more expensive. DAN has reported an increasing trend of fatalities in technical and especially rebreather diving, and DAN has also highlighted that breathing the wrong gas at depth remains one of the most common preventable causes of death in technical diving. In other words, complexity does not forgive sloppy teamwork; it punishes it. That does not mean every technical accident is caused by “failure in team diving,” and I will not pretend DAN says that. But it does mean that weak team discipline becomes a major force multiplier for bad outcomes as task loading, gas planning, decompression obligation, and equipment complexity rise.
So what does team diving look like in practice?
It means you are close enough to donate gas without writing a travel itinerary. It means you know each other’s hand signals, gas rules, ascent plan, turn pressure, lost-diver procedure, and what counts as “thumb the dive and go up.” It means you are not just nearby. You are useful.
That mindset is one of the biggest things we reinforce in Stuart Scuba classes, especially as divers move into an Advanced Diver Class. More depth, more current, more navigation, more task loading, and more decision-making only work well when divers stop thinking like tourists and start thinking like a team.
The ascent starts before you move up
A lot of divers treat the ascent like the credits rolling after the movie. The dive is over, everybody goes up, cue the boat snacks.
Nope.
The ascent is still part of the dive, and it is one of the parts where sloppy buoyancy can do the most damage.
Here is the rule: dump gas before you start ascending.
Do not use your inflator to begin the ascent. Your inflator is not your launch button. Your BCD is not an elevator. If your ascent begins with you pressing the inflate button and hoping for the best, you are basically asking expanding gas and physics to co-captain the dive. Physics is excellent, but it is not especially forgiving.
DAN notes that during ascent, the gas in a BCD or drysuit expands and can make a diver rise faster and faster if it is not vented, which is how controlled ascents turn into NASCAR (without all the left turns). DAN’s guidance is straightforward: vent excess gas during ascent, monitor ascent rate, and maintain control to reduce the risk of uncontrolled ascent, pulmonary barotrauma, and arterial gas embolism.
A proper ascent looks like this:
Stop. Get stable. Launch DSMB
Vent gas first.
Begin a gentle fin and moving upward.
Keep breathing normally.
Continue venting as needed as the gas expands.
Ascend slowly and deliberately, especially in the shallow zone.
If there is a line, use it. If there is a slope or wall, use the visual reference. If there is nothing, then your brain needs to be the adult in the room. Watch your depth, watch your rate, and stay ahead of the expansion curve instead of reacting late.
Good ascent control is not a decoration. It is a foundational skill.
The safety stop is where grown-up diving happens
I love the safety stop because it reveals everything.
It reveals who has buoyancy.
It reveals who is overweighted.
It reveals who is relaxed.
It reveals who has been secretly using their fins like ceiling fans the whole dive.
A good safety stop is not just “three minutes because my instructor told me to.” It is a chance to practice control, composure, and precision in the most pressure-sensitive part of the water column. DAN has written that the shallow zone is critically important for decompression stress, that the classic three-minute stop is good, and that it is even better when extended as gas supply and conditions allow. DAN also notes there is no magic stop duration; three to five minutes or more may be reasonable depending on the effort and exposure, and prolonging shallow stops is “cheap insurance.”
So yes, longer is often better, provided you have the gas, conditions, and control to do it comfortably.
Now let’s talk position, because this matters.
I want divers doing safety stops in a proper diver position, not hanging vertically like a confused fishing bobber.
Why? Not because horizontal position magically makes you look cooler. It helps because it improves stability, reduces unnecessary effort, makes depth control easier, and keeps you from yo-yoing in the shallowest and most pressure-sensitive part of the dive. DAN’s trim guidance emphasizes that good buoyancy and trim mean being able to hold position motionless in a horizontal posture, and DAN’s decompression guidance emphasizes that time spent shallow, with low exertion, is one of the biggest decompression safety buffers available to recreational divers. DAN also notes that mild, low-intensity activity is appropriate during ascent and stop phases, and that being relatively warm during the ascent and stop phase promotes inert gas elimination.
That is why “learning to hang” matters so much.
If you can relax, breathe normally, stay flat, hold depth, and stop fiddling with every piece of gear every seven seconds, you are building the platform for bigger dives later. Deep dives. Current dives. Navigation dives. Nitrox dives. More demanding dives all start with a diver who can just be still.
If your safety stop looks calm, your whole diving future gets bigger.
That is one of the clearest gains divers get from a Stuart Scuba Advanced Buoyancy class. Better trim, better breath control, better awareness, better gas use, less stress, and a lot less reef-kicking interpretive dance.
Proper weighting is judged at the end of the dive, not the giant stride
This one is huge!
A lot of divers judge weighting at the beginning of the dive. Big mistake.
The beginning of your dive lies to you.
At the start of the dive, your tank is heavier, your exposure suit is fluffier, and half the dive boat is still pretending they “always use this much weight.” Proper weighting is really judged at the end of the dive, at the safety stop, with a near-empty cylinder.
DAN repeatedly emphasizes that the amount of weight you use should allow you to descend, not cause you to sink, and that buoyancy changes during the dive as your wetsuit compresses and your tank becomes more buoyant. DAN also notes that overweighting forces divers to carry more gas in the BC, which tends to push them more upright, increase drag, increase effort, and increase gas consumption.
So here is the standard I teach:
At the end of the dive, at your safety stop, you should be able to hold position calmly with very little gas in your BC. Not “absolutely zero for every configuration and every suit,” because some setups still require small adjustments. But if you are floating there with a BC full enough to host a small birthday party, you are probably overweighted.
That is the point many divers miss. Through the dive you get lighter. If you are weighted for the beginning, you may be wrong for the part that matters most.
And if you are overweighted, you usually pay for it twice:
first on the descent, because you rush and overcorrect,
and then at the end, because your ascent and stop get sloppy.
If You “Can’t Get Down,” It Usually Isn’t a Weight Problem
It’s a technique problem wearing a lead belt
Let’s talk about descent, because this is one of the most common problems we see with newer divers.
We constantly have divers come onto the boat and say, with complete confidence,
“I need 28 pounds and a steel tank to get down.”
Now, unless you’re in a drysuit, built like a beach ball, or trying to stay planted in a 10-knot current while searching for pirate treasure, that is probably not a “getting down” problem.
That is a technique problem.
Or, as I prefer to call it, a bad 70’s disco song with pockets.
And the scary part is this idea gets passed around way too often. We have seen inexperienced instructors teach new divers that if they are struggling on the surface, the answer must be more lead. So the diver learns the wrong lesson right from the beginning:
If in doubt, add more weight.
That is how you end up with nonsense.
I once had a diver show up asking for 40 pounds of weight to get down.
Forty. Pounds.
This diver was 5’8”, 165 pounds, wearing a 3 mm wetsuit.
That was not proper weighting. That was a felony.
At that point, you are not helping someone descend. You are turning them into an anchor with fins.
And that is exactly where a lot of divers get stuck. They think they have a descent problem, when what they really have is a chain of bad habits stacked on top of each other.
Usually, “I can’t get down” really means:
“I’m tense, I’m breathing high in my chest, I still have gas trapped in my BC, I’m not fully exhaling, and I’m trying to descend while having a personal disagreement with physics.”
That diver does not need more lead. That diver needs a better process.
The best practice is simple:
Relax.
Tension keeps you at the surface.
Exhale.
A full chest is buoyancy. If you want to descend, you have to let some of that go.
Hold your inflator hose high and vertical.
Not kind of high. Not mostly high. Actually high.
Dump all of the gas out of the BC.
And I mean all of it.
Keep the dump open and do not stop venting until you are below the surface and actually descending.
Continue exhaling gently and naturally.
Equalize early and often.
That is how a descent should begin.
Because most descent problems are not caused by a mysterious flaw in the ocean. They are caused by tension, breath holding, poor venting, and too much weight.
And here is where the story always comes full circle: the diver who says they need 28 pounds and a steel tank to get down is usually the same diver who gets to the bottom and immediately has to put gas back into the BC just to stay off the reef.
That should tell you everything.
If it takes a ridiculous amount of weight to get you down, and then it takes a ridiculous amount of gas in your BC to keep you from crashing into the bottom, the problem is not the reef. The problem is the system.
Too much weight creates a mess. You descend too hard, so you add too much gas. Then your trim gets worse. Then your body position gets sloppy. Then you kick more than you need to. Then your gas consumption goes up. Then the whole dive feels harder than it should.
And by the time you get to the end of the dive, when the tank is lighter, all that extra lead is still there making your life miserable at the safety stop.
That is why proper weighting is not about how you feel at the beginning of the dive.
It is about whether you are correctly balanced at the end of the dive, with a nearly empty tank, holding a calm, controlled safety stop with little or no gas in your BC.
That is proper weighting.
Not “whatever finally got me under.”
This is one of the biggest breakthroughs we see in a Stuart Scuba Advanced Diver Class. Divers go from fighting the first five minutes of every dive to finally realizing that descent is not supposed to feel like a wrestling match. Once the weighting is right, the technique is right, and the trim is right, the whole dive gets easier.
And that is really the goal.
Not to force yourself underwater.
To slip underwater calmly, comfortably, and in control.
Weight distribution matters just as much as total weight
Even if the amount of weight is correct, the placement can still be wrong.
A well-balanced diver in proper trim should be able to get into diver position, close their eyes, breathe normally, and not roll left or right, pitch head-up or feet-down, or constantly need to correct. Diving should feel balanced, not like you are transporting a couch down a staircase.
DAN recommends distributing weight as equally as possible side to side and adjusting trim with weight placement and tank position. DAN also notes that a level profile is more hydrodynamic and that good trim means being able to hover, move, and perform skills without changing depth by more than a few feet.
That is the real goal: stress-free diving.
Not survival diving.
Not “I made it back to the boat somehow” diving.
Relaxed diving.
Because relaxed divers make better decisions. They use less gas. They are more aware. They protect the reef better. They are better teammates. And frankly, they enjoy the dive more.
The classes that make all of this easier
If you read all this and thought, “Yep, that’s me, I have definitely used my inflator like a panic button,” good news: this is fixable.
That is exactly why we teach the progression we do at Stuart Scuba.
A good Advanced Diver Class helps you grow beyond basic certification and into real control. You get better at planning, awareness, ascent and descent technique, buoyancy under stress, navigation, and working with other divers as an actual team.
A Nitrox class is one of the smartest next steps for many divers because it helps you understand breathing gas more clearly and can create a useful decompression safety buffer when nitrox is used conservatively with air limits. This is your secret to creating a better value in diving. The most expensive part of any dive is the first step in the water. Extending that bottom time with Nitrox makes for a more enjoyable and safe dive, BUT also a LONGER dive!
And an Advanced Buoyancy class may be the single most underrated course in diving, because it improves everything else. Trim. Weighting. Control. Gas consumption. Reef awareness. Safety stops. Team skills. Confidence. The diver who hovers well usually does everything else better too.
Final thought from Benjamin
The goal is not to look technical.
The goal is not to collect cards or merit badges.
The goal is not to be the diver with the most clips, gadgets, or opinions.
The goal is to be calm in the water.
Calm enough to descend without drama.
Calm enough to stay off the reef without bicycle-kicking.
Calm enough to hold a proper safety stop.
Calm enough to help your teammate when something goes wrong.
Calm enough that bigger, better dives become the natural next step.
That is the kind of diver we train and build at Stuart Scuba.
Because the ocean is amazing.
And it is a lot more amazing when your BCD is not trying to send you into low orbit.
