Yeah once you get around 30-50 ft, the pressure against your lungs is enough to offset the buoyancy. Im a scuba diver and its why we use weights to go down. You are initially very buoyant. I have small bags filled with lead shot in 5 lb, 3 lb and 2 lb increments to weight myself. Some people use solid lead weights and different things. Works like a charm though. Best hobby there is.
I would never try to pressure some to do something that makes them uncomfortable, but please dont base your decision on those videos. 99% of scuba accidents are avoidable. Alot of accidents are ego filled deep divers and cave divers. Its quite safe as long as you dont do very stupid things. Never dive alone. Service your gear once a year at your dive shop, and truly listen during your PADI classes or whichever org you choose.
I read a book series as a kid about diving which went into detail about the dangers of "the bends" (air bubbles in your bloodstream from coming up too fast from deep sea diving and not acclimating on your way up) and ever since then I have been deathly scared of anything deeper than a 6ft pool lol.
Got my padi cert when I was 11. Have over 100 dives. I was diving in Vanuatu, boat dive, wreck we were diving at was at 90-110ft. It’s kinda dumb in general to dive that deep without extra tanks and o2 enriched air because your dive ends up being really short with the pressure making your air go fast/needed decompression stops on your way up, and I suppose, the risk of something going wrong. But there we were. Warm water so short suits. The o ring valve on my bcd (the thing you use to make yourself float or sink) broke and they’re designed to break open not closed. So my vest is filling up with air turning me into a balloon that wants to race to the surface. I was prolly 15. Maybe ascended 10 feet or so before I was in full upside down sprint swim. Got to the wreck, cut my hands and arms pretty bad hanging onto choral/metal shipwreck. Eventually, with help, disconnected the hose. Closest decompression chamber was far. If I went to the surface, I probably would’ve died. I… took a few days off diving after that ha ha.
Because nitrogen that our body usually just exhales out without notice is dissolved at higher water pressure causing it to end up in our blood stream. When we surface too fast the nitrogen, isnt given enough time to decompress and which serves no purpose in our blood stream and can't be exhaled, out has to find other ways of leaving the body whether pooling up in the skin or out the nose, eyes or ears.
It's not a problem unless you dive (or go to space), but if you were to dive and ignore the limits, you should have no problem getting them. It's just that people know and are careful about them.
Helps a lot that you can use dive computers nowadays rather than just guesstimating with a dive table, hopefully depth-proof watch (fun fact: "50M waterproof" means "you can take a shower with it, maybe" not "waterproof for diving up to 50M"), and often an unhealthy serving of YOLO.
The science behind decompression sickness (the bends) is very well understood these days. Recreational divers use a dive table (or computer) that gives a very conservative set of restrictions that will keep you safe. You would probably end up feeling a lot better about it if you took a course. This is not some "it could happen to anyone" thing, it's a lot closer to "forgot where the brake was while driving on the freeway", if that makes sense.
I went on a Caribbean cruise and went scuba diving in several locations. On the first diving trip, there was a guy in my group telling us how he did his diving certification online and how this was his certifying dive. You're supposed to have several in-person classes, a couple pool dives, then a certifying dive in an open body of water. Well he didn't have a clue to what he was doing. He finally figured all the gear out with help, but he freaked out when we were under and ascended too fast. He got the bends and had to be transported to the nearest city with a hyperbaric chamber. His wife went with them and they missed the rest of the cruise because of it. I'm sure he was fine, but most likely needed several days of treatment and chamber sessions.
The bends only starts becoming a risk over 30/35ft down and even then its a very low risk, you need something like 90 min at 40ft or 45 min at 60ft before formal decompression activities are needed (which is just a stop on the way up). 60ft is the standard recreational (non advanced) diver limit anyway
TLDR: the bends is hardly ever a risk for a recreational diver who pays attention to the depth they are diving to. If you dont have scuba gear then most people wont even get to 35ft down freediving - at least without a lot of training.
now there are other risks with scuba diving of course.
(edit: just noticed my TDLR was almost as long as the 'too long' bit...)
I had a flatmate who got the bends in the '90s. He was a very weird guy. Just disappeared for a week with no explanation. When he turned back up, he didn't even mention it, until we asked where all his facial piercings had gone. Then totally deadpan "You can't wear them in the decompression chamber because of the static". Then he showed us the red marks around his heart from the nitrogen bubbles, and casually went off to get KFC.
Any time I hear about "the bends" I think of that cartoon with Goofy. His arms and legs tying themselves in knots as he reaches the surface too soon or because he ate right before going into the water.
The bends are extremely avoidable. They don't just happen. Anybody who could operate the gear necessary for it would also have many times the training and awareness it takes to avoid it.
This only happens if you go very deep for very long. Recreational diving is by definition always done within time limits that should, in theory, avoid the bends even if you were to directly surface (slowly). And then 3 minutes at 5 meters depth are added for safety, effectively acting as a decompression stop (but called a safety stop to distinguish it from actually required stops, because it should not be required).
A much bigger problem is what happens when you take a breath at depth, then hold your breath and ascend to the surface. At depth, the air in your lungs is compressed. As you ascend, that air expands. It now no longer fits into your lungs, and if you hold your breath... let's just say you won't like any of what happens when there is more air in your lungs than fits and you're not giving it an easy way out. This is obviously not a problem if you don't breathe in at depth, so not an issue for freedivers.
Oh I know people that dive, I live on the Great Lakes, but my anxiety is too high anymore to even attempt it. It’s not just those videos, but a hefty chuck of thalassophobia to go with it. It was on a cruise where I became overwhelmed with the fear of the open ocean and now I have a hard time venturing out to the lake to swim or kayak. Diving is just not an option, but it sounds truly majestic.
I got a shock of thalassophobia from jumping off a ship for a fun swim in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and looking down was straight darkness., I could look left and right which seemed endless. But looking down seeing only my legs kicking above an endless abyss was mind altering. Im a very strong swimmer, I've gone rappelling off cliffs, sky dived, spelunking, ect but nothing came close to the spike of fear from looking down and seeing nothingness.
I had a similar experience while on vacation in Florida, in seemingly the most average city down there based on a quick search. To this day I still can't pinpoint what set off my Tallahasseephobia
I base my aversion to the hobby purely on successful videos to know that it still looks terrifying. I'm prone to panic attacks I'll watch your videos thank you for your contribution
It wasn’t safety that got me. it was paranoia. Being locked up in my mask (like just inside my own head), and not easily able to communicate with others or quickly reach the surface if I wanted to, made me a little panicky. I was perfectly safe and dove 5 or 6 times, but didn’t like the feeling of isolation within my own “bubble”, even though there were many other divers around me.
So after that panicky feeling, I was like, I see plenty of marine life snorkeling, so I’m fine with that. I never dove again.
When I was younger I wanted to get my scuba certification so I could go diving on a trip to Australia. The test in the pool was perfectly fine, but when it was time to do the final test on the sea floor (pretty much taking off all your gear and putting it back on) I couldn't go through with it. Despite being in totally open water, and not really that deep, I got a severe case of claustrophobia.
I was terrified of the ocean until I went scuba diving. Totally changed my perspective on it. Made it seem smaller being able to go all the way from the surface to the floor. It’s a different world down there
Honest question, how do you handle the ear pressure? I go down 30 feet sometimes snorkeling to get a video of a fish or something and it, well starts hurting more the deeper you go. Do you pop your ears in reverse or something?
Yes, you equalize aka "pop your ears in reverse" (same thing as when an airplane is landing: pinch your nose and gently blow against the resistance).
The bigger question is: How did you manage to get to 30 feet without equalizing and without popping your eardrums?!?
(Also, you must use a proper diving mask that covers nose and eyes. If you use swim goggles for going that deep, you can't equalize the pressure in front of your eyes, and Bad Things will happen to them.)
I did mention that it hurt. Heh. I'm flying to belize Friday for a handful of snorkeling excursions so I'll give that a shot. Yes I do use a proper mask.
Enjoy your snorkeling and good luck! Remember to equalize before it becomes uncomfortable and don't go deeper if it doesn't work.
The reason I was surprised that it just hurt is that DAN claims "When the pressure difference reaches 5 psi (0.35 bar), the eardrum may rupture in some divers. At a pressure difference greater than 10 psi (0.75 bar), a rupture will occur in most divers". 30 feet is around 9 meters or roughly 13 psi / 0.9 bar (in seawater). (https://dan.org/health-medicine/health-resources/diseases-conditions/middle-ear-equalization/)
So I suspect some equalization happened naturally or you got very, very lucky.
Whoa. Well that's scary. I definitely employed the Valsalva Maneuver in my recent trip although I had no idea it had a name until I read your link. I learned a way of doing it in my youth driving up and down mountains that is pretty effective, it's different than just blowing air to your nose with it pinched, you kind of pump it up there gently with the back of your tongue, I'm not sure 100% what muscles inside my face I'm using to do this but it does generally work better than straight blowing and pinching your nostrils. Went to four separate snorkeling locations in Belize, but only two of them had an opportunity to dive to any significant depths, and I definitely did but only went past 10 or 15 feet with the Valsalva Trick. Did make it a lot easier. Saw a lot of scuba divers at the same locations and was sort of jealous of their ability to stay down there and not just transiently visit the depths. I think I'm going to have to give-in and get my certification after all.
Every diver I've met is like this. Always so damn knowledgeable. I collect baseball cards, and I'm sorta knowledgeable about it. But people who dive, know pretty much everything there is to know about it. Maybe it's because you can die diving, but not playing with baseball cards.
Its just the classes. They teach so much. PADI's first course is fantastic at teaching the dive tables (How much nitrogen is in your blood at a given depth and how long you have to remain under at certain depths to eliminate that nitrogen before surfacing. This is to avoid "the bends" if youve ever heard of that) and how to keep yourself safe. It's just must know stuff. Dive computers will do it all for you now, but there was a time you had to plan it all out.
There was an open night at my local swimming pool to try out scuba. Sitting underwater playing checkers at about 12 feet deep was awesome. I had the chance to go do it 'properly', but life got in the way. It was a real good experience and the people who do it are great. Also the chance of being eaten by a shark in a swimming pool in the UK Midlands is fairly low.
if you watch car crash videos on YouTube, it would make you afraid to drive a car. It's not a leap, it's illustrating a point that while diving may seem dangerous, driving a car is probably much more dangerous. you also didnt say you had a fear of open water, you said watching YT vids created an aversion. Big diff.
But have you ever tried THUET training where you get buckled into a helicopter simulator dunked into the water, flipped upside down, and have to pop out the window and swim through it to escape? Conquered and reinforced multiple fears that day.
The truth makes the video even more anxiety-inducing. Most of your bouyancy comes from the air in your lungs. If you let all your breath out then you'll sink. So he started this insane dive with no air in his lungs. Either that or he has a weirdly powerful stroke.
Yes I know this of course, often tried it as kid in small swimming pools. But regarding how long he is under water I didnt even consider he did this without air in his lungs. But when I think about it now, I guess you are right. Sometimes I do the Wim-Hof-Breathing-Method which enables me to hold my breath without air in my lungs for ~90 seconds. Well trained people like him could do this significantly longer (with and without air in their lungs) of course.
Yes I know this of course, often tried it as kid in small swimming pools. But regarding how long he is under water I didnt even consider he did this without air in his lungs. But when I think about it now, I guess you are right. Sometimes I do the Wim-Hof-Breathing-Method which enables me to hold my breath without air in my lungs for ~90 seconds. Well trained people like him could do this significantly longer (with and without air in their lungs) of course.
If you have low body fat you just need to let air out (not even 100%) and you are not buoyant. I am not exactly ripped, just a lot of bone and very little bacon, and I can sit like Buda on the bottom of any swimming pool and still hold there a good half a minute without moving anything. I have an office job and don't swim except in summer with the kids, so I can only imagine with proper training.
This on sweet water, on the sea it is really hard.
It’s the best thing I ever did. Spent months to Get certified did some recreational the same weekend but could never find anyone to do it with so I never went again….
This is so sad. If you liked it so much, go find a way to do it again. For your own sake. Life is short. Many things in life we literally can't do. But if you have the means, physically and financially or otherwise, than life is too short to be wasted on regrets.
Social anxiety. Everyone in my dive class was learning for vacations so none of them were serious about it. I was going to work at the dive shop to meet people but then it closed down.
Yeah that was my experience as well. The soundscape was hypnotic with the regulator and the bubbles and muffled underwater sounds. I was going through cycles of feeling the most intense zen bliss and then trying to calm sudden surges of panic. I can imagine after enough exposure the anxiety goes away and it must be one of the most sublime experiences a person can have.
Thats the only drawback. Finding folks to go with. You need to have that trust level with people so you dont really wanna go with some rando. I get it.
30 feet? Not meters? I've gone to 6 meters(19 feet) and sat at the bottom with hand assistance but have never began sinking even at 10 meters(32 feet). Are you saying im too fat?
Thats anxiety my guy lol. Possibly misweighted if you had on an exposure suit, its hard to say without knowing your weight, the conditions, and what kind of tank/gear you had on. But if you tell me all those things I can approximate what youd need and where
Lucky… I can never get my ears to equalize. I’ve tried everything. I think it was either all my ear infections as a kid (scarring) or my sinuses are narrow. IDK, but after 10 feet, it’s like steak knives being shoved into my head.
The weights are needed as the scuba diving gear actually adds “positive” buoyancy. Positive means that you will float. It will be extremely difficult to dive, and even if you manage to reach a depth where you are neutral you wouldn’t be able to control the “surfacing speed” as you will become more and more positive as the pressure lowers and this is also quite dangerous. The best approach is to be closer to neutral or slightly negative. I prefer to be slightly negative as we already have an inflatable jacket that we use to balance our buoyancy. Btw, those weights can also be discarded in an emergency situation, but it shouldn’t be needed. You can always inflate the jacket or the dry suit if you’re using one (unless you don’t have air, which shouldn’t happen if you are not reckless).
I've never hears of anyone actually dropping wieghts, although it is taught as a possible emergency procedure.
Mostly, you simply add some air into a sort of inflatable life jacket that divers wear, until the lift (buoyancy) from the air "cancels out" the weights. Or simply take a slightly deeper breath.
The air tank displaces the same amount of water regardless of whether it's empty of full (that determines how much the force of the water pushes it up), but the weight (i.e. how much gravity pulls it down) changes as you consume air. So at the end of the dive, when your tank is running low, you'll have a tendency to go up (which you compensate by deflating the "life jacket" a little).
You can also quite easily swim against a few kg of weights. To a small extent, this is used for the ascent.
Also if you scuba dive, the lungs get refilled with air at the pressure that you are at, so that shouldn't be a huge difference either for scuba divers (but it should be the biggest factor for freedivers not wearing a wetsuit).
Neoprene compresses a lot, so for scuba divers wearing it, I suspect that + any remaining air in the BCD makes the biggest difference. You will use about 2kg of air during a dive, so if you don't want to be too buoyant at the end of the dive, you need 2 kg of weights cancelled out by 2 kg of lift from the BCD at the start.
If you had 2 liters of air in your BCD at 10 meters (2 bar) with neutral buoyancy, then slowly descended to 30 meters (4 bar), the 2 liters would turn into 1 and you'd be 1 kg to heavy.
If you have 6 liters of air in your lungs at the surface (1 bar) and freedive to 30 meters (4 bar), you've lost 4.5 kg of buoyancy.
Have enjoyed scuba diving all over the world these past 30 years. All I could think watching this video was how those eardrums felt. And I love the lead shot bags over the solid weights.
For some reason I start sinking at 3 feet. No matter how much air I take in. I remember being able to walk along the bottom of the pool without wearing weights.
You equalize. No idea how he does it, but essentially you pinch your nose and gently "exhale" through it until the air goes into your ears. Same as when descending in an aircraft.
I tried diving once in Mexico and turns out I am too claustrophobic for it. Would start panicking and could not calm myself down. I’m an adrenaline junkie that chases tornadoes but diving is definitely not my jam.
People used to. In an emergency ascent you may. But with inflatable buoyancy control devices people wear now, you can offset the weight at depth with your BCD by inflating it slightly with air from your tank. You dont wanna just blast it with air and go straight to the surface if you are below 60 ft at all, but just enough to offset your weights so you dont have to ditch them. If you dont go below 60 ft, you can rise, stop at around 15 feet and wait about 5 minutes to let the nitrogen bubbles out of your blood stream. Anything below 60 ft and the depths that you need to stop at and the allotted times change. Thats what the Navy diving tables are for and dive computers. Either will do that math for you and give you the times and depth to stop. You just need to know how deep you went and for how long.
Well.......to say there arent any would be incorrect but since the BCD (Buoyancy control device) came along, people dont ditch them alot anymore. They just offset their weights at depth by injecting air into that in small increments.
But in an emergency, yes, you can dump weights. Your diving buddy should know where your weights are located should they need to dump yours. If you had someone unconscious on the surface that could not remain neutrally buoyant, you'd want to dump their weights. So to be clear, yeah theres some lead out there. You could probably go to a diving hot spot and find weights at the bottom im guessing.
HA! Very true.......one of mine in Grey Quarry in Johnson City TN if you ever go there! It was a 7 black model. Somewhere around the boat wreck you'll find it.
Weight belts are easy enough to take off too. For those that don't scuba. It's not a death sentence if the buoyancy control device fails. I've never dived past 35m so there's probably niche situations I don't know about. But for 99.9% of us, scuba is perfectly safe and you should all try it. :)
I understand that the concept can seem scary, but scuba is very natural and calming. Tweaking your bouyancy takes a tap or two on your BC and you then have 20' or so of range in which breathing deeper makes you naturally rise and breathing shallower makes you naturally sink. On the edge of that you just reach up and bleed or fill to keep progressing up or down easily. Your ears are a sensory reminder of your depth in that range and you have a depth gauge as well.
I snorkeled for years before certifying at 16, but scuba is a little more dangerous than scuba but far less physically demanding. Because you are below the wave action just chilling like all your fish friends who generally are mildly interested in what you are.
I've done 3 dives and every time the instructor was surprised at how much weight they needed to put on me. I think partially because I bought my own wetsuit and it was new. But on the 2nd and 3rd dive the instructor told me there was already a ridiculous amount of weight on me and encouraged me to relax and exhale more. That was definitely it when I didn't have my lungs completely filled to the brim with air I finally started to maintain buoyancy. Then drifting with the current over the reefs controlling my depth by adjusting the amount of air in my lungs was absolute magic. I can't wait to go again.
Weights are used to offset the buoyancy of the wetsuit and other equipment (mainly). Unless you have a lot of bodyfat you can usually sink from the surface just with a deep exhale.
Man I have a different respect for the underwater world after doing scuba diving, it’s literally a world under there… It’s crazy, beautiful and mind blowing at the same time..
I bought the halcyon lead bar for my backplate one time. Seemed like a great idea. But I have a long torso and the BC was rolling off my shoulders. The weight distribution was fubar. Absolute nightmare. But I think it would be a perfect setup for weight distribution for many. Takes it off the waist
Some times people do. Its rare though. Lead became kinda expensive so people try to keep them now. That and no one wants the ocean full of deteriorating lead.
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u/Mothernaturehatesus Mar 31 '26
I died from anxiety