by Brooke Morton - PADI BLOG
Divers who haven’t gotten their gear wet in ages don’t always understand the importance of taking a refresher course. Although the PADI ReActivate program touches upon navigation basics, a trend among divers returning to the water is actually to retake the Underwater Navigator course because they believe it includes some of the most important skills they have ever learned.
Like many other dive skills, practice will make you a competent navigator, which will open you up to a wider variety of diving possibilities. But whether you learn these skills in a classroom or from time-consuming, potentially risky mistakes is up to you.
Don’t rely solely on a compass.
A compass is a great tool, but it relies on the user to set it properly, making it prone to error.
It’s not unlike blindly following a smart phone; although the phone’s GPS doesn’t rely on user input, it’s still able to take us off course if we don’t visually compare our surroundings to what the device tells us.
In the same regard, we must stay alert to our underwater environments.
Remember: Digital compasses need to be recalibrated now and again.
Just as our computers rely on us to install regular updates, so, too, does the digital compass need recalibration. It’s needed, obviously, when the compass feature is frozen. The less obvious tell requires checking the compass settings.
When choosing natural-navigation markers, it’s OK to be picky.
Don’t pick one big feature, like a huge brain coral or a sand chute. Use that large feature as a starting point, then find something a little more inconspicuous—such as the huge brain coral with a two tube sponges on one side and a barrel sponge on the other.
“Take your time choosing a marker. You may think you’ve found a really unique feature, but then you start seeing that feature everywhere.”
Set your compass before your descent.
“You don’t want to reach the bottom and be turned around,” “To avoid this, set the compass heading to point toward shore before starting the dive and, when you start to descend, descend in the direction you intend to travel.”
Consider tracking air consumption, not kick cycles.
“Air consumption is the most important thing to watch,”
Tracking kick cycles becomes much more difficult when a current is added to the mix. If a portion of the dive occurred against a current and lasted 100 kick cycles, it could take 300 kick cycles to cover that same distance swimming with the current. So instead, try tracking air.
Granted, it’s not an exact science, making practice all the more vital—but with classroom time, the time it takes to acquire the skills is drastically reduced.
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