How to Clear Your Scuba Mask Underwater

Often, the most intimidating skill new divers face is clearing a scuba mask underwater. Many new divers find this skill intimidating because it involves simultaneously flooding their mask underwater and breathing from the regulator.

Ask any instructor, and they will tell you it is the skill most novice divers struggle with the most. This raises the question of, aside from how to clear your scuba mask underwater, how you do it so easily and how you become an expert at clearing your mask.

Breathing Is Key To Easy Mask Clearing

When it comes to basic scuba skills, the most feared and often the biggest impediment to divers' progress is mask clearing. While there are lots of “ways” to do it easily, they all overlook the same problem. The secret ingredient to clearing your scuba mask underwater is breathing. Once you have mastered breathing, whichever technique you choose to use will be a breeze.

Why Breathing is Important to Scuba Mask Clearing

The critical problem divers face is a lack of control of their breathing airways. Many divers have the habit of subconsciously breathing in and out from both their nose and mouth. As a result, when they start to flood, their mask, or it has a little water in – enough to cover the nose. They start to inhale water, which causes them to splutter and panic.

This habit of inhaling even a little from the nose needs to be broken before mask clearing becomes a breath. As long as you are not the master of your own breathing, mask clearing will always be difficult since you will habitually inhale water when your mask is partially or fully flooded.

Mouth and Nose Breathing

The key to good scuba diving breathing is to breathe exclusively through your mouth when underwater. An excellent pattern to establish is always breathing (inhaling and exhaling) through your mouth. You should only use your nose to exhale when you want to clear your mask – more about that later. Remember that in some situations, you will need to gently exhale through your nose to equalize your mask, although this is minor.

Mouth Breathing Techniques

If you want to work on mouth-breathing techniques, there are multiple ways to do so. Depending on the type of activity you are doing, you may choose to breathe through your mouth or nose. However, more and more researchers have begun to point out that we are better suited to nose breathing. However, when diving, this is not the case, and you will have to focus on actively breathing through your mouth and, more importantly, not using your nose.

The first exercise to perfect your mouth breathing is super simple. It involves focusing on breathing slowly and deliberately through your mouth. When you first start, you can use your fingers to pinch your nose. This way, you can start to develop the feel of breathing through your mouth exclusively.

Next, to establish an element of control, you can focus on inhaling one breath through your mouth and exhaling that breath from your nose. After a few times, alternate the spacing, so inhale and exhale through your mouth a couple of times before exhaling through your nose once. Vary the spacing between exhales from your nose to improve your control of the breathing pattern.

One good tip is to use your tongue to help close off the airway to your nose. If you gently retract your tongue in your mouth. This will have the effect of starting to close off the airway to your nose. When you need to exhale through your nose you can relax your tongue to feel the airway open and then exhale.

Clearing Your Scuba Diving Mask

Once you have good breathing techniques, clearing your mask is easy! However, to clear your scuba diving mask more effectively, you need to understand the mechanics of what is happening. When you clear your mask, you introduce air inside your mask from your nose. The air goes up, trying to escape and reach the surface. You seal the top of your mask to your forehead. As a result, the air cannot escape. Instead, it builds up and displaces the water in the mask. The water in the mask is pushed out of the bottom skirt of the mask.

A Well-Fitting Mask Is Key

One thing to note is that even if you are an expert, mask clearer, and have perfect airway control, if your mask does not fit properly, it will be impossible to clear it fully. It will always flood fully or partially; no matter what you do, you will always have some water sloshing around in your mask.

Take the Tidal Mask, for instance. Its design fits more than 90% of faces, making it easy to use and ideal even if you want to let a friend try it. Since there is a 90% chance it will fit them, this phenomenal design feature means that in many cases, the mask fits like a glove, resulting in a leak-free experience and minimizing any mask clearing you would be doing.

Simple Mask Clearing

Clearing a flooded mask is extremely simple and can be broken down into a few very simple steps.

First, flood your mask. You can do so by pulling it slightly off your face or by lifting the bottom skirt of the mask and slowly filling your mask with water. One thing to remember is to control your breathing, as mentioned earlier. This way, when the water enters your mask, you will not inhale it.

Once the mask is flooded, place the index and middle finger of each hand on the top corners of your mask while still facing forward. At this point in time, do not look up and keep looking ahead as usual.

To clear your mask, you need to do the following in one smooth motion.

·         Look up while gently pressing with your fingers on the top of your mask.

·         Exhale gently through your nose.

Remember that while breaking down mask clearing seems complicated, it ultimately is not and can be performed swiftly and smoothly. The short version of mask clearing would read as follows:

“Press on the mask top, and exhale from the nose while looking up!”

With time and practice, mask clearing becomes second nature, and you will find you don’t even have to use two hands. Experienced divers will regularly use one hand to press on the center of their mask and clear it instead of using two hands.

The one thing all divers who are perfect mask clearers share is excellent airway control and lots of practice to perfect their technique.

How much air do you need?

One thing to remember is that there is no need to breathe hard when clearing your mask. If you feel you do not have enough air in your lungs to clear your mask, then it is almost certain that you are performing the technique incorrectly. Your lungs have more than enough to clear your mask.

Consider that the average human lungs have a volume of 6 liters/ 1.58 gallons, while a typical scuba mask can have a volume of around 150ml/200ml 5flOz/6.7flOz. So, you should have enough air in your lungs to clear multiple masks in one breath. That is why if a diver is running out of air to clear their mask, they are probably performing the technique incorrectly.

Final Thoughts

With a little training and knowledge, How to Clear Your Scuba Mask Underwater becomes a non-issue. The movement becomes second nature, and you will even start to clear partially flooded masks absent-mindedly while diving. The whole mask-clearing process becomes a simple part of diving. You don’t think about it; you just do it.

Clearing your mask becomes like driving a car. When you first start driving, you need to concentrate on operating the vehicle and keeping your eyes on the road. After years of experience, you don’t need to focus too much on the operations side of driving, just on keeping your eyes on the road. That is why you can drive and have a conversation with someone in the passenger seat. Mask clearing is now different. At first, you need to dedicate a lot of mental energy to the process. With time, it just happens out of good habits.