Natural Navigation is one of the most important skills you develop as a scuba diver. It can mean the difference between great dives exploring reefs, missing out on many great experiences, or worse. While using natural navigation on every dive is not possible or safe., almost every dive will have an element of natural navigation in it. So how do you hone and perfect your natural navigation techniques and skills?
Pre Plan Your Dive
Never hit a new dive site blind with no information relying on natural navigation. This is just a recipe for disaster. Before every dive, have an idea about the general layout of the dive site and your route. You can do this by either consulting maps or asking local divers—about the layout of the site, what you expect to see, and any other unusual landmarks.
If you don’t expect to see any wrecks on the dive, and you suddenly stumble across a small wreck of some kind, in all likely hood, you have taken a wrong turn somewhere. You will only know this if you have a pre-planned mental image and expectation in your mind.
A good mental image of your dive can also make a huge difference to the enjoyment of the dive. Since every time you encounter something you expect to see on the dive, it psychologically confirms to you that everything is okay and going as planned. This confirmation is an excellent boost in unfamiliar diving conditions.
Your Body: Your Measuring Device
When using natural navigation, your body is your measuring device. You need to establish baseline data points to estimate how far you have gone. Kick cycles are a great way to estimate distance underwater.
Most experienced divers use frog kicks to potter around a dive site. So, it is essential that you not only know the distance you cover using flutter kicks but also using frog kicks. With time and experience, you will develop a good sense of roughly what distances you cover when diving at a “normal” pace in various conditions. With/against or with no current.
A big part of using your body as a measuring device is developing the experience through diving to know sites, where you have a good idea about distances and such. With time, experience, and a large data set, you will eventually have a good idea that you cover x distance, with so many kicks, in so many minutes, in these diving conditions.
You will be surprised how accurate you can get with your estimates once you have a lot of experience!
Shore Diving can be Tricky
Shore diving can be very easy and very tricky at the same time. While navigating from a single entry and exit point is pretty straightforward, things can quickly go wrong. As a general rule using the other techniques mentioned here, you keep the reef to one shoulder on the way out before turning around and making your way home with the reef at the other shoulder. The most crucial part of shore diving, in most cases, is getting your exit spot on.
Missing your exit when shore diving can be very problematic. You can easily find yourself bobbing around in the water next to cliffs with no easy exit route. To find your exit, you need to surface swim back against waves which is incredibly fatiguing and can cause some divers some serious issues. It is always worth paying close attention to your underwater navigation techniques when shore diving.
Keep An Eye Out for The Unusual
When diving, keep an eye out for the unusual, ideally something that does not originally belong in the water. Looking out for a coral formation or boulder(s) can be very misleading unless they are exceptionally unique in shape. Bear in mind coral formation and boulders that look distinctive from one side may not be when viewed from the other side, or above or below.
What you want is something very distinctive, for instance, a discarded anchor, chain, or even some bricks, or in the case of Shark and Yolanda Reef in the Red Sea, multiple toilets laying on the seabed. A specific item gives you an immediate fix to our position, especially if you had dived the site before or were diving a new location and expecting it to turn up any minute.
These unusual items give you a good indication of the dive progress. This is especially true when doing dives with the same entry and exit. If, for instance, there is a bunch of tires close to the entrance, and you still have not found them on the way back, you may want to stop and ask yourself a few questions: Are you in the right location? Are you at the correct depth? Have you been going slower due to the current? Have you swum past your exit?
Waves Can Be Useful
Waves can give you a good general reference to your direction of travel. This may seem counter-intuitive at first since we seldom look up. In addition, it can be a little difficult to do if you are a little deep or the visibility is pretty poor. However, on shallower dives in great conditions, the waves are a great quick way to get a reference to your direction of travel in the water.
If you are close to shore, waves will always break towards the shore, giving the direction of travel, whether parallel to the shore, towards the beach with the wave break or away from the coast. If you are diving offshore, you can still glance up and see the direction of the waves and compare that to your pre-dive plan.
One thing to keep in mind is that diving offshore, the waves are caused by the wind, and their direction can change with the wind. So it is best to make sure you are familiar with the forecast before the dive to see if the wind direction will change.
Sand Is Your Friend
When you are close to the beach, sand is your friend and can help you get a grip on your direction of travel. In shallow water, you will always find waves of ripples in the sand. These ripples are caused by the waves and always run parallel to the shore.
If you are in a shallow location with and sea these sandy ripples, you know if you are swimming parallel to them, you are heading parallel to the shore. If you are swimming perpendicular to them and the water is getting deeper, you are generally swimming out to sea (sandbars can sometimes be misleading). If the water is getting shallower, you are swimming towards the shore.
While these features do not offer a perfect location fix, sandy ripples are great ways to establish that you are heading in the right direction, especially if you combine them with other information like sun angle and such.
Cheat
Sometimes, you have to cheat! Imagine that you are diving from a beautiful long beach. While you can exit at any point on this beach, exiting at the wrong point will involve a long walk in full gear on soft sand in the sun, which is not the ideal way to finish any dive. You need to exit at the same point of entry, and with no special features, just a ripely sandy bottom, you need to cheat! Like Hansel and Gretel, you need to leave at least one breadcrumb to find the right exit.
In a situation like this, take a small weight belt with a couple of kilos/pounds on it and leave it on the sandy bottom close to the beginning of the dive. You will then know on the way back that you have found the exit when you hit the weight belt. If you opt to use this technique, always attach a small slate to the belt asking people to leave it alone politely, indicating that it is part of an exercise. The last thing you want is a good Samaritan picking up the belt, thinking it was lost.
Sometimes due to the terrain, your only option is to cheat, to easily find your way around without turning the entire dive into a navigation exercise with compasses, slates, and such!
Awareness is the Key to Success
When it comes to natural navigation, the biggest key to success is awareness and being mentally switched on in the water. Planning and paying attention to what is around you will give plenty of clues to be able to navigate most dives pretty easily. After all, almost all dives on tropical reefs around the world are done purely as natural navigation dives. Think how rarely you see a reef dive in the Caribbean, Red Sea, and Australia, done as a pure navigation dive with a compass and map!
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