Tanks & Tails: Revisiting Mermaids Scuba Diving

[johnleeex]

Buoyancy Compensator (BC) (or lack thereof) and mermaid scuba diving..

The mermaids in that youtube video I mentioned at the beginning of the thread do NOT wear BC's. I have some observations about that. First one, of course, is that it looks much sexier for my male eyes than a BC hiding the curvy upper body of a female diver. No surprise there. But what I find interesting is that it works so well. For scuba divers who grew up learning to dive in the last 40 years the idea of diving without a BC is just ridiculous. But I've been diving even longer than that and when I first began scuba diving, the first BC (just converted life vests then) were coming into use. For about ten years - into the eighties- the divers using BC were ridiculed for being wimps, incompetent, uncool, even cowards. Eventually the advantages of a BC won everyone over, of course. But the drag of a BC makes a big difference in how fast you can swim. It looks that the much more powerful thrust of a good monofin makes it even easier to dive without a BC than we did in the old days using floppy bi-fins. Of course, hovering motionless in the water column or floating inches about the bottom without moving doesn't work without a BC. But it works well enough, it seems. I even know a story of a bin-fin dive buddy with a BC who got into trouble in a strong current and his mermaid buddy (no BC, just scuba) just dragged him out of the current with the power of her tail.
Anyhow, curious what the experienced divers/merfolk think about BC less mermaid diving.