The Two Skills That Separate Good Cave Divers from Great Ones

Casa Cenote

You've got your full cave certification. Your gear is dialed in. You know the protocols. But if I'm being honest, there are two fundamental skills where I see even experienced divers struggle — and they're the foundation everything else is built on.

Buoyancy: You Can't Run Before You Walk

If you don't have excellent buoyancy control, you're not ready for the environments we dive in here. Period.

I don't care how many dives you have logged or what credentials are on your certification card. In a cave, poor buoyancy isn't just about looking sloppy — it's about preservation and safety. These systems have taken thousands of years to form. When you're dragging fins through silt or bumping formations with your tank, you're causing damage that won't recover in your lifetime.

The challenge is that we can't see ourselves underwater. You might think your chest and head are maintaining perfect clearance from the bottom, but your fins are dragging. Or your knees are touching. You're creating a silt-out without even realizing it.

How to Actually Improve Your Buoyancy

This is where most training falls short. Instructors rush through it because they want to get to the "exciting" parts. But here's what worked for me, and what I drill with every diver I work with:

Position yourself as close to the bottom as physically possible without making contact. Then hold that position.

Start paying attention to your lung capacity as a buoyancy tool. Watch your dive computer as you take a full breath, how much do you rise? As you exhale completely, how much do you descend? You need to know these numbers for your specific configuration because that's your working margin.

Once you understand your range, you can position yourself with enough clearance that your breathing cycle keeps you in that safe zone — not hitting the bottom on exhale, not hitting the ceiling on inhale.

This takes practice. Lots of it. There's no shortcut.

Propulsion Techniques: The Skill Nobody Wants to Practice

The different kicks we use in caves and caverns aren't arbitrary style choices. They're essential for moving through these environments without creating impact.

Frog kick, modified flutter, helicopter turns, back kicks — each one serves a specific purpose. And each one requires muscle memory that only comes from deliberate practice.

I see divers who can execute a decent frog kick in open water completely fall apart in a restriction or when they need to maintain position in current. Or they can move forward fine but have zero ability to back out of a situation without destroying visibility.

The Standard That Matters

Here's my philosophy, and it's gotten less popular as more instructors have entered the market: if you're not ready, you don't go to certain sites.

I know that's not what people want to hear. The prevailing attitude has become "you'll get better with practice," which sounds reasonable until you realize they're suggesting you practice in fragile, overhead environments where mistakes have consequences.

You should be ready before you enter. Not "almost ready" or "we'll work on it during the course." Ready.

That means your buoyancy needs to be dialed in whatever configuration you're diving. Your kicks need to be second nature. These aren't skills you develop in the cave — they're prerequisites for being there.

The rushing, the lowered standards, the attitude that anyone who can pay should be accommodated — that's changed dramatically in the twelve years I've been diving these systems. And not for the better.

If you're serious about cave diving, do the work on the fundamentals first. Stay shallow. Practice in open water. Film yourself. Get honest feedback. Put in the repetitions until these skills are so ingrained you don't have to think about them.

Because once you're in an overhead environment, you need to be thinking about navigation, gas management, team communication — not whether your trim is correct or which kick to use.