Steve Thorpe – Finding your buoyancy point

So, you get through your buoyancy point, so everybody’s got a buoyancy point. If you get in a swimming pool, there’s a point where you are neutrally buoyant, so when you’re above that point, you will float to the surface.

When you’re neutrally buoyant, you will just float there, and you won’t go up and you won’t go down.

When you go past that point though, and you become negatively buoyant, that’s when you start sinking a lot faster, so people that jump off bridges for example, they will go through their buoyancy point and that’s why people die.

It’s not the shock of the fall, they go past the buoyancy point and they can’t physically swim back up to the surface.

Simon: And the buoyancy point is literally the height that you are within that column of water.

Yeah, so mine was about I think three metres underwater, so you could sit there and just not go up, not go down. Then when you get through that point, when you push yourself through that point, you can physically feel yourself accelerating through the water as you go down.

Simon: Right. That must be quite weird the first time that happens.

It is, yeah (laughs). It’s almost like … you can feel the water rushing past your ears as you’re going down. It’s quite a bizarre feeling.