Donarun Das · Dive Training

Landlubber

Practise underwater compass navigation, on dry land. Walk the patterns with your phone as referee: it reads your heading, counts your steps, and draws the shape you actually walked.

Why

Navigation is the one dive skill that gives no feedback. A student swims a square, surfaces forty metres from the shot line, and neither they nor the instructor can say which leg went wrong. Landlubber puts the same drill on dry land, where it can be watched, and shows the track afterwards.

What it does

• A working dive compass in three dimensions, with every part explained.
• Reciprocal, square, U-pattern and expanding square, walked step by step.
• Heading held, step symmetry, and the shape you walked against the shape you meant to.
• Outdoors, the distance you finished from where you started.

What it does not do

It is not a substitute for water time. Buoyancy, trim, task loading and poor visibility are absent on dry land, and they are most of what makes underwater navigation hard. What it replaces is the guesswork in the debrief.