What is “Dive Safety?” Are we talking about being ready to respond to problems? Maybe avoiding problems altogether? Planning your dives so you and your buddy don’t get separated? Dive Safety can encompass all of this and much more. Let’s focus on preventing problems for now. In my next blog post, I’ll talk about the PADI Rescue Diver course, which is specifically focused on preventing problems and developing the skills to respond to problems.

Where do we start in preventing problems? Let’s start with you and your buddy. Do you have the skills and equipment necessary to make the dive you want? A recent accident highlighted this. A father and son received new scuba equipment. The father was certified, the son was not. They chose to make a dive in a cave system, for which neither was certified. The outcome was tragic; both died. They were not prepared for the dive they wanted to make. This is an extreme case. Let’s look at a more common case.

Predive safety checks can prevent diving emergencies.

What are the five steps to a pre-dive safety drill?

You and your buddy are out on a two-tank dive boat. You’re kitting up and have everything ready. What should you do before you jump in the water? A pre-dive safety check. The mnemonic we teach in the PADI Open Water is BWRAF. Begin With Review And Friend, Big White Rabbits are Fluffy, Bruce Willis Ruins All Films, Bruce Willis Rules All Films, whatever. You need to check your buddy’s

1. BCD
2. Weights
3. Releases
4. Air
5. Final check.

Does your buddy’s BCD hold air? Is it secure? Is the weight system in place and secure? Does your buddy have trim weights in non-ditchable pockets? Is the weight system ditchable in an emergency, or is it caught under a harness? Know where your buddy’s releases are—BCD and weight releases. Does your buddy have enough air for the dive you’ve planned? Look at the gauge while your buddy breathes off of his regulator. Does the needle stay still or does it drop? That could be an indication that the tank isn’t all the way on. Do both the primary and alternate work properly? Does the power inflator work? Then do a final check. Are you taking along any specialty equipment, like a camera? Make sure it’s ready and that you can enter with it or have it handed down to you. Give your buddy a once-over. Look at everything and make sure nothing’s missing. Where are his mask, snorkel and fins?

Okay, let’s take a step back. We’re about to enter the water and our kit’s all set. What about you and your buddy? Is your head in the game? Are you both focused on making the dive, or is one of you distracted by something? Are you trained for the dive? The Divemaster said it was a dive to eighty feet/24 meters. You and your buddy are only trained to the Open Water Diver level with a maximum depth of 60 feet/18 meters. There is absolutely nothing wrong about speaking up and saying, “I’m not trained to dive to that depth.” That’s what a prepared, mature diver would say.

Ready to dive? Trained for the planned depth? Did you plan it out with your buddy? Part of your dive plan should include some what-if’s. What if you’re separated, what if you have ear problems, what if you see something cool and want to pause. If you plan the dive together and both agree on the plan, separation becomes less of an issue. Be a good buddy—keep an eye on each other. Ask each other how much air you have throughout the dive. Another part of your plan should be at what time or remaining air-pressure should you turn the dive and start heading back. One approach is the rule of thirds. Use one-third of your air on the way out, one third coming back and a third in reserve. So for a 80cf aluminum tank at 3000psi, you could head out until your gauge shows 2000psi, then you come back to the boat or entry area. If you have to wait or spend time at a safety stop or emergency decompression stop, you still have 1000psi left in your tank.

What do you do if you become separated? Agree upon procedures first. A good guideline is search underwater for no more than one(1) minute and then surface. Then WAIT until your buddy joins you. Now, there may be some circumstances where you might wait a bit longer. Imagine you’re on a night dive. Sometimes, you can cover your light and look around for your buddy’s light. It might take more than a minute for you to do that and allow your eyes to adjust so you can see your buddy’s light. Either way, make a plan first with your buddy and stick to it.

What else can you do to prepare for the dive? Think about advanced training. Is the dive you want to do a specialty area, e.g. deep diving, wreck diving, hot spring diving? Specialty training might be the way to go. For a generic approach to preventing and responding to problems, the PADI Rescue Diver course is an excellent first step (see my next blog post). Beyond that, additional training in how to respond, specifically diving first aid such as the DAN diving first aid programs, is ideal, especially if you’re going to be diving in remote areas.

As dive professionals, we can only spend a finite time in the water. For some of us, lengthy travel is required to make open water training dives. Once we’re at a dive site, we need to use our time wisely and avoid leaving our students sit idle and be bored. Let’s look at a couple of ways to use your dive time.

One of the ways promoted in Instructor Development Courses (IDC) is multilevel training. That means we’re running multiple courses at the same site at the same time. Here are a couple of possible scenarios:

Scenario One: Separate classes, same site, separate dives

Say you have an Open Water Diver class of six divers and a Rescue Diver class of four divers. Ideally, you’d have at least one certified assistant for each group. Brief your assistants and divers on the plan. Take your Open Water students and assistant out and make your first dive. Have your second assistant get the Rescue class ready about the time you should be surfacing with your first group. Let your Open Water divers get out, get a snack, swap tanks, etc. While that is going on, have your Rescue class practice skills or perform one of the scenario exercises. You could even use the Open Water students as spotters or other surface support for the Rescue class. After the Rescue class is done with their exercise, they take a break while you take your Open Water class back out for their next dive.

Since you were supervising from shore, you were able to get a surface interval before your next dive. Your Open Water students benefit by seeing continuing education in action and might even get to participate. Your Rescue students benefit by having bystanders around so they can practice scene management. You benefit in many ways, not to mention only making one trip to the dive site.

Scenario Two: Separate classes, same site, same dives.

Say you have a couple of small classes, two Open Water Diver students and a diver completing an Adventure Dive like Peak Performance Buoyancy or Fish Identification. Ideally, you’d have at least one certified assistant. Take the entire group out and descend. While you evaluate your Open Water students’ skills, the Adventure student waits patiently or hovers nearby with your assistant. After you’re done evaluating your Open Water students, you have the Adventure student perform their skills. For Peak Performance Buoyancy, that might be the hover, etc. For FishID, they could be looking at the fish around you and the group while you were evaluating your Open Water Students.

Scenario Three: separate classes, same site, some on the same dive, some on other dives.

Combine the three groups above: Open Water, Adventure/Advanced and Rescue. You can take the Open Water and Adventure/Advanced out as in Scenario Two, then when you surface you have the Rescue class perform one of their scenarios.

Now, not all courses mesh well together. For example, you shouldn’t take your Open Water Students out with Adventure/Advanced students doing a Night dive on the same dive. In general, though, this can be a great way to save you time and travel costs. Be careful, though. Make sure your student diver get the best experience you can give them. We’re not here to just make money, we’re here to make sure divers learn to dive safely and have a good time. Don’t just push your students through as fast as possible. Remember, if you’re having fun, your students will have fun, too. Take the time to have fun.

In a previous post, I talked briefly about the PADI Adventures in Diving program and the related certifications, PADI Adventure Diver and PADI Advanced Open Water Diver. Time to look at the program in depth.

Not so long ago, to become an Advanced Open Water diver, you only had to compete four dives beyond the ones you did for your Open Water Diver certification. Those four dives were required to be: a deep dive (beyond sixty feet), a navigation dive, a search & recovery dive and a night dive. This has evolved over the years.

Often, newly certified divers are daunted by the name “Advanced Open Water Diver. Many have thought that you need to be an advanced diver to take the course. PADI realized what was wrong and restructured the program under the title Adventures in Diving. While there is still an Advanced Open Water certification, it is part of this program. Rather than needing to be an advanced diver, the program advances your knowledge and skills and makes you an Advanced Open Water Diver.

These divers are diving in a remote location and should probably have an extended amount of emergency oxygen.

Adventure Diver? Advanced Open Water Diver? What’s the difference? Two essential differences are the number of dives and the required dives. Both certifications require you complete Adventure Dives, dives that are specific to a specialty area of diving. Here’s a short list of potential Adventure Dives:

• Altitude
• Boat
• Deep
• Fish Identification
• Enriched Air
• Digital Underwater Photography
• Search & Recovery
• Night Diving
• Navigation
• Underwater Naturalist
• Peak Performance Buoyancy
• Sidemount
• and many, many others

For the Adventure Diver certification, you need to only complete any three Adventure Dives. For Advanced Open Water, you need to complete the Deep Adventure Dive and the Navigation Adventure dive plus any three other Adventure Dives.

Here’s the awesome part: you can probably complete the dives in a weekend. Yes, two days of diving can take you from Open Water Diver to Advanced Open Water Diver. Or one day to go from Open Water to Adventure Diver.

So, why do it? There are many reasons. At some dive sites and for some dive operations, they’ll only take you on some dives if you can show proof of training beyond entry-level (Open Water Diver). For many operators, the Advanced Open Water Certification is required before they’ll take you on dives deeper than sixty feet. Okay, that’s the regulatory requirement. On the fun side, think of the Adventures in Diving program as the sampler platter for specialty areas. You get to try out different activities before jumping in. Maybe you’re curious about night diving, but aren’t ready to do the three-dive Specialty. You just want to try one night dive to find out.

If you find out that there is something you really like to do, like using a Diver Propulsion Vehicle (DPV or scooter), you can continue your training and earn the respective specialty certification. Here’s how that works: The Adventure dive in a specific specialty area (e.g., Altitude, Boat, Deep, etc.) is the same as the first dive in the respective Specialty. That means that, at your instructor’s discretion, the Adventure Dives you complete for Adventure Diver or Advanced Open Water can count towards the Specialty. But the flip-side holds true as well. If you complete any three Specialty diver courses, you can earn the Adventure Diver rating (you’ve complete those three dives, right?) And, if you’ve completed the Navigation Specialty and Deep Specialty and three other diver specialties, you can earn the Advanced Open Water Certification.

There can be many individual reasons to complete the Adventure Diver or Advanced Open Water rating, too. Perhaps as a personal diver-improvement. Or maybe you’re tracking towards Master Scuba Diver. Or maybe you just want to see what divers do for fun. Regardless, if you’re an Open Water Diver, think about your next step being in the Adventures in Diving program.

Only about a quarter of our planet is covered in land.   The rest is covered in water.  As a scuba diver, the other three-quarters of the globe is your oyster (or giant clam, weighing up to 230kg). Divers get to explore inner space, the aquatic realm, the space beneath the seas. SCUBA diving can take place as long as there is enough water for you to submerge. That can be incredibly cold lakes and quarries in the Midwest, clear and cold springs in Idaho, hot springs in Utah, kelp forests off Southern California, reefs off of the Florida coast. Or it can be something further afield.

As a certified open water diver, you can dive to a maximum depth of sixty feet. That’s close to the height of a six-storey building. Completing your advanced open water training, you’d be trained to dive to a maximum depth of one-hundred feet, a ten-storey building. With deep diver training, at the recreational level, you can dive down to one-hundred and thirty feet, a thirteen-storey building. The next time you’re walking on the street, look at the buildings around you and think about what that depth means.

For most fresh-water environments, the visibility typically isn’t that great. That means that light isn’t penetrating as far due to suspended particulate matter. At some sites, there might be algae in the first ten to twenty feet resulting in limited visibility. Below that, there might not be any algae, but much of the light is gone because it was absorbed by the algae at shallower depths.

Tropical diving! Warmer water typically has fewer nutrients, so there isn’t as much plankton (algae/phytoplankton or zooplankton, the microscopic animals that feed on phytoplankton), so light can penetrate to great depths. With minimal particulate matter in the water, visibility can stretch to well over 100 feet. You can see, virtually, forever. One interesting aspect of the warmer water is that we find corals. Coral can be thought of as a fairly broad term covering the coral animal (yes, animal), the symbiotic algae (vegetable) and the reef skeleton made of calcium carbonate, secreted by the coral animal (mineral). Coral reefs are home to over a quarter of all known marine organisms, and a significant number of marine animals spend some part of their life on the coral reef. With all that going on, there’s no wonder that divers love to dive on coral reefs.

Coral reefs are found around the world, but they are restricted by water clarity, temperature and salinity (amongst other factors). Most of them are found near the equator (warmer, clearer water). A small fraction of these reefs are found in the Atlantic, mostly around the Caribbean Sea. The rest are in the Indo-Pacific region, making that a prime attraction for diving.

Divers have amazing travel opportunities to see coral reefs. Beyond that, though, are diving opportunities that extend beyond the tropics. If you’re not keen on cold water, brace yourself. Diving at the polar extremes provides a view into incredibly unique ecosystems. Of course, diving in those extremes requires additional training and equipment (e.g., dry suits and ice-diver training) to keep you warm and safe.

Don’t like cold water? Other than the tropics with their warm water, there are some freshwater sites that might interest you. In the Intermountain West, we have hot springs. Many are small, but some are large enough to dive. Imagine diving in water that is 95F/35C in the middle of winter. You don’t need a drysuit or a wetsuit, a simple swimsuit and rashguard will do it. Maybe you’ll need to plan your exposure protection for when you’re out of the water rather than in it.

So far, I’ve talked about diving environments. What about things to see while you’re threre? Coral reefs, with their abundant aquatic life are truly amazing. Polar ice dives have amazingly clear water and unique aquatic life. Hot springs provide warm or hot-water diving in unusual places. But maybe there is more. What about something historic? Wreck diving is one of the most popular diving activities around the world. Why? Because you get a glimpse into history. The protected wrecks of Truk Lagoon are a prime example. A significant portion of the Japanese fleet in World War II were sunk there. In some cases, human remains can be found. There are extreme wreck dives, requiring technical training beyond recreational limits, such as the wrecks in the Marshall Islands from the nuclear tests conducted in the 1950’s.

Does a wreck dive have to involve a boat or ship. Other man-made structures that have been sunk or flooded can be considered a wreck. Some fresh water reservoirs have been created by flooding small towns. Imagine diving over houses of people displaced by making a reservoir to feed a bigger city downstream. World War II wasn’t the only conflict to leave us with wrecks. The Cold War did that, too. There are flooded nuclear missile silo complexes around the US that are now dive sites.

In a nutshell, SCUBA divers have amazing opportunities to explore parts of the world that non-divers can never access. Adventure abounds. Why are you sitting at a desk reading this, when you could be out diving or learning how to dive, and experiencing the adventure?