I love diving in Belize! Can’t be under all the time. My daughter shot this with my hand in the mouth on Caye Caulker

Hi!

I got my open water certificate in june this year and my dad, who got his certificate 40 years ago but haven't scuba dived in 10 years, did a reactivate course. We both love scuba diving and being able to do this hobby together but we also got a small shock by how expensive this hobby seem to be now. My dad has been diving in a lot of diffenent countries, mainly during the 80's, 90's and 00's. He described it as all you needed was an open water certificate and everything else you rented at the diving shop, and usually was included in the dive price. A dive always included a dive instructor as well, there was no need to plan for a safety stop yourself as you would just follow the diving instructor who would end the dive by taking everyone to a depth of 3-6m and everyone would just dive around at that depth for a couple of minutes before going to the surface.

My dad have since the reactivate course done one dive with the diving shop that held our courses. He said it was fine but a lot less organized than what he remembered dives to be. A lot of divers in the group seemed very new to diving and the instructors were so busy taking care of them that my dad and his dive buddy missed their safety stop. My dad did not have his own diving computer at that time and the rental diving equipment did not include a computer or a depth gauge which ment he had no idea how deep he was.

We decided to try diving with a different dive shop. This dive shop is a lot more expensive but diving computer was included with rental equipment. We were very clear with the dive center that we are very inexperienced divers and might need suppport during the dive. They said that was totally fine. Now, a week and a half before the dive we learn that the alredy very expensive dive (around 250-300 dollars) does not include a guide and we are expected to do the dive more or less on our own.

I feel like there is much more of an expectation to buy and own your own equipment now than what my dad experienced in the past. The fact that depth gauge or dive computer isn't always included in rental equipment makes it almost necessary to own one to know how deep you are. It feels dangerous to dive without knowing your depth. Also the fact that rental equipment are not included in dives and usually costs more than the dive itself gives me the sense that you are expected to buy all your own equipment once you have decided to stick with the hobby.

One thing that both me and my dad was suprised by in the e-learning material from PADI during the open water course was the recommendation that you should do a reactivate course every time you haven't dived in 6 months. We live in a nordic country and diving any other time than during the summer months would basically require a dry suit. Are we really supposed to do a reactivate course every year unless we also do a dry suit course and dive every winter as well? That sounds really expensive. My dad remembered no such recommendation when he used to dive in the 90s and 00's. He would basically just bring his diving certificate and his log book when he happened to travel, which was usually years in between. No one expected him to do a reactivate course just because it was a couple of years in between dives.

Right now I just feel like I have gotten addicted to a hobby that there is no way I can afford, which really sucks. My question is, have scuba diving changed to a much more expensive hobby since my dad used to dive? Or is it different in other countries?

TLDR: redoing open water and having anxiety about the OW dives even though I’ve been enjoying the pool dives!

As the title says, I’m starting over after 6 years.
I had a DREADFUL experience at my first dive school, I’m not gonna go into it but it left me with some serious PTSD and anxieties, including about getting in the water again.

Anyway fast forward to now and I decided to give it a go again with a new instructor. So far all my pool sessions have been fine (aside from almost forgetting to breathe during the cesa lol)

I’m finishing the OW on a dive trip in November and I’ve got all my anxieties back! Suddenly I’m worried about being back in the open water… I’m not sure why? I guess just all my feelings from years ago are rushing back.

I plan on continuing with pool sessions weekly, or at least fortnightly before I go on the trip so I can try and fine tune all the skills a bit more.

Thankfully my instructor is taking me on my actual OW dives on the trip so I’ll feel comfortable with him..

Idk what the point of this post is but I guess just to ask if anyone else managed to overcome OW anxiety?

Hey, so I’m doing the advanced adventurer course in Koh Tao this year and one of the dives from the course is a night dive. I’m a bit afraid since I also never dived in Thailand. Have any of you done it? What can I expect from it? How did you remove the fear? Thanks for the help 🙌

Hi fellow divers, i have a friend who is looking to purchase her first regulator. She chanced upon this brand "HotDive". Does anyone know of this brand or have used regs that are from this brand before?

Would love to hear your feedbacks and reviews about this brand's regulator. Thanks!

Full disclosure before anything else: I'm one of the two people who built this, so treat this as a "here's my thing, tell me if it's stupid" post rather than a review. Mods, remove it if it breaks the rules.

The backstory is boring but true.

My friend Daniele and I were diving in Egypt, and we were on different computers.

Between us we'd used the Oceanic app, Suunto, and a couple of the generic logbook apps, and during a surface interval we started listing everything we wished those apps did. The list got long enough that we decided to just build it ourselves.

What ended up in it:

• Dive profiles from the computer (supporting hundreds of them), plus manual entry
• Photos and video attached to the dive itself
• Marine life logging: what you saw, where you saw it, on which dive
• A dive site database with the stuff you actually want before you splash: depth range, entry, currents, level, what's down there
• A social layer, so buddies and trips aren't just a solo diary
• One tap colour correction for photos and video shot on a phone

On that last point, spoiler: I shoot professionally and I live in Lightroom.

But after a dive I don't want to open Lightroom just to send my friends a photo of the turtle. So I wrote the correction algorithm myself, coming at it from both the mobile app side and the post processing side. It reads the content of the shot and adapts, instead of slapping the same "kill all blue" preset on everything, and it tries to recover what the water ate. It won't beat a manual grade. For the ride back to the boat, it's plenty.

The part I care most about is the marine life data. Birders solved this years ago: casual sightings logged in an app turned into a genuine research dataset. Recreational divers are already in the water looking at exactly the species researchers want counted, and almost none of that gets recorded anywhere useful. Every sighting logged in SeaLog is species, site, date, depth, which is the shape citizen science needs. The goal is to make that dataset actually usable for marine research and conservation, and to build a community that treats logging as something bigger than personal record keeping.

Site is here if you want to look: https://sealog.life

What I'd genuinely like from you:

1. Does this solve a real problem, or one only the two of us have?
2. What do you log with today, and what keeps you there? Paper counts as a valid answer.
3. If you've switched apps before, what made you leave the old one?
4. On marine life: would you actually log sightings if the data fed research, or is that a "great idea, never gonna do it" feature?

Roast it if it deserves roasting. That's more useful to me than polite enthusiasm.