Op'eds & comments

Outside comments, debates, chronics

Sport Diving in 2025 Is in a Good Place

Divers in a pool session at Purple Dive Penida in Bali, Indonesia. Photo courtesy of Purple Dive Penida.

Recreational diving as a sport today is in a better state than commonly thought just two decades ago. Simon Pridmore takes a closer look and offers insights into the positive developments in diving.

Transferring Anticipation Skills to Problem Resolution

Adding some realism to your training protocol also requires adding spontaneity, distraction and surprise. This is not as hard as it seems, but it can be dangerous for instructor and student if not well-controlled.

Mike Ange discuss methods of building a safer and more comfortable diver at the more advanced levels by preventing the diver from anticipating issues before they occur. While this may sound contradictory to the earlier articles in this series, in reality, it is taking those skills to the next level.

Ten Commandments of Tech Diving Ops, Part I

An excellent strategy to guard against complacency and protect you and your dive team from becoming too casual about your diving is to establish set operational procedures for all your technical dives.

Today, technical diving is well into its fourth decade. We now have better tools, technology and systems than we did in the past and we know far more about which methods, decompression strategies and gear configurations work well and which do not.

To Shark Dive or Not to Shark Dive

It was seven in the morning and my coffee hadn’t kicked in yet. The dive guide was giving me a slightly more thorough dive briefing than normal. I wasn’t supposed to wear anything colorful or shiny, and black gloves and a hood were required. Also covered in black neoprene, he was putting on chainmail gloves and told me he’d have a pole with him. He said it was more for the potato cods though, not the sharks.

What Does It Take to Be a “Good Diver?” — Part One

You are chatting with a diving friend and the conversation turns to mutual acquaintances. “Do you know Bob and Carol?” your friend asks. “Oh yes, good divers!” you reply. We will usually refer to someone as a good diver when they are not around. We will rarely say it to their face. And it is something that we all rather hope people say about us behind our backs.

Preconditioning for Safer Scuba Diving

This column is adapted from a chapter in my book, Scuba Physiological – Think you know all about Scuba Medicine? Think Again! The chapters in this book were originally written by scientists in the field of decompression research as part of a three-year project called PHYPODE (Physiology of Decompression). My (self-appointed) task was to rewrite their sometimes-complex research in a form accessible to all divers.