Alert Diver Category: Safety 101

As with any exercise, it is important to honestly and accurately assess your fitness level before diving. There are assessments you can do at home to test your fitness for dive and ensure you’re in good health.

Parents often express reservations or concerns about going on dive vacations with their kids. But it’s a joint reasonability from both parents and dive operators.

Air hose malfunction can be a very serious safety concern. From yellow “crystals” to degraded linings, air hoses are essential pieces of equipment. Learn more about air hoses.

If it took two planes, a boat and a hike to get somewhere, getting out will usually be similarly complicated. With that in mind, always prepare for safe travel.

Imagine descending to a beautiful reef. The water is clear, fish glide past, and then you feel a strange pull on your face, like the mask is trying to suction itself onto your eyes. When you surface your eyes are red, swollen, and possibly bruised. The cause was mask squeeze, a common but preventable dive injury.

Make it your standard practice to gently and completely turn on your air. If you’re an instructor, consider not teaching students the quarter-turn back. Dive operations should instruct their staff not to perform the quarter-turn-back practice on customers’ cylinders. Confusing the direction of a handwheel does not happen only to new or inexperienced divers. There have been anecdotal reports of divemasters on busy boats accidentally turning off customers’ cylinders and then performing only a quarter-turn on.

Fresh-water diving comes with increased risks. Why is that? Learn more about the risks and how to dive in fresh-water environments safely.

Freediving is growing in popularity but the sport does come with risks because of how divers hold their breaths for long durations. Learn more about the safety of freediving.

Certain medications can impact your health and/or ability to dive. There are important considerations that need to be made before heading into the water.

Diving experience is incredibly helpful to ward off certain risks. We experience risk in different ways and some ways provide helpful lessons. Read more.