DAN’s vision is to make every dive incident- and accident-free. Improvements in training, equipment, operations, dive boats, and dive computers have made diving significantly safer. The safety of a dive, however, relies heavily on the diver’s practices.
It’s 5 p.m., officially boarding time, and the floodgates have opened. Eager, impatient divers synchronously emerge from their cars and begin to haul carts full of gear down the dock. We’re right there with them, jostling to get a prime spot for our tanks.
The day-to-day tasks of injury monitoring at Divers Alert Network include tracking dive fatalities by sifting through emails, news alerts, and social media to collect information about recent events. Our goal is to report to the dive community our findings on what people report to us or what we encounter in our research.
In the last issue of Alert Diver we shared the harrowing story of an attack on a fossil-hunting river diver by a 13-foot alligator. In this issue we’re bringing you more educational articles related to hazardous marine life encounters.
Getting to the wreck of the Caribsea off the coast of North Carolina can take up to an hour and a half. While traveling to the dive site, I regrettably ate a prepackaged lunch with an indecipherable expiration date I had purchased the night before.
Known for her work in developing sophisticated algorithms and methods for managing and coordinating complex systems, Silvia Ferrari has applied her expertise to integrating scuba diving technology with robotic systems.
You might know me already or at least know about me. I came to Key Largo, Florida, in 1978 to open Captain Slate’s Atlantis Dive Center. Early on I had an affinity for the marine life on our reefs, and my earliest mentor, Steve Klem, had established ongoing fish-feeding activity on the City of Washington wreck.
Spearing fish has been a part of human sustenance since hunters first sharpened sticks. With the advent of masks and fins, spearfishing became its own activity. Whether for sport or to put food on the table, divers and freedivers seek these opportunities around the world.
About 12 years ago, a pair of commercial dive operators began offering adventurous divers a chance to go blackwater diving off the coast of Florida. Since then, blackwater dives have become an established fixture in the Palm Beach dive community, and I have been fortunate to log more than 1,000 such dives without incident.
Indonesia’s archipelagic beauty and marine biodiversity lure divers from around the world. As the country’s popularity as an international dive destination grows, so does the complexity of dive safety. Protecting divers is no small feat across this landscape of more than 17,000 islands, many dotted with dive sites in remote locations lacking medical infrastructure.
