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.
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.
Mammoth Cave National Park and other cave systems are part of a limestone belt that defines Kentucky’s landscape with its gently sloping bluegrass valleys. This geography made way for Kentucky to become the thoroughbred horse capital of the world and drive an economy built around events such as the Kentucky Derby. Beneath this limestone bedrock, a water supply often ranked No. 1 for water quality in the United States fuels well-known and developing dive sites that are surprisingly blue.
Her legs move quickly as she scrambles over the sand toward a large coral reef. It’s a bold and risky move, as the expanses of sand between coral patches are full of predators waiting to take advantage of a lone spiny lobster.
Training on a paddleboard requires you to stabilize your body to maintain balance. Working your stabilizing muscles is beneficial for diving because they are helpful in dynamic ocean environments.
Malaria is a serious infectious disease threat that primarily exists in many of the world’s subtropical and tropical regions — areas popular with divers — where the environmental conditions support a stable, infected population of Anopheles mosquitoes.