REFRESH YOUR SKILLS

Update your knowledge and in-water diving skills.

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Diving requires special skills learned during training and maintained through practice. “Use it or lose it” is especially true in diving. While skills will degrade somewhat with as little six months of inactivity, most dive educators and instructors consider inactivity of one to two years sufficient to warrant refresher training.

With longer periods, you’ll want to consider how much you have changed and what changes have taken place in the diving world. After a long hiatus, we highly recommend formal review of both your knowledge and in-water skills before you resume diving.

Evaluate Your Skills

Practice Fundamentals

In your entry-level scuba course, you learned fundamental skills intended to promoted your safety and teach you how to deal with various problems that can arise during dives. To remain proficient in these skills, you must practice them. This is even more important if you are a relatively inexperienced diver. Most instructors and training agencies recommend a refresher course after a year of not diving.

Refresh In-Water Skills

If you have been out of the water for a prolonged period, consider retaking the entry-level course. You never know what you may have forgotten or missed in your original course. When undertaking refresher training, DAN highly recommends both the classroom portion (which includes basic dive physics and physiology as well as dive planning and execution using dive tables and computers) and the in-water skills portion.

Prepare, Educate and Practice

The classroom portion of refresher training generally covers:

Dive planning
Use of dive tables and computers
Other knowledge and theory per your training agency’s standards

For your first dive after a period of inactivity:

Do not dive alone. Consider diving with a divemaster or instructor
Dive at a familiar site
- Shallow
- Minimal or no currents
- No major hazards
- Choose a site that is not remote

Practice your skills in confined water before you dive in open water. Good skills to practice include:

Predive checks
Buoyancy checks (proper weighting)
Buoyancy
Mask clearing
Mask removal and replacement
Recovering and clearing your regulator
Shared air ascent
Emergency swimming ascent or controlled emergency swimming ascent (depending on what your training agency teaches)

Take a continuing education course at the level recommended by your training agency.

Additional Dive Skill Resources

The Importance of a Predive Safety Check

Checking your equipment and doing a buddy check, regardless of how many times you’ve dived with
your gear or with the same buddy, can help prevent many of the common factors that lead to dive accidents.

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Avoiding Panic After Regulator Failure

Divers are responsible for doing a proper buddy check, having a plan for
handling emergencies and making the decision to abort a dive if necessary.

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