Ok, apologies if this is a dumb question, but this seems like an appropriate place to ask. At no point in my short diving career has it ever been explained to me what consitutes a loggable dive - i.e. one that's worth logging. Presumably there's some sort of understood protocol here that I simply don't know. Open water dives, fair enough, whether they're in a lake or the sea and as long as you get your head under for longer than you'd be able to hold your breath etc, they all go in the book. But next year Jacs and I intend to do one of those shark dives at an aquarium, in the big tank. Do we log that? And once we've bought our new gear (whatever it turns out to be) we'll undoubtely do a couple of pool sessions to get the hang of it all before venturing into open water - do we log them? I wouldn't have thought you'd log an hour of splashing round in the local leisure centre but if you're doing pool dives to keep your skills in check then I'd imagine the next time you go out to Sharm your dive centre would be interested to know that. So yeah, in my usual style, 1000 words where 10 would do... but what's the "done thing" regarding what to log and what not to log?
Ultimately it's up to you what you log. I think one agency states something like "min time 20min, min depth 10m" - not sure of the figures, but you get the idea. Personally I wouldn't bother with pool dives but did log a "hard hat" (traditional dress) dive done in a pool and also a "recreational" dive done in a chamber. Generally I log all my dives (lake or sea) but there are exceptions where I didn't feel it was worth the effort of putting my reg in - IMVHO any dive which you learn something from should be logged regardless of the depth/time. A logbook is a record of your experience and you will often learn more on a dive aborted in the first 5 mins than on an uneventfull 40min bimble.
normally if its a training dive there are standards about depth,time or amount of gas consumed. if you are not training then you can log whatever you want.
Your log book, your choice. Remember, some people log those 'dry dives' when you are pressurised in a recompression chamber. At least in a pool you are doing some form of diving.
Personally, I feel guilty to log anything other than a 'proper' Open Water dive, although as others say, you can log any dive. Among the unusual dives that I have logged are those at the cenotes of Yucatan and a strange dive in Bermuda where the maximum depth was 3.2m! It was a reef and underwater 'meadow' that covered a large area but at a very shallow depth. There were some unusual worm-like critters and other stuff that were too small to be seen while snorkelling at the surface and so my buddy and I decided to kit up and treat it as a dive.
Were you in a situation where your scuba gear was keeping you alive? i.e. underwater? Then it's a dive As JB said, your logbook, your choice. That said, if someone came to dive with me and they had 100 dives consisting of 99 pool dives I might just be the tiniest bit wary
Very good question. For the PADI MSD you need to have completed 50 dives. If logging dives is a personal preference would PADI accept the minimum open water dives (for specialities and rescue) say 20, together with 30 + 'pool dives'. As angryjonny asks what would be the criteria for logging dives. Geoff
Then you need to fulfill Padi's criteria As jenkins has said, it's something along the lines of minimum 20mins at 10m, but you would have to clarify with them. Does this mean 19mins @ 9m does not constitute a dive? To Padi for the purposes of validating a DM trainee's experience maybe not, to me yes it is If it's just for your own use then I'd stick with the my logbook, my choice viewpoint.
its your log book, so do what you feel useful there are no hard a fast rules. Generally a pool dive would not count but I may make a note if I was trying out equipment configurations just for my own personal record. A shark tank or Nemo 33 (33m deep swimming pool) can count as a logged dive in the eyes of PADI as they are controlled enviroments beining larger than a swimming pool with additional hazard be it aquatic life depth etc. The guidlines for PADI training dives 20 mins greater than 5m for the majority of the dive or breathe at least 50cft or 1500l of air. Although there are exceptions the rescue course being one of them where they hope you can locate and recover to the surface an unresponsive diver in less than 20 mins. you tend to get asked how many and where have you dived and when was your last dive. I take my log book when I go on holiday but noboby has looked through it carefully. Apart from my instructor to verify I had reached the minimum number of dives for the DM course and they were not all at wraysbury.
Log what you consider important. Some people log every time they get wet regardless. I log only dives that I'll reference later. Change of kit, change in conditions etc or a deeper than normal dive. As others have said log what will be usefull there's no set rules or standards. BK
One dive I thought was questionable was a training dive, 15m for 6mins. SSAC say (all trainee dives need to be 15mins in duration), however I was qualified. I looked at it as my comp logged it, as did I. And as BK has just said, it mey have been something needed for ref at a later date. DD
You can log any dive you want, but if its a qualifying dive (type of dive need to get a cert) it needs to meet the training agency criteria.
Well then. Quite a splatter of responses but the line of best-fit seems to say "it depends who your readerbase is" - if it's just yourself you may want to log everything for your own education, if it's PADI or someone then they may turn their noses up at your "Dive #41, wore my snorkel in the bath again" type entries. So, bearing that in mind; it's plausible that a year or two down the line I may be going for my Master Scuba Diver rating so I don't want to fill my log up with a heap of "useless" dives. However, I'd imagine, often when I try something for the first time (i.e. a skill or a piece of gear) it'll be in the pool and I'll want to jot down what I learned. Would it be stupid, therefore, to maintain 2 logs? One for "proper" dives (long, deep open water dives where I'm fighting off giant squid and harpooning Scaramanga's henchmen) and one for pool splashing that I might find interesting to reread at a later date?
Worth logging for the first couple of hundred at least, depending on where your interest takes you. Personally I would say log every dive that constitutes a proper planned and executed dive. If you have a situation where a dive went wrong and was aborted say 3-5 mins in for congestion, equipment fault or fault and restart, I would certainly log it for future reference but not number it, or if on the same day, add it as a very brief prologue to the following numbered dive. Remember this log is there primarily for your reference and only occasionally to show a training agency you're ready for a specific progression. If you need to count the dives to prove you are ready for the progression, you probably aren't. It's not just there to just to bump the index up so you can occasionally say "woohoo 50" or "woohoo 100". Anyone judging purely by the number in a logbook rather than your training, ability, attitude and recency is not worth paying attention to anyway. Summary: Always log what's relevant to you, count what seems obvious and reasonable.
Just smack the person that sneers at your log book. A year or two down the line you will have so many good dives in your log book that, the time you got lost surfaced three times in exactly the same place lost your weight belt and had a 20 min conversation with snot all over your face dive will be long forgotten. Yes we have all had dives that are quiet frankly embarrassing.
Personnally I moved my logbook to ... helps me make a better looking by guiding through the fish species or uploading my precise dive profile straight from the dive computer.... just makes it more useful to me than regular paper logbooks.
SiltyBottom summed up my thinking. If you want to log any dive, pool, pressure chamber, paddling pool, it's up to you, but log it accurately and anybody who's using it to assess your experience can make their own decisions as to the value of any particular dive. I logged my "try dive" when I switched my log from a cheapy notebook I bought in Sharm to a loose leaf binder and I'm still not 100% sure I should have, but it was a 20+ minute dive in open water down to 11M (Blue Lagoon in Cyprus), so was as much a 'proper' dive as many I've done since. M
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