What SCUBA Diving Activities Should I Try?
Candace Reno April 27th, 2023 Posted In: Articles Tags: SCUBA
What SCUBA Diving Activities Should I Try?
SCUBA diving is full of exciting opportunities. Your first certification course teaches you all about diving safely. The advanced open water course then gives you teasers of what other types of diving might be like. Once you are comfortable in the water, having something to do on a dive can keep your enthusiasm for diving alive. What SCUBA diving activities should you try? Let’s take a look at some popular SCUBA diving activities.
Reef Diving
Reef diving is perhaps one of the most popular SCUBA diving activities. It is easy for beginner divers and just as enjoyable for experienced divers. They can be shallow, deep, full of coral, swim-throughs, or even patchy, scattered throughout the sand. Some reefs are full of life while others are dying. This is a big problem throughout the world. When you dive on a reef, do your part and stay off of it! There are opportunities for divers to help with coral conservation efforts. Some dive shops will let you participate in planting coral in the coral farms. What a great way to give back to the ocean!
Wreck Diving
Wreck diving is one of my favorite SCUBA diving activities! When people think of wrecks, they think of boats, but they could be planes or other interesting objects. A really cool thing about wreck diving is learning about the history of the wreck. Many wrecks were sunk for the purpose of making an artificial reef. There are many that were also sunken naturally.
Wrecks can be dove just on the outside and can be very pleasing in this manner. However, if you obtain the recreational wreck diving certification, you can learn all about how to safely enter a wreck and explore inside. Proper exposure protection will help protect against potential scrapes while penetrating a wreck. Remember, take only pictures! If you see items on a wreck from what it was hauling, you should not take it because it might be illegal to do so but also because it makes the wreck less interesting for future divers.
Search and Recovery
Search and recovery diving is a great way to keep up with advanced skills such as search patterns and staying focused looking for an item all while keeping a close eye on your air consumption. Search and recovery diving can be quite rewarding. This isn’t public safety diving where crimes are involved. This is recreational diving in search of lost items. People often lose items off of boats or docks, such as keys, rings, and phones. Sometimes people pay handsome rewards for their lost treasures.
Dive Caching
Speaking of lost treasures, one of the newest, hottest SCUBA diving activities is dive caching. Who doesn’t love an underwater treasure hunt? Dive caching is much like geocaching but underwater. Someone will hide items underwater and post its coordinates on a website. Divers can look on the website to see these locations. At the dive site, underwater navigation and search and recovery skills are honed by looking for these items. Often there is a dive slate or someway for you to leave your name or notes once you have located the item. You could also take a picture with your find and post it to the website.
Underwater Photography
This brings us to another favorite SCUBA diving activity: underwater photography. Underwater photography is always challenging but less so these days with the advancement of technology. There are newer cameras that are waterproof themselves, no housing required, and have a built in diving mode that puts a red lens in place when diving in blue water. Some divers still have their main cameras with very expensive underwater housing. There are numerous underwater light, flash, and strobe setups as well. I think the simple point and click options for people just starting out with this hobby is best.
No matter what type of SCUBA diving activity you try, remember, your number one objective on every dive is to return safely. You must keep a careful eye on your air consumption and no-decompression limits. Your secondary objective is doing the activity that you choose.
This is not an all-inclusive list. There are many more SCUBA diving activities that divers enjoy. Get with your nearest SCUBA diving shop to inquire about the exciting certification courses they offer in these fun areas of SCUBA diving activities.
