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49 stories for“diving safety practice”
Compact geography, shore access, wrecks and a new six-person hyperbaric unit make Gozo an unusually practical Mediterranean base for a mixed-experience dive trip.
Jul 25, 2026
Divers Alert Network is not a training agency and issues no certifications. It collects the injury data, then publishes guidance based on it. Here is that guidance, in the order it matters.
Aug 12, 2026
Two agencies now certify divers to dive alone, with redundant gas and a long list of prerequisites. The case for it rests on an uncomfortable observation about how often the buddy system already fails in practice.
Sep 5, 2026
DAN warns that remote liveaboard incidents rose sharply in 2024-2025. Divers can reduce risk by checking oxygen, drills, charging rules, exits and evacuation plans before sailing.
Aug 2, 2026
Most divers carry something sharp and have never once deployed it underwater. The gap between owning a cutting tool and being able to use one in the dark, with one hand, is where people die.
Aug 12, 2026
Scuba has real hazards, but recreational diving within training and conditions is a managed-risk activity, not the extreme gamble suggested by rare accident headlines.
Jul 25, 2026
Spearfishing shares its breath hold physiology with freediving, but a hunting mindset changes the risk calculation entirely, and blackout remains the top cause of death.
Apr 8, 2026
Research divers work under formal scientific diving safety standards, but a marine science background does not make deep or technical diving inherently safer to attempt.
Jun 14, 2026
Cave diving safety rests on a small set of hard rules built from decades of accident analysis. Here is what those rules are and why the sport enforces them so strictly.
Jun 2, 2026
Safety divers, counterballast lines and strict medical protocol turned a high risk sport into one of the most closely supervised in the water.
Mar 11, 2025
CO2 tables build genuine breath hold tolerance over weeks. Hyperventilating beforehand does the opposite of what beginners think it does, and it has killed trained divers.
Sep 2, 2025
Three minutes at five metres is drilled into every diver and explained to almost none of them. It is not decompression, it is not required, and skipping it is not the emergency people assume.
Aug 9, 2026
Two men and a woman surfaced from a dive at Canyon Reef, found no boat, and were carried kilometres out. Whether lost divers are found has surprisingly little to do with the search itself.
Aug 18, 2026
Malta, Chile, Norway, Scotland. Different species and different regulators, the same short list of causes: entanglement, working alone, depth creep, and a job nobody classified as commercial diving.
Aug 12, 2026
Oxygen keeps divers alive, until pressure turns it toxic. Here is why central nervous system oxygen toxicity shapes every gas decision in technical diving.
Sep 10, 2024
Shark bites made headlines again in 2025. The numbers behind those headlines tell a very different story for the people actually diving with sharks.
Mar 5, 2026
A woman and her partner, both long-serving members of the European technical community, did not survive an emergency ascent near Ueberlingen on 2 August. The cause is still unknown.
Aug 5, 2026
The standard aluminium 80 is negatively buoyant full and positively buoyant empty, which is why safety stops go wrong at the end of a dive. Steel behaves differently, and the valve and testing rules differ too.
Sep 5, 2026
DAN is a name every diver knows, but membership and dive accident insurance are not the same thing. Here is what each one actually buys you.
Jun 30, 2025
A cave in the Maldives, a lake in Germany, an inlet in Florida, a tuna farm off Malta. Four very different events, and a short list of factors that shows up in nearly all of them.
Aug 13, 2026
When a diver surfaces with decompression sickness, a hyperbaric chamber is the only real fix. Here is how recompression works, and where chambers actually are.
Nov 18, 2024
Five Italian divers and a Maldivian rescuer died in May. A manslaughter file is open in Rome, a liveaboard lost its permit, and the Maldives is writing technical diving law. A follow-up assessment.
Aug 12, 2026
After six divers died in a Vaavu Atoll cave, the Maldives is drafting new rules to permit and regulate technical diving in the country for the first time in its history.
May 28, 2026
Egypt's most famous sinkhole is also its most argued-over dive site. What the Blue Hole actually is, and why so much depends on who is diving it.
May 20, 2024
Lionfish, stonefish, stingrays and most jellyfish deliver venoms that heat breaks down. The standard measure is immersion in fresh water as hot as you can stand without burning, capped at 45 degrees, for thirty to ninety minutes.
Sep 2, 2026
A sunken ship draws every diver's curiosity, but the line between a safe swim-through and a genuine penetration dive is stricter than it looks.
Jun 25, 2025
Finnish cave specialists, Maldivian coast guard divers and DAN Europe medics carried out a coordinated recovery after the Vaavu Atoll cave tragedy.
May 22, 2026
The numbers every diver recites are not arbitrary and they are not a safety margin invented by lawyers. They come from a specific set of chamber trials, and knowing their limits tells you when to wait longer.
Aug 15, 2026
One demands breath control and stillness, the other demands equipment discipline. Here is what separates them and where beginners should start.
Jun 24, 2025
An Open Water card opens the door to diving worldwide, but it is a narrower licence than most new divers assume. Here is exactly what it covers.
Sep 9, 2025
Diving emergencies far from shore involve costly medical evacuations and coordination. Here is how that response is actually funded and organised, and who calls the shots.
Jun 25, 2026
The agencies argue endlessly and the accident data barely distinguishes between them. Here is what genuinely differs, what does not, and the questions to ask a dive centre before you pay.
Aug 13, 2026
The east coast has the depth, the Gulf side has the pools, and summer changes the answer entirely. A practical guide to training here across the year rather than flying to Dahab every time.
Aug 13, 2026
Budapest and Novi Sad staged world championships nine days apart under rival federations. Four AIDA world records fell, then CMAS records fell again, often to the same athletes.
Aug 4, 2026
Submersion triggers an ancient reflex that slows the heart, redirects blood, and quietly reshapes what a trained freediver's body can survive underwater.
Sep 18, 2024
HEAD rescued Aqualung out of receivership with a 50 million euro package. The result is a single group holding four of diving's best known equipment names and SSI, the agency that certifies divers to use them.
Aug 18, 2026
Deep water a short swim from shore, no boat, no current and warm all year. Dahab's geography explains its status, and the same geography is why the Blue Hole has the reputation it has.
Aug 9, 2026
A British freighter bombed off Sinai in 1941 still holds its motorcycles, trucks and rifles in the holds. Cousteau found it in 1956, and it remains the Red Sea's defining dive.
Aug 6, 2026
Technical diving begins the moment a diver can no longer go straight to the surface. Here is how training builds toward that shift, one course at a time.
Dec 5, 2025
Scuba Schools International built its model around the store rather than the individual teacher, gave its digital learning away, and quietly became the main alternative to PADI in most of the world.
Aug 12, 2026
The Philippines' remote World Heritage reef rewards careful planning with walls, sharks, turtles and a conservation model built around a short liveaboard season.
Jul 25, 2026
Global Underwater Explorers standardises equipment, teaches in teams, tests fitness, and hands out provisional passes rather than certificates. It is the most divisive system in diving, and the most internally consistent.
Aug 12, 2026
Glasses do not fit under a mask, so the default answer is contact lenses. Eighty-five per cent of cases of a rare blinding corneal infection occurred in lens wearers who swam or dived in them, and there is a better option most divers never price.
Aug 20, 2026
