How to Avoid Common Scuba Diving Mistakes and Stay Safe

In an ideal world, no scuba divers would make mistakes, and we would see everything we want on every dive. Sadly, neither is true; we do not see everything on every dive, and mistakes do happen with wide-ranging consequences. So what are some of the most common mistakes divers make, from diving with a tight-fitting scuba mask to not having their gear serviced regularly?

Gear Maintenance: What’s That!

The hard truth is that you would be hard pressed to find a single scuba diver anywhere on the planet who is not at least a little bit guilty of neglecting their gear maintenance. Many divers never service their regulators and BCDs until they break or develop a major issue. The big secret in the industry is that this tends to affect experienced divers and instructors who are diving on a regular basis.

Seasonal divers tend to establish a routine, where they put their gear away at the end of the season. At the start of the new season, they have their gear serviced and start their diving adventure. This is not the case for many experienced divers who dive year-round. Since they never have a natural break from diving, and the gear keeps working, they simply do not make time to service it and keep diving.

As a result, when things start to go wrong, they do tend to go wrong in a spectacular fashion. That said, due to the robustness and excellent design of modern dive gear, it is capable of withstanding a great deal of abuse before finally breaking. That said, you should have your gear serviced on a regular basis, as per the manufacturer's recommendations, to ensure it is always working optimally.

Hydration

Ask yourself how often you think about or monitor your hydration when on a dive trip. Probably not much, and that is a mistake many divers make worldwide. One of the biggest safety factors that divers tend to ignore is the issue of Hydration. This is because dehydration is one of the primary causes of DCS incidents in warm-weather diving destinations.

Divers who live in cooler climates often lack the habit of regularly drinking large amounts of water to stay hydrated. As a result, when they are somewhere warm, enjoying a diving break, they tend not to change their behavior to ensure they stay hydrated. To make matters worse, often since people are on vacation, they may consume a coffee or two more per day, and they may have a few more alcoholic drinks with dinner in the evening. Both of these are diuretics and actually make you more dehydrated day after day.

Couple the slowly building dehydration, and an additional diving load, and by the end of the week, the diver can be at serious risk of suffering from a dehydration-related Incidence of DCS.

How to Stay Hydrated

Luckily, staying hydrated is relatively easy to do and will ensure you stay safe on your next diving trip. The key to good hydration is “little and often.” Try not to drink large amounts of water at once. Your kidneys can only process so much in one go, and all the excess will go through your system without benefiting you.

Ideally, you should drink a glass of water 3 or 4 times per hour during the day. If you are in a tropical, hot location, you will need to drink an additional 2 liters (4 pints) or more than your normal daily intake to stay hydrated. If you are diving somewhere super hot, such as the Red Sea, during the summer months when daytime temperatures can exceed 40 °C/104°F, you may need to drink even more water during the day to stay hydrated.

Neglecting Shared Pre-Dive Checks

Many divers develop a bad habit of not doing a full buddy check, and simply checking themselves, without engaging with their buddy. While an experienced diver can check their own kit and ensure it is working, missing out on engaging with their buddy is a crucial error that can come back to haunt the pair in an emergency.

The key reason a buddy check is done as a buddy pair is not simply because four eyes are better than two when it comes to spotting issues with the equipment. Instead, it is also a case of each diver familiarizing themselves with the equipment configuration of their buddy. The last thing any diver needs in an out-of-air emergency is to be looking around their buddy’s dive gear trying to locate where they stowed their octopus. In the same way, if there is a significant incident, and you end up unconscious on the surface, the last thing you want is your buddy searching to determine whether you are wearing a weight belt or weight pockets before ditching your weights to establish positive buoyancy.

That is why neglecting shared pre-dive checks is somewhat like driving without a seatbelt. If nothing happens, you will escape any significant issues. However, if an incident occurs, even a minor one, the lack of checks can lead to disaster.  

Diving Beyond Your Abilities & Training

The truth of the matter is that at some time, almost all of us have pushed beyond our abilities and pushed the boundaries. Whether as an Open water diver sneaking a dive to 20m/66ft, or pushing hard on your air consumption and surfacing from the dive with substantially less than you should.

Diving beyond your abilities and training can lead to serious consequences, ranging from minor embarrassments to more severe outcomes. Perhaps the most stark example of the dire consequences of pushing beyond your abilities and training is the Blue Hole in Dahab, Egypt. The lure of a deep dive at 55m/180 ft has led to hundreds of diving fatalities over the years. Today, the numbers have greatly reduced with the proliferation of technical diving in the area. Now, with the proper training, equipment, and skill set, divers execute dives that have claimed many lives in the past.

Not Advocating For Yourself

Novice and inexperienced divers can often fall into a trap of not advocating for themselves and asking questions when needed. They often place their trust in the dive guide and do not seek clarification about key points in the briefing. Or they may have concerns about their abilities and the proposed diving conditions, yet they carry on, afraid of losing face or being embarrassed. Or worse, trusting that the dive guide is a professional who knows everything about their diving and will look after them.

Divers need to remember that dive professionals are humans, and just like every human on the planet, they can make mistakes or misjudge your abilities and comfort levels. It is critical that you communicate and advocate for yourself when diving with a group. Take, for instance, a situation when the first dive of the next day is being discussed in a group, and the site is a deeper one that is beyond what a diver is comfortable with. The diver should be able to take the guide aside and let them know how they feel about the next day’s dive.

There are multiple solutions to the above situation, aside from telling the diver to tough it out and get on with the dive! Most reputable dive operators will be able to deal with the situation while keeping everyone safe and diving within their comfort levels.

Task Overloading

Task overloading can be catastrophic and lead to lots of problems, especially for relatively inexperienced divers. At the beginning, they must focus on buoyancy, good breathing, monitoring air, depth, and dive time. Finally, they should actually enjoy looking at the marine life and appreciating the dive.

That is a tall order, especially for a novice diver, and they should focus on building up their basic diving skill set before throwing another task into the mix. Throwing in a camera, whether a professional-grade DSLR in a housing or an iPhone in an underwater case, can cause problems on more challenging dives, especially if a diver's basic diving skill set is not second nature.

Divers can become so preoccupied with the camera that they get a form of tunnel vision, where they fail to monitor other aspects of the dive, which in turn leads to problems. Keep in mind that most diving incidents are not the result of one significant error, although it happens. Most are the result of a cumulative series of minor errors and poor decisions that compound into a disaster.