The 10 Best Scuba Diving Tips You Ever Wanted To Know

• Are you looking for helpful scuba diving tips to improve your performance?
• Are you bored with those articles about scuba diving basics for beginners copied from each other?

Welcome to the Dressel Divers blog.

“Check the air left in your tank, never stop breathing, equalize your ears frequently…” Really?

Obviously, these are excellent diving tips, but they already give them to you during each briefing, and you still have unanswered questions.  We know because you ask us daily.

We firmly believe that good divers can improve through their knowledge. For that reason, we wrote this article 2 years ago. With it, we tried to contribute new things and give ideas for making small changes in your routines that will help you scuba dive better and safer. Now we add new content to offer you more value.

Take a look at the content table.

1) 4 Scuba Diving Tips to Put on Your Wetsuit Faster

If you can’t put on your wetsuit in less than 10 minutes, in the following lines, we offer you 4 dive tips to beat your record.

1. Use a plastic bag to slide the suit down your arms and legs (reuse the bag as much as possible, then put it in the plastic recycling bin).
2. Wear lycra tights under the wetsuit. You won’t have a problem pulling up your pants again, but if you’re diving in the Caribbean in the summer, you might get hot.
3. Use specific lubricants for this function. They have a water base.
4. Our human resources director recommends taking a shower or running a hose and letting the water run into the suit. It will dilate the tissue so that you have more room to maneuver.

2) Optimize The Safety Check and Do Not Forget to Check Anything

Yes, we know. It is one of those scuba diving tips for beginners we have talked about before. It is recurrent for a reason: 70% of the problems that can arise during a dive are prevented with this routine act.

You have asked us is how to improve it and avoid carelessness.

Our dive tip is to do it from head to toe. Starting with the hood and ending with the fins, review each of the equipment parts that you find along the way.

And here we drop an extra tip: pay special attention to the regulator: Try to breathe through the two regulators (main and secondary) with the cylinder closed. If you can’t, then everything is fine.

If you can breathe, this is because there is a leak letting the air through. Be careful, because if uncorrected it will fill with water while you dive.

3) Follow The Proper Protocols on Board

You would be surprised to know how many people have scuba diving equipment, just like yours. Especially if you have rented it at the dive shop. Climbing on the boat and spreading your equipment everywhere is a big mistake. Keep in mind that this act can cause accidents. But that’s not all; many people remove the things that hinder them to place their stuff on the boat. So, when the owner of that gear looks for it, they don’t find it, causing delays in the departure and frustration for the rest of the group. This doesn’t sound nice, does it?

The best diving tip to avoid situations like these is: to get on the boat, put your things all together and leave them as collected as possible. If the equipment is your property, also mark it with your name.

Another important point on a boat is the diver’s entry into the sea. It doesn’t matter if you make a giant stride or a back roll. The truth is that at that moment your visibility is limited by the mask, by the team or because you are with your back to where you are going. In other words, if you are not careful you won’t completely know what is happening in the water.

So, follow our scuba diving tip and wait for the double OK signal of the crew and your diving partner.

This way you will avoid mishaps. In the article The Dos and Don’ts on A Dive Boat you will find these and other tips to move about safely on a dive boat.

4) Descend And Ascend Following a Line

We already know that divers prefer to free fall into the blue of the sea. But if we want to improve our performance, our dive tip is to ascend and descend following a line. How to do it?

Close to the line and with it between the legs. So, if the current is strong, you will not be at risk of losing the line and getting lost.

Why should we use the line?

Have you ever heard the awful phrase “I will wait for you down there”?

It means you intend to move without waiting for your buddies at the most critical moment of a dive. However, descending and ascending along the line avoids this situation since all the divers descend at the same line, making it easier to meet at the sea bed. Also, if someone has a problem, the rest can wait for him or her and offer air if necessary.

When you ascend using the rope, you no longer depend only on the strength of your flapping fins. You could freehand climb the line straight to the boat if there were a problem.

5) Improve Trim to Improve Buoyancy with This Dive Tip

To be a good diver, everyone will give you this scuba tip “Improve your diving buoyancy”. We too. In fact, our expert, Víctor Córdoba, already did in the article “3 Secrets About Buoyancy Control to Dive Like an Expert”. You can also improve your buoyancy skills with the PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy course.  Of course, you should take it with us.

Anyway. Few people talk about the convenience of improving the trim. Trim is the diver position. It must be horizontal.

If you look closely, you can tell who is an expert diver and who is not just from their position diving. The novice generally moves diagonally. The reason being that they are incorrectly weighted. Therefore, the diving tip is, to learn to weigh yourself with the right weight, neither more nor less than you need, and to distribute it well.

6) Dive as a Team

A group of divers should dive as a team. It means that everyone has a role in the execution of the dive. The word team implies working in a complementary, joint and redundant way to deal with any problem.

So, being aware of other divers is vital in diving as much as properly playing your role.

7) Develop your situational awareness

According to DAN, situational awareness is a 3-step process:

1. to perceive the underwater environment that surrounds us and the elements that compose it;
2. to evaluate their importance and anticipate their effects, as well as assess whether they represent an advantage, a risk, or are neutral;
3. to make the right decisions to reduce human error. This is one of the main factors for scuba diving accidents.

8) Know When Is the Moment to Return

To determine when to return, use common sense. For this, you must be attentive to your air consumption, meaning:

During a dead-end dive, start to return before reaching half of the air in your tank.

During a cave dive, strictly follow the rule of “three thirds”; a third to go, another to return, and another, for whatever could happen.

If you are doing a drift dive, you will not have to go back, but you will have to know when to ascend. Pay attention to your dive computer and your pressure gauge.

9) 2 Diving Tips to Get on Board Without Dying Trying

In Dressel Divers we are well aware that not all divers have the strength to pull themselves up with their arms or climb the ladder with all the equipment on. For that reason, the ladders of our boats have a 45º inclination that facilitates placing the foot on the step and ascending with ease. Did you notice this detail when you dived with us?

But if you don’t dive with Dressel Divers, some of the best scuba diving tips we can give you to board the boat are:

1. Hold onto the ladder, take off the weight belt and pass it to the crew, then the fins. This way, you can place your feet on the lowest steps. Important! Don’t release the ladder under any circumstances, especially if there is a current. Otherwise, you will drift away from the boat and you will have to return without the fins. If you can’t hold yourself, ask your partner for help.
2. If you have to climb aboard a zodiac, take off the bottle and the weights before boarding, pass them to the partners on the boat without letting go of the side rope. But do not take off your fins, they will help you to enter.

We invite you to send us your questions through the form below and we will expand this series of articles, offering, as always, the best scuba diving tips.

10) 4 Articles with Many More Scuba Diving Tips

Scuba Diving Breathing Techniques to Improve Your Air Consumption

3 Secrets of Buoyancy Control to Dive as An Expert Diver

How to Scuba Dive Better with 5 Essential Diving Skills?

7 Underwater Navigation Tips to Dive as An Expert