Dive Planning Secrets Not Found In The Manuals .

Plan your dive, dive your plan. It's one of those sayings that pretty much every diver is going to hear at some point in their scuba diving journey, and unfortunately a lot of people don't know how to actually plan a dive. Most open water students that I've seen do not come out of their open water class feeling confident enough to go and do a dive plan with their dive buddy, which they should totally be able to do as certified divers. Most of them say that they don't really feel comfortable getting back into the water and doing their own complete planning session on their own with their dive buddies, unless there's also an instructor or dive guide or dive master in the water with them. Then as time goes on in their diving careers, a lot of them just still don't worry about it because many people take trips, you know, a couple times a year and that's when they go diving. Maybe that one Caribbean trip per year where they get on a boat where there's a dive guide, whether it's a dive master or a dive instructor, in the water with them and they follow the leader. But what if you and your dive buddy want to go on a dive trip on your own? Or you want to go diving at a local lake or quarry? Or you just want to do some beach entry diving if that's nearby to you as well? Or what if you get on one of those charters where they don't have a guide in the water with you at all? How are you going to plan your dive? If you think about it, you can't just turn to some dive guide and say, hey, I reached half a tank, can we turn the dive now? No, you don't just magically end up back at the boat or on the shore again or whatever your entry and exit points are supposed to be. You need to actually do a dive plan. Well, in this video, I'll go over dive planning tips that a lot of open water manuals just don't deep dive into. Pun intended. Let's get into it. I'm Thomas Hughes, a professional scuba instructor, and one of those questions newer divers ask me that seems to come up pretty commonly is how do I plan a dive with my dive buddy when I'm not going out with some type of dive guide that I've paid for? Now, as an instructor, this really, really bothers me that it's not hit on more in the different coursework, whether it's PADI, NAUI, SSI, etc. And I think part of the reason to blame is somewhat understandable in that there used to be a lot more planning information when we use dive tables, but dive computers have pretty much replaced dive tables for everybody nowadays, and no one really wants to learn tables anymore. So the agencies can't really be expected to cover dive planning on every dive computer manufacturer out there. That wouldn't be fair to only pick a few, and it's also not really fair to expect them to cover every dive computer because they can all be a little bit different in how planning works. So that said, I want to go ahead and show you how you can actually do some dive planning on your own, what you need to think about, and go a lot more in depth than what the open water classes do from the different agencies out there. The goal is that you'll walk away at the end of this being able to feel confident that you can plan a dive with your dive buddy and go dive locally somewhere, whether it's a local rock quarry like what I have nearby here, going out and doing a shore dive if you're close enough to the water there, or when you're out on a trip somewhere in general and there's a body of water, you can rent gear and go diving without necessarily having to also pay for a dive guide to be in the water with you. So how do we do it? Now to actually start dive planning, we need to start with what our goal and objectives are in mind, and first and foremost it should go without saying, but we need to remember to always be safe and conservative divers, and not just ourselves, but our dive buddies as well. It's important to make sure everyone is completely comfortable with the dive plan, and it's also important that we just slowly expand our limits and not go right to the limit immediately. As you gain more experience as a diver, you'll be more comfortable pushing to your limits. So again, as an open water diver, you might be certified to 60 feet, but you don't need to necessarily dive to 60 feet on your first 15 dives, 20 dives, etc. You can usually find a lot actually quite a bit shallower, and I talk about a little bit more about gaining experience and what makes an experienced diver up in that video, and I'll leave that video link down below as well. Now the main takeaway from that that I want to bring here is that you should slowly expand your comfort zone here. So if you or your buddy are not comfortable with the dive plan, change the dive plan so you're not just pushing right to the limit and people are uncomfortable or anxious before they go on the dive. With all this in mind, it's important to set that objective or goal for the dive itself. Now in tech diving, this is something that's actually hit home really really hard, and I wish it was driven a little bit harder in recreational courses, because depending on which course you take, there might be some discussion about dive plans and making sure you have a very specific mission that you do and things like that. But the idea is that we need to have a rough objective or goal of the dive we're going to be doing to direct our overall plan. Now this doesn't have to be all crazy detailed like you would do in tech diving, but for recreational divers, which I'm targeting this video towards, what you need to know is just what your base goal is. And it could be something as simple as, hey I just want to have some fun and dive in this local area, or I want to go explore that new shipwreck that's off the coast here, or I want to go check out the yacht that Mr. Beast sank. And we've got that video linked up in the cards and down below as well, where I found a yacht that Mr. Beast sank in my local rock quarry, for example. That goal could also be like, hey I want to bring my camera and just try out this new camera, or try out these new lights. And the entire objective of the dive is that I don't really care about going out and seeing all these different things, I just want to see if I can get my camera dialed in. And that's all you really need for your dive plan objective and goal. The first objective of every dive plan truly is that everyone comes back safely and no one's hurt or anything like that. But right after the safety measure and ensuring everyone comes back alive, what is it that you want to do on this dive? Why are you getting into the water this time? Now as you take a look at this objective that you wrote down, you then want to move into the next steps, which is starting to look at the different conditions that you have in the area you're about to dive, and see if this objective is even going to be able to be met. For example, I often need to dive in my local rock quarry because I have a diving YouTube channel, so I need to go diving often so I can get footage, whether it's for new gear that I'm testing and reviewing, or just getting some b-roll footage, or trying to get some footage of me doing different skills and stuff, or like the refresher playlist that I have up here in the cards and linked down below as well. But the problem is, freshwater doesn't always have the best visibility, and for anyone that's dove in a lake or a quarry, raise your hand, you know that visibility can sometimes be 10 feet or about three meters or so, and sometimes it can be maybe one to two feet, so less than a meter. And lately, especially over here, we had a lot of pollen come down, for example, and diving out there looks like you're diving in a blizzard. So that's going to impact my objective of, let's say, filming underwater footage, where I might not be able to film stuff if it requires me to be more than one to two feet from the camera, because it just won't really look good at all. And you might have seen some of that actually in some of the footage I've done for like cold water diving or helicopter turns and stuff, where I wasn't able to get as much footage of my own because the conditions just didn't allow it. So that's going to impact my objective. Now, as you continue to evaluate conditions and see if that's going to impact that objective or not, you want to also look at things like your current in the area. Surge. Are there lots of waves? For the entry and exit that you're going to be doing, is there any hazards that you have to worry about at all? What's the water temperature? What's the temperature outside? What's the time of day of your dive? All these different conditions are going to go into your dive plan for what you need to bring with you, what you need to plan for, and all of that. If the water is cold, for example, you might need different exposure suits than what you had initially thought, and you might want some extra warm clothes to switch into after the dive. Rather than kind of sitting in your wetsuit for a minute or two, you might need to swap out of that wet clothing immediately so you don't freeze. Likewise, if it's really hot but the water's cold, then you might need the exposure protection, but you need to be able to change out of that exposure protection very quickly as well so you don't overheat when you're out of the water. I have a whole video on tips for cold water diving I'll link up in the cards and down below if you're interested in that. Now, let's assume that you have the dive gear you need, the conditions are perfect for what type of diving you want to do, you don't have to cancel anything at all, you're ready to hop in the water, right? Well, not just yet. We still need to plan the actual dive itself. We've assessed the dive side and made sure that our plan is possible, but we need to actually talk about what we're doing when we're underwater. Now before I get into that, if you're finding this video helpful, I'd really appreciate it if you shared it with your other dive buddies out there. A lot of people don't know about the channel still because it's still fairly new overall, but it is full of educational content answering these basic dive questions that people always ask me as an instructor. So if you find it useful, share it with a friend of yours. With that, let's walk through the rest of our dive plan. Plan your dive, dive your plan, right? Well, that first starts with our entry and exit techniques for the dive site that we're going to be at and potentially even marking our entry and exit as well. For example, are you going to do a giant stride off the back of the boat and then do your dive for a while, then do a reciprocal and come back to the boat and get back up where the boat's anchored in the same position all the time? Or maybe you're going to do a bit of a drift dive instead or just a one-way dive where you dive for a certain amount of time or a certain distance and the boat's kind of following along and they pick you up on the other end of that drift. Maybe you're doing a beach entry from ashore and you want to be able to get back to the same beach that you got in on and not end up at another beach, you know, a few hundred feet down the shoreline because of a current that came and pulled you down the line. Believe me when I say you don't want to be walking back through the beach with all your heavy dive gear and stepping through all that sand and everything to get back to where your vehicle was that you parked. Ask me how I know. This is all part of your planning and whether you have someone for surface support on the boat or on the beach to help mark your entry and exit position, or doing things like having some sort of beacon or light set on a downline on the boat, for example, or maybe you have some type of lantern or lamp set up on your truck on the beach, for example, and that way you know, hey, yep, that's my vehicle, that's my beach, that's the parking lot I need to be at. Let me head to that one, not the one over here. Other things you can do for this, and we've tried out as well, is like you can get a bright colored towel and lay it across like the hood of your truck, for example, and maybe tuck it under the windshield wipers or tuck it under the hood some so it stays there, and that way you have this nice bright marker so when you kind of do a turtle pop or just kind of come up to the surface and you look around a little bit and you're like, oh, yep, that's the right beach, that's the one I want to head to because you see this brightly colored towel. Now after we know about the entry and exit, we have to talk about all the in-between, the actual dive itself, right? And like I mentioned earlier, you can get really in-depth with the more like tech diving planning, which is going to cover like, okay, based on my sack and my RMV, I have this much gas volume in my cylinders. So then, you know, based off the amount that I have, do I have enough breathable gas to do the full dive that I want, right? And that's a bit out of scope for this video. That's again, getting a little bit more into the tech diving side of things and not so much for recreational divers. So if you're interested in that, let me know, and I'll work on a video for that as well, but leave a comment down below or something like that. For us, let's talk about recreational dive planning for the underwater portion. And if you're into the idea of some basic gas planning and things like that, I do have a video up in the cards and link down below that covers a little bit of that with a video on air integration that just kind of talks about some of the features you get with that and how that can help you with your gas planning as well. For this video, however, again, we're going to keep it basic, high level, recreationally focused. So we'll worry about how deep are we going and how long do we want to be down there? Now, traditionally, this would have been something that you would do with dive tables or eventually like dive computer software or electronic dive tables, like the ERDPs and things like that. But today, everyone pretty much uses dive computers instead. And just about every dive computer out there can do some form of basic dive planning. This is why the very first piece of equipment that I recommend all divers purchase for themselves is a dive computer of their own. Yeah, you can get a BCD and regulators, exposure protection and all of that, but a dive computer is going to let you dive more often because you can actually plan your own dives, keep track of repetitive dives and all the benefits that come with that. So if you're looking at picking up a computer and you haven't yet, or maybe you're thinking about upgrading your computer, I actually just did a video on buying your first dive computer or your next dive computer. So I'll leave that linked up in the cards and link down below as well. Now, every dive computer is going to be slightly different in how the planning functions work, but they all should be similar in a sense where they take the same information to generate a dive plan for you and just read the manual on your computer so you can figure out how to get into the dive planning mode. I'll go ahead and show you on the brand new Shearwater Turn TX that I'll have linked down below if you're interested in picking up for yourself. Now on the Turn TX specifically, you need to go into dive mode and then you'll go to dive tools and finally NDL planner. Now you'll want to make sure that your gas is set up properly to do this. So make sure you have it set to 21% for diving air. And if you're a little bit more of an advanced diver diving nitrox, then set it to that percentage instead, but make sure all your gases that are configured are turned off except for the ones that are actually going to be with you on the dive. Uh, so don't leave like 21% turned on and 32% make sure you only have the breathable gas that you'll have with you on the dive itself. So only put air if you're only diving air. Now from here, you actually just want to go ahead and enter when your next dive is going to be. And that can be as short as now, which is like swapping the bottle, hopping in the water, or it could be, you know, maybe after an hour break because we're going to sit down, eat lunch, take a little bit to talk about the dive before we jump into the next one, or, you know, it can go all the way up to one day, which is great because it could be the end of the dive day. And you're saying, okay, cool. We want to go diving tomorrow morning at nine o'clock. Can we dive the dive that we want to do? Or maybe you just arrived at a location and you're planning on diving, you know, later that evening or the next morning, something like that. Right? So it's nice to have that flexibility. And again, every computer might be a little different, but on the turn, that's what the constraints can be on this. Now, once you enter your surface interval or basically when the next dive is going to be, you're going to get a list of NDLs and depths on the computer screen. This is all based on what the computer knows about the gas you're breathing. So again, the percentage that you calculated and entered into the computer, and then also your current nitrogen load that it is estimating for you. So if you've been diving, you know, twice today already, and you have some residual nitrogen buildup, it takes that into effect and into account as it's planning this next dive for you based off the estimate that it has for you. So then we take a look at these depths and the times, and we see if we can do the dive we want to do. For example, if we wanted to dive to 60 feet, we can see the exact amount of NDL that we would have. So that's the longest we can possibly stay down there without having to go into decompression, which we don't do as a recreational divers. Right. And that's of course, provided that our air lasts that long. So this doesn't say that, you know, you can stay at 60 feet for 47 minutes or 55 minutes or whatever it is on your dive plan. It's saying that theoretically, if you had enough gas breathing 21% air, you could be down there for this long due to your no decompression limit. Right. And there's a lot more that gets into that. Again, it's going to try to stay away from the more advanced topics there of algorithms and gradient factors and all that junk. But instead, let's just take a look at what the dive plan says. Now, you know, if we wanted to dive to just 30 feet or 40 feet, then again, our NDL will be different based off of those different depths and the type of gas that we're breathing. So we can see if our dive plan fits appropriately into that. And speaking of gas, we do need to plan for our gas ourselves, because again, this is just saying as long as our gas lasts that long, that is the most amount of time we could stay at that depth. This means we need to plan our reserve pressure and turn pressure still. So reserve pressure being that gas that we should never use. That's our in case of emergency. And we should end up on the surface with at least that much, if not more. And our turn pressure basically being that point of the dive that we're going to turn around and head back on a reciprocal, or we're going to start ascending if it's a straight line type thing or, or what have you, right? That's, that's the point that we need to start ending our dive and be on the last half of our dive, not the first half anymore. For most divers, we use what's called the rule of thirds. And of course you can change this based on your level of conservatism for the type of diving you're doing. At a base level, the rule of thirds basically says that you'll use one third of your cylinder on the way out for your dive, right? So let's just say you're doing an out and back one third on the way out. The next third will be on your way back. And the final third is your reserve pressure that you should never have to touch, basically. So one third breathing outward, one third coming back. And as an example, let's say you had a standard aluminum 80 cubic foot tank here in the United States, and we're using PSI in the US. So let's say I had 3000 PSI in that tank. It's a full tank, right? One third would mean that I would breathe 1000 PSI on the way out. So when I SPG or my air integrated computer reads 2000 PSI, that's my turn pressure, right? At 2000, I need to head back. And the final 1000 PSI, I should never touch, and that's my reserve for emergency situations. You can do the same thing in bar, of course, but this is one area that PSI makes it a little bit easier to calculate. One thing I'll say, though, is remember that this is based off your actual tank pressure when you turn on the tank before you get in the water, right? So even though we should all have 3000 PSI for, again, a standard aluminum 80 and all that, we might have a little bit more, right? It might be 31 something or 28 something, right? It might be a little bit colder and the gas pressure is a little bit higher. So use your actual gas pressure. Don't just say 3000 PSI because what if your tank isn't completely full? And that's part of your pre-dive safety checks and things like that too. Now, this sounds great probably for like reciprocals where you're doing the out and back, but obviously it changes just a little bit if you're doing more of like a drift dive or something like that, but the basics are the same. We plan to be at a certain depth for a certain amount of time. And at some point we have a gas pressure that we are going to turn the dive on. So, you know, if it's a drift dive, you might be going down deeper portions first, and then the last half your dive, you're going to go ahead and start ascending. And that's why you'll see on different dive trips. A lot of times it'll be something like, tell me when you're at half a tank because at half a tank, we're going to start coming up and we'll make sure to end our dive there. But that leads us to the next question that everyone just loves. And that's going to be, what about navigation? So if I'm having to navigate out and back on my own, or if I'm doing just a straight line out and I just hope to end up somewhere else, how do I navigate underwater without a guide? Or how do I even use a compass underwater? Well, don't worry. I have videos all about compass use and navigation that you can check out right now. Click or tap the screen to look at those. And with that, stay safe, have fun, and let's go diving.