Scuba Diving
Skills
Scuba Diving
Gear, Technique, Trip Planning, and More
Why We Love Scuba Diving
We love scuba diving because it gets us to some of the most amazing marine ecosystems in the world.
Leah is happy doing shallower, easier dives. Karl likes the challenge of more adventurous dives, including cave and wreck dives. Scuba diving also gets us to beautiful and interesting parts of the world that we would never have gone to if we weren’t into diving like the Belize Barrier Reef and Garifuna communities of southern Belize or the Cenotes and Maya communities of the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico.
Scuba Diving 101
We aren’t going to do a deep dive into key scuba diving skills since you will learn these in your scuba diving certification course or courses.
In our case, we have our PADI Open Water Diver and Advanced Open Water Diver certifications, as well as several more specialized certifications. If you are going to dive with an instructor, the PADI Open Water Diver course is really all you need (although getting your Advanced Open Water Diver certification certainly doesn’t hurt). If you are going to dive alone, we’d recommend getting your Advanced Open Water Diver certification which includes training on topics like navigation. Pick the dive shop that you are going to get your certification from carefully (How To Jumpstart The Divemaster in You (see below) has some great tips and tricks re. how to pick a dive shop.
How To Jumpstart The Divemaster in You is by far the scuba diving resource that we have found. It is a great tool to help you prepare for your scuba diving course(s) and to supplement what you will learn in your scuba diving course or courses.
Our Scuba Diving Gear
We rent almost all of our scuba diving gear with the exception of booties, dive computers, masks and snorkels. On trips where we might also be doing a lot of snorkeling, we also bring fins. For dive computers, we prefer watch based dive computers.
Our Scuba Diving Resources
Here are some of our favorite scuba diving resources that we use to learn new techniques and to select dive sites:
Gear
Technique
- How To Jumpstart The Divemaster in You is an eBook that is a great source of information on scuba diving techniques. Diane’s website includes gear reviews and trip reports.
Trip planning
- 100 Dives of a Lifetime is a great coffee table book that includes a list of some of the best dive sites in the world
- Padi.com is a website that is another resource that we use to plan scuba diving trips, although it’s not as good as Scuba Diving.com
- Scuba Diving.com is a website we use to develop our bucket list of global scuba diving adventures and to develop more detailed itineraries for specific scuba diving adventures.
- Scuba Diving Smiles.com is a website in addition to publishing the How to Jumpstart the Divemaster in You eBook, Diane’s website includes gear reviews and trip reports.
- Scuba Travel World’s 100 Best Dive Sites in 2023
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