Search
60 stories for“safety”
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
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
The PROTECT package treats drowning as a systems failure involving childcare, transport, infrastructure, rescue and climate preparation, not a single bad choice.
Jul 23, 2026
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
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
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
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
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
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
A good briefing answers most of what a visiting diver needs. A great diver asks the rest: current, exit, turn pressure, lost-buddy plan and what happens if the boat cannot find you.
Sep 18, 2026
Below about 15 degrees a thick wetsuit keeps a diver alive but not warm, and cold is a safety problem before it is a comfort one: it thickens judgment, wastes gas and makes the hands useless. The drysuit is a different way of diving, not a thicker suit.
Feb 4, 2025
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
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
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
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
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
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
Drift diving turns a dive from a route into a ride. The techniques that make it safe are mostly about the surface and the boat, and the mistake that kills people is trying to fin against water that is stronger than they are.
Sep 5, 2026
DAN's annual diving reports track how divers die each year, and the leading cause is rarely the dramatic equipment failure popular imagination assumes it to be.
Jun 19, 2026
Divers who silt the bottom, burn through gas, struggle to hold a safety stop and finish cold usually share one cause. They are carrying too much lead, and every other symptom follows from it.
Sep 5, 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
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
Redeemer Grima, 41, was working 30 metres down at a fish farm off St Paul's Islands when he drowned. His equipment was later found lodged in the mouth of a dead bluefin tuna.
Aug 12, 2026
A small genre with a heavy subject. These are the documentaries and features that actually explain the sport, including the ones that handle its deaths honestly rather than as spectacle.
Aug 11, 2026
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
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
