Scuba Diving

Gear reviews & travel tips by passionate divers — everything you need to know about scuba diving.

---

Diving Hub — explore by area

---

Watch our latest dives

From dive site tours to gear tests — new videos from the DIVEIN team every week.

---

Find your gear

---

Best Dive Destinations in the World

Readers’ favorite regions

---

---

Choosing the Right Dive Computer

Our most popular dive computer reviews, tested by PADI-certified divers.

---

Recent Articles

---

Featured articles

---

---

Learn all you need to know about scuba diving from DIVEIN.com

Scuba diving allows you the freedom to explore the beauty and serenity of the underwater world, experience the feeling of being weightless, marvel at beautiful coral formations, and see countless species of fish and aquatic animals.

---

Diving may be a weekend hobby for you, like it is for most of us. We usually meet up with friends early on a Sunday morning, returning with smiles from ear to ear in the afternoon.

Or maybe you’d like to take it further and become a professional scuba diver or dive instructor. Not only will you make a living doing what you love, but you’ll also likely travel to scenic areas and meet many unique people — the perfect job!

No matter how much you’d like to make diving a part of your life, let DIVEIN.com get you started. We’ll help you decide what gear to buy, where to dive on your next trip, and offer plenty of tips and tricks for safe, enjoyable dives along the way.

Scuba diving vs. snorkeling

While snorkelers enjoy the underwater world while looking down upon it from the surface, divers experience true immersion in the scene. Skin divers may stay at the surface to get an overview of what’s underwater, but will then swim down to get a better peek.

Finally, freedivers will descend on a breath-hold dive to spend as much time as possible at the shallow reef. If you’re ready to make the leap and buy your own scuba gear, check out our guide here. Want to get better at snorkeling? Here’s our full snorkel guide.

---

Our in-depth guide to scuba diving

Basic Scuba Diving

Ok. You’ve seen how good scuba diving looks in the movies, but making it look good takes some experience and technical prowess. No worries. We’ve collectively cultivated some of the best habits gleaned from life underwater for you to adopt in order to make it look good and feel even better at the same time.

If you want to stay longer underwater or want to learn better finning techniques, we got you.

After getting a taste of the underwater world it’s only natural not only to want to do it better but also to want more of it. Fortunately, others have been here before and there’s the innovation to prove it.

Nitrox and rebreather apparatuses make things a little more technical but present the possibility for a payoff in the form of longer periods underwater, giving more time and security to explore caves in harder-to-reach areas at slightly more inaccessible depths.

Diving and Taking Care of the Environment

Scuba diving and snorkeling are what they are because of the dynamic natural aquatic environment. As ecosystems are punished by overfishing and pollution, conservation of the oceans is a necessary part of maritime activities making us acutely aware of the need to do more.

Bleaching of coral reefs due to warming temperatures is one visual reminder of the impact human industry has on not just the air we breathe but also on the oceans. It is the sea that absorbs the excess burden of our collective activities mitigating climate change as much as it can until it too falls out of balance.

Check out some info on how you can help conservation efforts. Join others striving to protect the integrity of marine ecosystems.

Check out some organizations that are making a difference. Find out how you can do more.

Skin Diving & Freediving: Stripped-Down Diving

Before there was scuba, there was skin diving. Skin diving is swimming underwater while holding your breath for leisure or fitness. Freediving is the competition-based discipline of divers holding their breath for as long as possible to swim as deep or as far as possible.

Whereas snorkeling is the total leisure approach to observing the aquatic universe from the surface, skin diving and freediving demand dealing with the hydrostatic pressure that increases as you dive deeper. Even though there’s no tank you need to practice equalizing, maybe even more so because you’re holding your breath and it’s air that is getting constricted.

Scuba Diving and Snorkeling With Sharks

It’s a fairly well-accepted truth that sharks aren’t as dangerous as the movies make them out to be. Sharkwater, a documentary by conservationist Rob Stewart (read his obituary) succeeded in bringing this truth to a wider audience and since then swimming with sharks has boomed. But so has awareness of the role these ancient species play in creating balance in the ocean.

Divers and snorkelers who share the water with sharks experience exhilaration and awe. It’s normal to be insecure about sharks because they are predators and some of them can appear menacing. But the truth about sharks reveals that they are in fact preyed upon by human activities including industrial fishing, demand for shark products in cosmetics and by restaurants, and, of course, climate change affecting their habitat.

73 million sharks are slaughtered each year for their fins alone, with the total number much higher when fishing is included. As awareness and understanding increases so too does our ability to help conserve the natural world.

As scuba divers and snorkelers increasingly encounter sharks, demand for cage diving with great white sharks and shark safaris are also on the rise. Shark feeding too has become widespread, with debate swirling around from different points of view. Does it encourage shark attacks, for example? Not likely.

Shark diving is safe

Whether it’s wise to feed sharks will continue to be debated. It is clear from data that it is not particularly dangerous to kit up and swim with sharks as long as the basic guidelines are followed. Being safe and maximizing fun is why rules exist in the scuba world.

If you’re going to swim with sharks, do your research on the dive center and continue to behave like the responsible diver that you should be to help maintain the ocean and carry-on the spirit of people like Cousteau and Stewart. Meanwhile, check out this shark tracker to see how far they swim.