Writing up your diving logbook

Well, most of it should be pretty obvious to intelligent people like you are, so I'll leave you to figure most of it out for yourselves. However, one thing that sometimes foxes people is the little graph.

The idea is that this is a plot of depth (on the vertical axis) against time (on the horizontal axis). The units can be whatever you want them to be, but I've usually found that on shallow dives, say down to 12m or so, you can use 2m per row while on deeper diving its better to use 5m per row. Likewise, you will run out of table if you do a long dive and use less than 5 minutes per column.
Close your eyes and think about the dive you did - did you go straight to the deepest point first? Or did you descend gradually over the first 15 minutes? Did you leave the bottom to look at the deck of the wreck and then go back down again? How slowly did you ascend to 6m? Did you do in-water safety stops or simulated decompression? - then draw the profile you think you dived.

Of course, if you got me to print out the profile recorded by your wrist computer, then its a simple matter of transferring that to the graph (or cutting and pasting if you have an electronic or a paper copy). Anyway - each dive needs:

  • an approximate start time
  • a tissue code at the start (A unless you already dived that day)
  • a dive time (from leaving the surface to getting back to your check depth, 6m)
  • a maximum depth
  • an exit tissue code (B-F, you can work it out from the tables in your possession)
  • and a graph as explained above.

    When it comes to the text, you can do it all in words or, better, you can combine words with sketches of the dive site (indicate north if you know it), or sketches of interesting things you saw. (Could be a fish, an anemone, or could be a rock formation or a boiler - whatever)

    To see one I put in the oven earlier, click here. This was a dive most of you will either already have done, or will do in future - the James Eagan Layne - a WW2 freighter near Plymouth. If you want to follow up on the wreck itself, click on this link, or this one. The one I usually recommend is http://www.divernet.com/wrecks/wtour620404.shtml (you can copy and paste the address into your browser) which will take you on a guided tour of this very well loved dive. However, when I tested it tonight, it wasn't working.