Dive Logbook

A diver's record of every dive: date, site, depth, time, gas, conditions, and notes. Proof of experience and the raw material for better planning.

A dive logbook is the running record of your diving life: for each dive, the date, site, maximum depth, dive time, starting and ending pressure, the gas used, exposure protection worn, conditions, buddy, and whatever you saw or learned. In the water it has a practical planning role, since past logs tell you how much weight you needed with a 5 mm wetsuit, what your gas consumption looks like at 25 m, and how a site behaves at slack tide.

Logs are also credentials. Dive operators and courses routinely ask for logged experience, rescue and professional courses have minimum dive counts, and a stamped or signed logbook is the accepted evidence. Beyond bureaucracy, the log is where your SAC rate trends, weighting experiments, and equipment changes become visible over time, which is exactly the feedback loop that makes planning sharper.

Paper logbooks still get stamped in dive shops, but digital logbooks have taken over much of the job, importing dives automatically from a dive computer with full depth profiles, and adding photos, GPS coordinates of the dive site, and species lists. Whichever form you use, the habit matters more than the medium: log the dive while the details are fresh.