40 Scuba Diving Terms to Speak As a Pro

Many things change in your life when you start diving, including how you communicate. Suddenly, you are going to use and listen to totally new expressions that only a diver can understand. Read carefully this post. So, if some asks for a sausage, you will know what to give them.

Scuba Diving Terms: A

Advanced Open Water: This recreational scuba diving certification level will allow you to improve your experience as a diver and expand your knowledge in this field. The biggest difference with the previous level is that being an AOWD you can dive deeper. Your new depth limit will be 30 meters / 100 feet.

Air: We are talking about the mix of gas your tanks carry, usually 21% oxygen, 78 % nitrogen. Never say oxygen, never. It means you don’t know anything about diving. Say air or gas.

Alternative air source: A second regulator that you would use in special cases, for example, when you lose the main one or if your partner needs air.

Ascent: The last part of the dive, probably the most important one, especially when decompression stops are needed. We are talking about the moment when the diver returns to the surface.

Scuba Diving Terms: B

Back Roll: A kind of entry into the water made by divers dropping onto their back from the dive boat.

BCD: Buoyancy Control Device also called BC, stabilizer, stab jacket, wing, or ABLJ depending on the design. This is an inflatable system used to keep positive buoyancy on the surface and neutral buoyancy while diving. It also keeps the tank secured to diver’s back. You can know more about buoyancy control in this article: 3 Secrets of Buoyancy Control to Dive as An Expert Diver.

Bootie: A neoprene sock that is used with open fins to keep the foot warm and protected.

Buddy: One of the most basic principles of Scuba Diving is “No one dives alone”. In fact, scuba diving is a team sport where the two members of a scuba diving couple look out for each other. Each member is called a buddy. Find yours reading: How To Find A Dive Buddy?

Scuba Diving Terms: C

C-Card: Every time you finish a certification or diving specialization, you will receive this document that attests that you have acquired the required skills at each level.

Cave Diving: Cave diving is a mix between scuba diving and speleology.  The cave divers must possess exceptional buoyancy control and specific diving skills obtained by doing the Intro to Cave or Full Cave Diver certifications. Obviously, we are talking about a technical diving variety in which you have to know how to manage advanced techniques and specialized gear. We recommend you read the article: Everything You Need To Know About Cave Diving In Mexico

Cavern Diving: During a cavern diving you will receive sunlight the entire time that you are exploring the cavern, and always be within emergency swimming distance from an opening to the surface. For this reason, practicing cavern diving you cannot go deeper than 70 feet (21 m) or further than 200 linear feet (60 m) from the surface.

Scuba Diving Terms: E

EAN: Enriched Air Nitrox or Nitrox. Enriched air is a different mixture of gases than we find in atmospheric mix air tanks. The most popular EANx mixes are: EAN32 or Nitrox I: 32% oxygen and 68% nitrogen. This is the mix that you can find in Dressel Divers and enjoy for free. EAN36 or Nitrox II: 36% oxygen and 64% nitrogen. EAN40: 40% oxygen and 60% nitrogen. If you are interested in Nitrox, don’t miss this article 5 Reasons to become a PADI Enriched Air Diver

Eddy: When the current collides with an obstacle, it forms an eddy. These kind of whirlpools are like sinks. They are unsafe for divers.

Equalize/Equalization: Inside your middle ear there are dead air spaces connected to the outer world only by the Eustachian tubes. As long as you are descending, the pressure in your outer ears increases and you need to match the pressure in your middle ears with that outer pressure building up. To do that, you need to let the air enter the middle ear. This act is called equalization. If you have any kind of problem to compensate, accept our advice and read 10 Tips To Equalize Ear Pressure Like A Pro

Scuba Diving Terms: D

DAN: Divers Alert Network

Dive Instructor: also called Open Water Scuba Instructor (OWSI). It is the scuba diving certification level that allows a professional to teach and certify recreational divers.

Dive Light: A flashlight that is used to light dark places such as cavities or night diving.

Dive Table: The diving tables help divers plan their dives. Using them, they can guarantee safety by calculating their duration and depth in advance.

Divemaster: The divemaster level is the scuba diving certification level to start making diving your professional career. Also called a dive guide.

Drift Dive: Drift diving consists of moving forward by letting yourself get carried away by the current. Know more about this topic reading:  Drift Diving: 5 Tips To Make The Most Of It.

Scuba Diving Terms: From F to L

Fins: A part of the scuba gear worn on the feet to impulse yourself through the water. Use this term, never say flippers, as PADI says, Flipper is a famous dolphin not a part of the diving equipment.

Giant Stride: A scuba diving entry from a dive boat, a dock, or any other type of platform. In our article Giant Stride: How to Do A Perfect Scuba Diving Entry?, we go over the required steps to accomplish a perfect giant stride in line with the PADI guidelines, and we’ll explain why each one of them is necessary. Don’t miss it!

Liveaboard: A diving cruise where divers spend the entire journey doing dives at strategic points where diving is especially impressive and exclusive. Know more about Dressel Divers’s Liveaboard offers.

Scuba Diving Terms: From M to Q

Mask: Swimmers and skiers wear goggles, scuba divers wear a mask. A diving mask also covers your nose, so you can avoid the effects of water pressure.

No Fly Time: During diving, our body accumulates more nitrogen and it takes some time to eliminate. Nitrogen takes 12-24 hours, on average, to return to normal surface levels in your body. If you fly, the small residual nitrogen bubbles can expand and cause decompression problems. So, No fly time is how long you have to wait to fly after diving. Know more about this topic reading Flying After Diving And Diving After Flying

Octopus: Read Alternative air source.

Open Water: The main objective of this course is to learn to manage yourself and your scuba gear underwater. When you finish this course, you will be an independent certified diver, which means that you can choose your dive partner freely and just go diving by yourselves within the limits of your training. You no longer need the presence of a professional diver. From this moment on you will be able to dive with any other certified diver.

Scuba Diving Terms: P

PADI: Professional Association of Diving Instructors.

Profile (Dive Profile): A graph, which represents the relationship between time and depth throughout a dive. Dive profiles help us to prepare the dive and they are a good tool to avoid the appearance of decompression accidents.

Pony bottle: A small cylinder fastened with a harness from which the octopus comes out. If the diver has to donate air to a partner, he does not do it from his tank. The drawback is that you must carry two pressure gauges and that the two regulators must be easily distinguishable.

Scuba Diving Terms: Form R to S

Rebreather:  The basic idea is: we only use approximately 5% of oxygen with each breath. Since air has 21% O2, we could use that same breath several times. Rebreathers help us take advantage of oxygen and not waste it. We tell you all about rebreathers in this article. What Is A Scuba Rebreather and What Are Its Advantages?

Safety Sausage: SMB or Surface Marker Buoy. It mainly serves to mark the position of a diver on the surface.

Squeeze: If you do not exhale from time to time through your nose when diving, to equalize the inside of the mask, the effect of the increasing water pressure on the mask will cause pain.

Surface Interval: The time a diver spends on the surface between one dive and the next.

Scuba Diving Terms: T

Trimix: a mixture of helium, nitrogen, and oxygen. The objective of TRIMIX is to replace Nitrogen with Helium as much as possible, thus avoiding problems as narcosis and optimizing decompression. It is used for deep diving.

Technical/Tech (Diving, Limits): This kind of scuba divers want to break the limits of decompression. To do this they have to prepare themselves attending more and more advanced diving courses. Through these courses, they learn to use different mixes of gases, different configurations of equipment and a different way of “focusing” a dive. As their scuba knowledge and diving hours increase, their abilities and skills increase with them. Then, the limits of recreational diving disappear to welcome a new way of diving; Technical Diving.

Thermocline: The thermocline is a layer of separation between two bodies of water at different temperatures. The sun heats the surface of the sea or lake, hot water is less dense than cold water, so it floats on top of cold water. For everything about thermoclines and haloclines just click on the link.

Scuba Diving Terms: From V to Z

Wall Dive: A wall in scuba diving terms is essentially an underwater cliff face, a coral reef that drops off suddenly into the depths of the ocean. A wall dive usually implies a deep dive, as walls drop off suddenly to great depths.

Weight Belt: to compensate positive buoyancy elements which make us float and distribute weight throughout the body. The diving weight belt is part of the gear which will help us with this task. Do you want to choose yours? Take a look at this article.

Wetsuit: the human body loses heat 25 times faster in the water than out of it. The wetsuit gives us thermal insulation, protects us from friction, and helps control buoyancy. They are usually made of foamed neoprene. Check out Scuba Wetsuit Thickness Guide: How To Choose The Perfect One For Your Dives.

Wreck Diving: Scuba diving on the wreckage of ships, aircraft, and other artificial structures is an amazing experience, with an enormous historical and archaeological interest. Every wreck hides its own secrets.

Mysteries about their travel itineraries, their destinations, and the reasons that caused these wrecks to sink. In addition, marine life develops around these wrecks, converting them into artificial reefs.

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