Level :
Diving guide

  

Diving guide.pdf


I Knowing the environment

Before diving

• Get informed about current legislation concerning marine environment and protected species and habitats.
• Know how to identify the threatened and the protected species.
• Inform your divers about ecology and the most common species in the place you are going to visit.
• Prepare records about species to be discovered by your student divers.

While diving

• Let your divers discover the most common species using submersible identification charts.
• Use submersible notepads to draw and note your observations.
• Teach your student divers to observe and fit into the environment without bothering it.

After diving

• Help the divers to identify the species drawn on their notepads. Let them be aware of the interactions of the species among them and the effect their interactions have on the environment.
• Help them to fill in their notebooks or diving logbooks.
• Write down your own observations: they will enrich your future comments about ecology and species delicacy, and give a better knowledge of their life cycle over the seasons.
• Inform the divers about scientific programs and lectures dedicated to the sea environment you’re exploring with them.
• Get involved yourself in such practical scientific surveys, if you can.

 


II. Reducing your impact on the environment

Before diving

• Ask your divers not to throw anything overboard, including cigarette filters.
• Check the ballast of your divers, don’t ballast the snorkelling beginners.
• Stress the dangers of over ballasting, the balance and the fins use during the briefing.
• Check your divers’ equipment to prevent the manometer and the spare pressure reducing valve from dragging the bottom.
• Emphasize the rule that collecting living or dead animals or plants is strictly prohibited to anyone.

While diving

• Deliver technical courses preferably above a sandy zone.
• Check the buoyancy of the divers in order to avoid scraping the bottom.
• Be careful that the divers do not hit the fixed plants and animals with their fins.
• Put stones back after having moved them.
• Do not feed the animals and take care that the divers not do it.
• Be careful that divers do not break or collect plants or animals.
• Be careful that divers do not bother animals. Encourage the divers to come close without bothering them and to fit into the sea environment as unobtrusively as possible. Be careful that the photographers do not bother the fauna with the flash lights.
• Pick up plastic bags and things found while diving.

After diving

• Bring back your waste.
• Ask the divers to keep their used batteries and put them in a recycling container. Be sure to stress on that point in the country where there is no selective sorting for waste.
• Propose reusable plates, glasses and cutlery instead of disposable plastic ones.
• Use biodegradable soap and dish soap.
• Ask the divers to use the rinsing tank for their diving equipment.
• Ask the divers to save fresh water by staying a shorter time under the shower.

 

III. Protecting and taking actions to protect

Before diving

• Let people know about the “International guidelines for responsible diver”.
• Prefer diving schools that have adopted an ethic charter.
• Improve your knowledge concerning marine biology: enroll yourself in the courses offered by your respective diving schools or by universities.
• Share your experience and your knowledge with people who don’t know the sea environment.
• Emphasize respect of living animals and plants, during the briefings.

While diving

• Be an example, share your passion and respect for the environment : you are a model for your students.

After diving

• Require that your services providers save fresh water as much as possible.
• Ask for the installation of a soft water saving system in the diving school you are working with.
• Put in dustbins and ashtrays in the school premises and on the boat of your diving school.
• Heartily recommend to the divers not to buy souvenirs ripped from the sea : shark teeth, tortoise shell, dried fishes, shellfish, corals, etc...
• Lead initiatives for sea life protection
• Refuse all useless wrapping.
• Save the necessary time for the dive debriefing because it is as important as the time spent under the water.


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