There are four pieces of scuba equipment that I believe are essential to the safety of your dive. I make sure to have them with me on every dive trip in Asia and every liveaboard dive adventure I do. My experience in the water has shown me how important these life-saving dive tools are to you and your dive buddies.
Safety Sausage, this surface marker is the cheapest scuba gear you can buy besides a whistle, which is nice to have too, but these days they are almost always standard equipment on many “BCDs.” The safety sausage can be seen even in choppy seas from far away with the naked eye. Today there are brands that also include a strip of night reflectors that will illuminate very intensely when hit with any type of light.
A dive light, preferably an LED light as the turn-on times are very long. At night, if you are adrift, you can draw the attention of passing ships, helicopters, or planes. Certainly, if a search is done for you at night, it really increases the chances of being seen. I keep one in my pocket all the time as I like to search the holes for little critters on the dives, so I take advantage of the light in my pocket a lot, always knowing in the back of my mind that I have it in case of to divert me. And disappear into the night
Knife I can remember one time in Cambodia that I was diving with a group, and I was looking at something and I broke away, as I was heading to the pickup location, I almost swam into a large, almost invisible ghost net! It would be very easy to get tangled up and without a knife I would have had a hard time getting out.
I have a friend who works with nets that fish off the coast of Hawaii, and when he does it at night, he swims naked to lessen the possibility of something hanging from the net and drowning him, which does happen to this type of fisherman.
Dive computer, today they are very cheap and last for years. Why trust old analog gauges with charts and graphs, when you can have this essential piece of scuba gear for roughly, calculated to most divers, less than a dollar per dive? Curves are something you don’t want to waste time with, having a dive computer lets you know right there on your wrist or dive console exactly where you are in terms of nitrogen loading and dive time, which too it will tell you how much decompression stops to make if you accidentally exceed the safe limits in your planned dive profile.
Let’s check
Dive with safety sausage, cheap and very easy to see in the open sea, if you can get it with a light reflector, even better.
Dive light to be used as a night signal to attract the attention of boats, helicopters and search planes.
Dive Knife is used to cut fishing line and fishing nets that you might accidentally bump into.
A dive computer prevents you from accidentally contracting decompression sickness (DCI)
Remember to plan your dive, dive your plan, and be prepared with the right dive gear.