Logged dives?

Hello, I am new to diving and have just gotten my c-card, but my question is about what makes up a logged dive?...Another diver and myself have been told by various people that you must achieve a certain depth and have a certain amount of bottom time, but others have said this isn't true....I am confused

Some agencies have rules regarding open water dives during certification. Once you are certified, you determine what is a dive. There are no scuba police who monitor your logbook.

MD

basically i log a dive each time i put on my gear and enter the water. A log book should be educational. I had to abort an ocean dive once due to conditions before we even truely desended and I logged that one. I wrote about the reasons why we aborted, the conditions and how I felt. It could be helpful later on to recall that experience. The only dives I have not recorded were my training dives. Reason being...I feel there is a difference between diving and certified diving. My logs include certified dives only. I also do not count my training dives when telling people about my dive totals.
Long story short.....its up to you.

Bmax, the logbook has a few purposes. One is, you can prove your experience to interested parties, such as Instructors and Dive Boat Captains. Secondly, you can see your own progression and training development. Thirdly, if you are diving more than once on the same day, you use the logged dive to plan the next dive and figure out your residual nitrogen and maximum dive time. Finally, you can return to your logbook for details if you dive the same site again, eg weighting, temp, current, what suit you used, etc. Some divers draw a sketch of a wreck if that was what the objective was, identify fish they saw, etc etc. Good to have the logbook entry signed by your buddy or Dive Guide or Instructor or Dive Operator so it is more verifiable.

Instructors have to follow guidelines as to what constitutes a dive so as to maintain quality educational standards. In PADI, an open water dive is at least 15 feet deep, and either 50 cubic feet of gas breathed, or 20 minutes bottom time. NAUI is similar. Don't know about SSI but it is probably similar. A dive is breathing compressed gas under water and can be very short or long. For example, if you had to abort the dive for any reason, that is an interesting dive. How did you handle it? What was the reason?
So this dive would be logged and has nothing to do with the educational minimum standards. As was said, it's up to you to log whatever you want to log. More is better than less.

There should be a minimum of at least 10 minutes surface interval between dives, for the purposes of dive tables, otherwise it is all one dive. So if you come up during the dive to the surface, and go down again, it counts it as one dive, both for log, and the tables.

The main thing is, get a log book and get in the habit of recording all the dive's information, as soon as you get out of the water. Bring the log book to all your dives, keep it in your dry, not gear, bag. Also some people transfer log book data from their computer so they can better analyse their dive profile and what happened.

I prefer to log dives as my primary computer counts them. If my computer records it as a dive then I enter it in my logbook, regardless of how long or deep it is or isn't. If my surface interval is so short that my computer counts it as one continuous dive, then that's how it is entered in my logbook.

Ahhh well now that makes more sense...and yes, the numbers we heard were ...you had to be at least 20 feet or greater and had to have more than 15 mins at that depth to make it a logable dive. I agree with logging and trying to learn from all my experiences, good or bad...thanks

theoretically get in roughly 48 dives in a 24 hour period following the "20 minutes down/10 minute surface interval" requirement...as long as you had someone on the surface to hand you a fresh BCD/tank setup as needed (or, better yet, to save time, change to a new set of gear while underwater.) But when I see one of my customers has 48 dives, I expect him/her to be at least marginally competent...not just lying on the sand for 20 minute periods to build up dives.

I have 4478 dives at the moment...probably 90% over 40 minutes, at depths from about 20' to 130+ (not over 130 with customers, though...)
I can recall only one 20 minute dive in that period...teaching JR OW to a skinny girl who was shivering...so we did the "PADI legal minimum" on that one to get her out of the water as soon as we could. Except for the introductory diving (aka Discover Scuba) at around 20', nearly all of the boat & beach dives are around 40~130'.

Chris in Guam (formerly Iruka until the message board ate that name somehow)
www.letsdiveguam.com