Average Dives per Year of Diving

[iamjblevine]

I did a quick search for some previous posts, but nothing useful came up. I'm probably using lousy key words "Annual Dives", Dive Recurrence, "dives per Year".
I greatly appreciate any links to previous posts on this if someone knows them.
Otherwise,

At lunch I was explaining the risk of being a once per year diver to a friend thinking about getting certified. He's a pilot and completely understood, and said that if he doesn't fly at least 1/90 days he has to have a new checkout before flying someone on his commercial rating. That got me thinking, does anyone know of good data on average dives per year. I'd like unbiased data. I'm guessing the people who read this are a poor cross section of global scuba divers, and would yield an abnormally high dives per year result.

Thanks in advance for any links to scuba board posts, links to a study, or thoughts on this in general.

 

[boulderjohn]

I'd like unbiased data. I'm guessing the people who read this are a poor cross section of global scuba divers, and would yield an abnormally high dives per year result.

This is indeed the wrong place to come for an unbiased answer. You can be pretty sure that people who participate in ScubaBoard regularly are reasonably active divers. You can be pretty sure that the people who go on dive vacations once every 5-6 years (or more) are not ScubaBoard participants. I was teaching a new student in the pool the other day, and a Divemaster was in there doing a refresher course for a diver who had not been diving for 22 years. You can be sure that she is not a SB participant. When you exclude just about 100% of the low end of the spectrum, and when it is a low end that almost certainly includes much more than half of the total population of certified divers, your survey becomes less than reliable.

 

[Instructor_Tom]

if your looking for numbers year to date I'm at 85 dives; but I do work as a shop dive master and a lot of those dives were either advancing my training or help with students.

strictly pleasure dives some wear in the 20-30.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[mathauck0814]

Not sure there's a lot of data - if there were, it'd be held by the agencies and manufacturers and I'm not sure it'd be flattering on the macro scale so it's probably not public. You could poll folks, but unless you're in the industry it's probably pretty spotty. I dove a lot as a teen and then stopped when I was in college and started back up again shortly thereafter. On "average" I probably only have in the neighborhood of 100/year, but that doesn't really tell the story since there were 7 years where I didn't dive, two years where I worked full time in the industry and the balance spent diving like a "regular" person. Circumstances change. I'd say if you're getting out once a week or more you're doing really well, less than monthly and there's probably skill degradation. No data to support that, just observations from my own diving...

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

It'd be tough to come up with any meaningful data without requiring divers to log their dives into some kind of centralized database. Too many variables ... not least of which is that in many parts of the world people don't rely on dive ops ... even in popular destinations like Bonaire or Maui.

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[SailNaked]

well the current Padi cert number is way over a million, the number of SB visitors is someplace around 100k if you do some extremely inaccurate math you come up with about 1% of divers dive regularly. if you assume SB members dive regularly. if you also assume the average vacation allowance in the US is 2 weeks, and if your regular divers are not DMs or instructors, then they dive 1-2 weeks a year and get 12-24 dives a year.

now people that live someplace they can dive regularly maybe 5% of the population of the US (only because California is so freaking large). then 5% of 1% dive maybe once a month, and then on their vacations, so maybe 40 dives a year.

instructors dive a lot, but they dive the same pit of dispare and it really does not count.

100% of the statistics in this post are made up.

 

[boulderjohn]

well the current Padi cert number is way over a million,

Believe it or not, according to the latest statistics I saw, for the past decade PADI has averaged a bit under a million new divers certified per year world-wide.

 

[BluewaterSail]

In Israel there is a law that you need to take a refresh course/dive if you haven't dove in 6 months. It appears that all of the shops do a brisk business with this "product", as folks on vacation who are not regular divers decide to do some diving. They generally do a refresh, then join in on a regularly scheduled guided dive. But numbers or percentages, who knows.

This raises the question that if someone hasn't dove in a couple of years, do you really call them a diver?

 

[SailNaked]

Believe it or not, according to the latest statistics I saw, for the past decade PADI has averaged a bit under a million new divers certified per year world-wide.

thats what I get for making up my own statistics. But I only do that on 25% of my posts.

 

[Panama Jones]

I actually believe that this board is the perfect place to determine the average. Because this board represents regular divers. Certified divers that only do a few dives every year or two would be outside a normal curve and would never be statistically counted. Instructors that do the same dives over and over would be outside the (other side of the curve) and would not be statistically counted. So poll this forum,

1. assume that occasional resort divers aren't even on the board to respond, (you've all made that assumption already)
2. ask instructors and other pros that dive daily not to respond.
3. assume that everyone else on the board are regular divers

There you have your mean and averages