New member saying Hello, Looking for some knowledge!

[EllisBartlett1990]

Hello everyone,

Im Ellis, 27 based in Berlin, I have been diving for around 8 years now, AOWD. I love diving but I don't get to dive as much as I would like! I would really like to start planning my own dives for the summer, I have a top level idea how to do this but i'm interested to know how you do it.


When Im not diving I work as a UX designer, designing apps and websites. I'm currently in a research phase of a project where I am working on developing an app to help divers plan dives. There seems to be a bit of a gap for this kind of app, at the moment I believe we have to use a lot of different resources to plan dives (check conditions) and I'm really interested to hear how you guys plan dives with focus on checking conditions pre dive.


I'd really appreciate it if you could share some knowledge about:
- What you would check pre dive (water, waves, visibility etc)
- Where you go to find the information ( particular apps/websites)
- When would you check (The morning of, night before, everyday for two weeks running up!)


If you would like to help my research, I kindly ask that you share your opinions by filling out this short survey (5 mins), which you can find here: https://forms.gle/beb39SuP5xQB7E5i7


If this is not allowed by Scubaboard, I apologise and will remove the post immediately

Warm thanks,
Ellis

 

[Searcaigh]

Welcome to SB Ellis.

I think your survey should include multiple responses, I had to use "Other" several times.

Why does your survey on the number of dives stop at 51+ dives?

I would have expected a reasonable set of ranges to gauge experience

e.g. 0-24, 25-50, 51-100, 100-200 etc

 

[EllisBartlett1990]

Welcome to SB Ellis.

I think your survey should include multiple responses, I had to use "Other" several times.

Why does your survey on the number of dives stop at 51+ dives?

I would have expected a reasonable set of ranges to gauge experience

e.g. 0-24, 25-50, 51-100, 100-200 etc

Hello and thank you for filling it out for me!

Thank you very much for the feedback and I will try and update it now! If its not possible, I will try and infer an experience level by linking number of dives with certification level. But you are completely correct, I should have broken down the total dives number further.

Again thanks for the feedback
All the best

 

[boulderjohn]

First of all, I agree with Searcaigh.

Your response choices indicate that you are most interested in divers who are fairly inexperienced and usually in need of having someone do their planning for them. Because of that I, and I assume almost all fairly experienced divers answering your survey, was unable to find my answer in your choices.

Effective dive planning is, in my view, a bit more complicated than you appear to be envisioning it. I would have included a number of issues that you did not mention. I wrote a PADI-approved distinctive specialty class in dive planning, and in support of it I wrote what amounts to a short book on the topic.

 

[lowwall]

I gave up on the survey.

You also need to turn many of those questions from single select to multi-select. More importantly, the choices you have suggest that you need to do further research on how people in different areas dive and how people plan their dives before embarking on this project.

 

[wnissen]

Hello everyone,

Im Ellis, 27 based in Berlin, I have been diving for around 8 years now, AOWD. I love diving but I don't get to dive as much as I would like! I would really like to start planning my own dives for the summer, I have a top level idea how to do this but i'm interested to know how you do it.


When Im not diving I work as a UX designer, designing apps and websites. I'm currently in a research phase of a project where I am working on developing an app to help divers plan dives. There seems to be a bit of a gap for this kind of app, at the moment I believe we have to use a lot of different resources to plan dives (check conditions) and I'm really interested to hear how you guys plan dives with focus on checking conditions pre dive.


I'd really appreciate it if you could share some knowledge about:
- What you would check pre dive (water, waves, visibility etc)
- Where you go to find the information ( particular apps/websites)
- When would you check (The morning of, night before, everyday for two weeks running up!)


If you would like to help my research, I kindly ask that you share your opinions by filling out this short survey (5 mins), which you can find here: https://forms.gle/beb39SuP5xQB7E5i7


If this is not allowed by Scubaboard, I apologise and will remove the post immediately

Warm thanks,
Ellis

Hi,
Welcome, our last trip was to Berlin for Christmas 2019. Magical! No diving, though.

This board is very permissive, as far as I know commercial posts are permitted without prior approval.

If you manage to put together a portal for dive site information, I think that would be great. There's a lot of information that I would like to have!

Long term info:
Depth
Seasonal water temperatures
Seasonal weather
Access (transport, parking, entry)
Local risks: current, animal, boat traffic
Location of closest chamber

Short term info:
Wave height - Locally I use this: Monterey Bay Swell Forecasts The ones with broad national or international coverage seem oriented toward surfers
Visibility - often found on forums such as this one. Very hard to find unless you call a shop or know someone. A "viz forecast" would be huge!
Local surface weather forecast - In the U.S. I use weather.gov but elsewhere Intellicast
Tide forecast

Good luck with your research. That's not my area but I do enjoy noodling in UX.

 

[DiveClimbRide]

I use windy for water temperature, wind, waves and swell. I then use cawthron eye (or whatever real time satellite you have in your area) to check the visibility. I check althese usually a couple days before a dive, the day before and on the day. I use Google to research history on specific wrecks and use other people's experience to get an idea on bottom conditions depth and possible currents/tides. After all that I plan the dive as half out half back + 70bar reserve(usually if it's a wreck it'll be different and usually plan to stay within ndl) . Although I usually come back shallower to extend dive time. Dive shops are also very useful for finding good sites and figuring out which new ones can be worthwhile.

 

[wnissen]

I use windy for water temperature, wind, waves and swell. I then use cawthron eye (or whatever real time satellite you have in your area) to check the visibility. I check althese usually a couple days before a dive, the day before and on the day. I use Google to research history on specific wrecks and use other people's experience to get an idea on bottom conditions depth and possible currents/tides. After all that I plan the dive as half out half back + 70bar reserve(usually if it's a wreck it'll be different and usually plan to stay within ndl) . Although I usually come back shallower to extend dive time. Dive shops are also very useful for finding good sites and figuring out which new ones can be worthwhile.

Wait, you use a satellite? Can you please elaborate on how that works? Like, are you looking at the images and seeing the brightness of the bottom, or what? I would love to have more information on that.

 

[DiveClimbRide]

https://tools.cawthron.org.nz/apps/cawthroneye/ i use this one. It will give you images that are around 12hrs old. Dark water = good vis. Pale blue water = **** vis. In the screenshot you can see that close to shore the vis is very bad 1-2m but off shore it's good

 

[OTF]

That is super duper incredibly cool. That's new to me. Unfortunately the website is giving me some sort of security block and I can't see the images, maybe because i have a non-NZ IP address.

Does anyone know of there's a US / Northeast equivalent satellite?

Seconding Windy as a great app for conditions.