For those that aren’t familiar with the term, a liveaboard is a larger recreational diving boat with sleeping and eating accommodations designed for multi-day dive trips. These vessels visit the more exotic out-of-the-way dive sites that aren’t usually accessible by shore-based boat day trips.
The liveaboard diving experience is a must do for anyone passionate about Scuba Diving, as it really tests the skills of a diver and exposes one to several different dive sites and conditions, and some of the more exotic dive sites in the world. We have compiled a list of a few “liveaboard musts” which features skills, or equipment one must have before setting off on a liveaboard scuba vacation. Our first part takes a look at a few skills a diver should tune up on before setting off on such a vacation.
Enhance your Diving Skills
If you plan to do liveaboard diving, then it is strongly advisable that one is at least an Advanced Open Water diver with 30 or more dives under his/her belt. A liveaboard trip is not the right environment to be learning your basics. Most liveaboard diving is highly demanding, and dive sites are at places in where shore boats don’t normally go. Sites can be unsheltered, rough, currents may be strong, and so a diver needs to be comfortable with his /her diving ability. There are often several dives (3-5) a day, so a diver would need to be very comfortable with all different diving skills, situations and conditions, i.e. night diving, descending and ascending without an anchor line, drift diving, wrecks and caverns. Dive groups may be large with varied diving abilities, so you surely won’t have as much one-on-one supervision from your dive master. If you haven’t dived in a while then get some practice dives before you set out on a demanding liveaboard.
Perfect your Buoyancy
Whether you are diving a ship wreck, or planning to pass through some nifty swim-troughs or lava tunnels underwater, mastering your buoyancy skills are a must. If there are surface currents your dive master may require you to descend upon hitting the water immediately, or while ascending perform a safety stop at 3 meters without the assistance of an ascent/anchor line or visual reference. All of these situations require a diver to have good buoyancy skills.
Learn to dive Nitrox
A liveaboard visiting plenty of deep dive sites or shipwrecks is a great opportunity to dive Nitrox and benefit from longer no-decompressions times. The diving time allowed when using enriched air nitrox changes as the “enriched” air used has more oxygen and less nitrogen. This means, when diving nitrox a divers body absorbs less nitrogen during the dive than a diver that uses regular air. Several liveaboards conduct Nitrox courses onboard, and learning to dive nitrox is a good skill to have in your diving arsenal, and will help you get the most of your dives on your trip.
Practice how to kit up and familiarize yourself with your equipment
While some liveaboards may have deck hands kit your scuba equipment for you, most require you to set-up your Tank, BCD, octopus up yourself before each dive. Since you will be performing numerous dives each day, even if you don’t need to kit-up each dive, one must know how to inspect his or her equipment before each dive. Basics like checking air-pressure, leaks, LP Inflator and regulators need to be carried out before each dive. Get familiar with using your equipment, know where everything is, and you will have no problems underwater.
photos from flickr by: ClifB, Joi, dachalan
