Scuba Diving Goal Setting Tips for 2020

It’s the first quarter of 2020 and it’s the perfect opportunity to enhance your diving competence and become a better diver. Finding ways to improve your knowledge and skills is the key to help you unlock your diving goals. Here are four goal setting tips you can work on this year to help you move forward in your diving journey.

1. Dive like a pro by mastering buoyancy skills 

Buoyancy control improves your safety, minimizes fatigue, and enables you to have more fun underwater. When you perfect your buoyancy skills, you will be able to glide effortlessly in the water, conserve your air, and use less energy. Acquiring the ability to float fluidly helps you avoid accidentally damaging delicate corals and other marine structures. It can also improve your interaction with marine life because good buoyancy skills allow you to approach and observe marine creatures without scaring them away. 

Mastering buoyancy skills is not something you can accomplish overnight because it takes time and practice to fine-tune and perfect this remarkable skill. Once you do, it will make underwater explorations easier and more rewarding. 

Nemo Diving Center can help you master your buoyancy skills when diving in UAE. We recommend enrolling in our PADI Peak Performance Buoyancy to learn about proper weights, trim scuba gear, streamline, and master vertical and horizontal hovering techniques. Our highly trained diving instructors can provide you with specially designed exercises to hone your buoyancy skills. 

2. Feeling a little rusty? Get a refresher

Even experienced divers need a little boost when they have been inactive for six months or more. Sometimes being out of the water for a while makes you a little rusty and a Scuba Refresher can help you get back on your flippers again. Our PADI ReActivate program can refresh your diving skills and help you get back your diving groove on. 

3. Widen your diving scope by trying new adventures

The great thing about scuba diving is that it’s a never-ending adventure because no dives are exactly the same. The underwater world offers so many amazing surprises and you’ll never know what you’re going to find each time you make a descent. Diving is very exciting because you’ll never see the exact kind of marine creatures and the experience is always different. 

When you explore different marine conditions and environments, it gives you the opportunity to discover new places, see a variety of creatures, and collect amazing memories. 

• For instance, if you are used to diving in tropical waters, you can consider diving in cold waters to broaden your diving experience. There will be some dive wear, gear, and skill considerations when diving in cold waters but learning to adjust and augmenting what you already know are part of the diving journey. 
• Suppose you always dive during the daylight, why not try night diving to see how mesmerizing the world beneath the waves is during the cloak of the night? How about going on a deep dive to feed your curiosity about the mysteries of the deeper depths?
• Are you fascinated with the idea of going on a wreck dive? Perhaps this year, you can finally tick off that box in your bucket list. Wreck diving is an incredible experience when you finally get around to doing it. With the right training, you can safely explore a wreck dive site and learn about its history. 

Opening yourself to new knowledge and experiences will help you become a better diver. Our dive center offers Dive Specialty courses that can help you prepare for a variety of underwater adventures. 

4. Nurture a deeper concern for the marine environment

As a diver, you have the ability to help defend, conserve, and protect our precious oceans. Diving is an enjoyable activity but you can make it more rewarding by nurturing your love for the underwater world. Here are a few simple ways to help you get started:

• Think of each dive as an opportunity to help clean up the ocean. So make it a point to bring a mesh with you each time you dive so you can take action against debris. It will certainly go a long way if every diver picks up and removes litter from the oceans on each dive. Just make sure that you dispose of the trash properly when you get to shore to prevent it from going back to the ocean.
• Do your part to help fight ocean plastic pollution by practicing the 3 Rs: recycle, reuse, and reduce. A good way to start is avoiding single-use plastics by bringing reusable shopping bags, carrying your personal tumbler, and using washable bamboo or stainless straws.  
• Did you know that most of our regular sunscreens contain chemicals such as Oxybenzone (Benzophenone-3) that are harmful to corals and other marine life? It can cause coral bleaching, abnormal growth, and deformities. Some chemical components of sunscreen are also toxic to ocean creatures. You can help our oceans by going green this 2020 and begin using ocean-friendly products such as reef-friendly sunscreen or getting a UV protected rashguard. 

Diving is a wonderful journey and each year is an opportunity to improve your skills and become a better diver. If you focus on your goals, accomplishing them will be a breeze. At the end of the year, nothing beats looking back and seeing that you have met each diving goal.