Changelog

Dive numbers go wrong in small, boring ways. You delete a duplicate from the middle of a trip and every dive after it is off by one. You import a week from a computer whose counter restarted, or the same trip twice from two sources. You log a day by hand and guess the numbers. None of it is dramatic, and all of it leaves a logbook you can no longer trust to count.

From today Divebase fixes it in one pass. Select the dives, press Renumber, and the selection is rewritten in logbook order: the numbers, the repetitive series, the surface intervals, or any combination of the three you ask for.

Divebase has spoken metric since the very first day, and for a lot of you that has been the one thing standing between a trial and a logbook. I dive in Europe, I learned in metres and bar, and every screen I built assumed you did too. Meanwhile the messages kept arriving, from the US, from Canada, from the UK, many asking the same obvious question: can I see my depths in feet?

From today, yes. Divebase now reads and writes feet, Fahrenheit, psi, and pounds, and you choose each one on its own.

This is the update I've been slowest to ship, and not because converting a number is hard. It took this long because a careless unit preference is exactly the kind of feature that corrupts a logbook. I wanted the foundations under it before a single foot reached a screen.

How much lead you carried is only half the story. When dive conditions arrived, every dive gained a place to record the weight, but the number on its own never says whether it was any good: nine kilos is right for one diver in a 7 mm suit and far too much for the same diver in a shorty with a steel tank. What you want back on the next dive is the verdict, not the figure.

So now you can record the verdict too. Beside the weight on the dive form sits a Buoyancy rating, five steps centred on neutral:

• Sinking — badly over-weighted, finning to stay off the bottom.
• Negative — a touch heavy.
• Neutral — the weighting was right.
• Positive — a touch light.
• Floating — too light to hold a safety stop.

Shearwater Cloud was never the logbook most technical divers chose. It's the fastest way to get a dive off your wrist, and one day you notice it's holding every dive you've ever done. You buy a Perdix, a Teric, or a Peregrine, you pair it with the app because it's right there and takes ten seconds, and you tell yourself you'll file the dives properly later. Years on, the app that was only meant to replace a cable is the only complete record of your diving.

That makes Shearwater Cloud the most common starting point I see for divers coming to Divebase, and a great migration path: it's not a partial log or a subset you exported once, it's genuinely all of it. Today Divebase reads that database, whole.

Convenience is why your dives ended up there, so the long-term answer has to be just as convenient. The Divebase mobile app is being built to be the thing you reach for on the boat: download the dive straight off your computer, no cable, no desktop, no export, into a logbook that gives you the interactive chart, your gas, your gear, your sites, and your trips on the other side. Until that lands, this importer is the bridge.

Subsurface is the dive log every other dive log is measured against. It was started by Linus Torvalds in 2011, has been led by Dirk Hohndel and a community of divers ever since, and it's free, open source, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. Through libdivecomputer it downloads from more dive computers than any commercial product bothers to support, including plenty the manufacturer stopped caring about years ago. If you've ever wanted your dives off your computer and into a file you own, chances are you passed through Subsurface to get there.

Subsurface also settled, early on, something I care about a lot: your logbook is a plain file on your own disk, in a documented format, readable without an account and without permission from anyone.

That file made this the hardest importer I've written, and the most interesting. Subsurface isn't a simpler tool I could pour into Divebase and tidy up afterwards; in several places it records more per dive than anything else Divebase reads: trips, free-text tags, weights as a list of named pieces, per-cylinder gas with the exact second the diver switched onto it, per-sample tank pressure, the recording computer's serial, firmware, and decompression algorithm, and every warning and bookmark the computer raised. I set the same bar as for MacDive: everything the format holds, in the right fields, with nothing dropped on the way. Today the Subsurface import is here, and it takes the whole divelog.

Some things about a dive don't fit in a field. Divebase has a home for your depth, your duration, your gas, your gear, your buddies and your conditions, and between them they describe most of what happened underwater. What they don't describe is that it was a night dive, that it was the checkout for a course, that it was the spring cleanup you do every year. There's no field for those, and there shouldn't be: they're your categories, not mine.

That's what tags are: your own words, on your own dives, in whatever vocabulary you already think in.

This one has been waiting a while. When I wrote about the MacDive import I listed tags among the things that didn't fully come across: Divebase read them out of your database, but only used them as hints (a CCR tag set the dive's mode, a Wreck tag marked the site) and then threw them away. Today that paragraph is out of date.

MacDive has been my logbook for over ten years, and I owe it a great deal. It shaped the way I approach diving: it taught me to look at a profile instead of a single depth number, to track which gear was on which dive, to care about when a regulator was last serviced. A good part of what Divebase is today began as a habit MacDive gave me, so please don't read this entry as a replacement announcement. It isn't one.

What changed is the pace of development. MacDive has been quiet for a long time now, and the libdivecomputer it bundles predates my current computer, so it can't download from a Halcyon Symbios and realistically never will. That's what pushed me to write Dive Exporter (the whole story is here), and eventually to build Divebase.

There are 1,625 dives in my MacDive library, 58 days underwater across seventeen years. I wasn't going to move all of that with an importer that was merely "good enough to get started": I wanted everything MacDive knows about my diving to land in Divebase, in the right fields. Today the MacDive import is here, and it takes the whole database.

Gear that keeps you alive deserves a maintenance record. Regulators get overhauled, tanks get their hydro test, rebreather sensors get swapped: every piece of kit has its own rhythm of servicing, and forgetting where each one stands is how you end up on the boat with a cylinder that's out of test. When I opened the Equipment section I promised the Service tab was coming. Today it's here.

Service tracking gives every item in your inventory a full maintenance history and a clear next-service date, so you always know what's been done and what's due. And it's more than good housekeeping: as of May 2026, Italy's "Legge del Mare" makes keeping a register of equipment testing and maintenance a legal requirement for diving operators (Legge 7 maggio 2026, n. 70). Whether you're a professional who has to keep the register or a diver who just wants peace of mind, it's the same tab.

Some dives belong together. The fourteen you logged on that liveaboard week in the Maldives, the handful from a weekend at the local quarry, the season of dives from a research campaign: each of those is one journey, scattered down your logbook as separate entries. Today Divebase gets a whole new section to hold them. Meet Trips.

A trip groups the dives you logged on a single journey, with its own dates, its own location, and its own running totals. Instead of scrolling your logbook and squinting at dates to remember which dives came from where, you open the trip and the whole journey is right there: every dive, every site, the total bottom time, the deepest point.

I've wanted this for a very long time. I've kept my logbook in MacDive for over ten years, and it's still my favourite divelog, but it has no concept of a trip, and neither do many other divelogs. Every time I came home from a week of diving I wished I could wrap those dives into something I could name and look back on as one.

There are all sorts of ways to use a trip. A few that I reach for:

• Liveaboard — a week aboard a boat, hopping between sites.
• Resort — a diving holiday based out of a resort or a single dive center.
• Excursion — a short outing, a weekend or a day trip to a nearby site.
• Expedition — a longer campaign, often with a purpose beyond leisure.
• Other — anything that doesn't fit the moulds above; the box is yours to fill.

Expeditions are close to my heart. An expedition is a campaign with a goal, and very often that goal is research: marine biologists, archaeologists surveying a wreck, citizen-science groups running transects season after season. They all need to keep the dives from a single campaign together, distinct from their recreational logbook, and an expedition gives that work a home. If you dive for science, Divebase now speaks your language too.

A dive is shaped by the water it happens in. The same site is a different dive on a calm, clear morning than it is in a cold, murky current. Today Divebase gains a small but genuinely useful addition: a new Conditions tab on every dive, where you can record and revisit the conditions you dived in. These are the details that never fit in the basics but tell the real story of a dive, and having them on hand changes how much a logged dive is worth to you later.

So what can you record as dive conditions? The Conditions tab gathers everything into four panels:

• Water — how far you could see and how the water was moving. Visibility is a distance in meters, paired with a clarity rating from Zero to Excellent for the times a number alone doesn't capture the impression. Current runs from none through light, moderate, and strong.
• Temperatures — the air temperature above the surface, and the water temperature at its warmest (near the surface) and its coldest (down at depth), so a dive through a sharp thermocline reads at a glance.
• Weather — the sky over the surface: sunny, cloudy, rainy, windy, or foggy.
• Logistics — the practical side of the dive: whether you got in and out by boat or from shore, and how much weight you carried.

A few days ago I shared the first piece of the dive profile. Today I'm finally presenting the rest: the new dive profile section, built around an interactive dive chart that lets you replay your dive, event by event and condition by condition. It reads the samples your dive computer records at periodic intervals through the dive, tracking depth, temperature, CNS, ppO₂ and much more.

This is one of the features I'm most proud of. I've relied on dive charts for years to review my own dives, for all sorts of reasons: inspecting the profile of a deco dive, working out the best navigation for a site, or debugging my rebreather's ppO₂ and sensor readings. For all of those, and many more, the interactive dive chart is now there for you too.

Since we released the UDDF importer, many of you asked to import dives straight from your Garmin dive computers. Garmin dives can't easily be exported to UDDF, but they can be exported to Garmin's proprietary format, FIT.

The Garmin Flexible and Interoperable Data Transfer (FIT) protocol is designed specifically for storing and sharing data from sport, fitness, and health devices. That includes, you guessed it, dives, their dive sites, and their coordinates.

Today we're opening up support for importing dives from Garmin FIT files. Importing a dive from a FIT file doesn't just create the dive; it also populates the dive profile.

A dive is more than its deepest point. Today Divebase gains one of its most significant additions yet: the dive profile. A dive profile is the trail of readings your dive computer records at regular intervals through a dive, the data that lets you visualise and replay how the dive actually unfolded.

Dive profiles are made possible by dive computers. Throughout a dive they monitor parameters like depth, time, temperature, and ppO2, and record them into the log at periodic intervals. When you download a dive from your computer you aren't just capturing the basics (dive time, duration, maximum depth, temperature); you're downloading a collection of dive samples. Each sample is a snapshot of those readings at a single moment in the dive, and those samples can be put to work later in a number of ways: to plot the dive profile, or to inspect one particular aspect of the dive.

If a dive has a profile attached, the main dive overview now shows a simple dive profile preview, tracing depth against time. It gives you an instant picture of the dive to refresh your memory.

Diving is better with friends. Yet until now, Divebase remembered every dive but not the people you shared it with. Open any dive and you'll now find a new People tab where you record whoever was in the water with you, the same way you already attach equipment.

Every dive has its own kit. Starting today, you can record exactly which gear you took on each dive. It builds on the equipment inventory you already keep in Divebase: the same scuba gear, now connected to the dives where you actually used it.

Open any dive and you'll find a new Equipment tab. It lists the gear for that individual dive, each item with its details, and a click on any entry takes you straight to that equipment's page.

Some dives ask for more than a certification. Dive professionals like instructors and divemasters need an active insurance policy to stay in teaching status. And plenty of dive activities, trips and liveaboards among them, won't let you join unless you're insured for the duration.

Keeping track of your policies, their numbers, and their expiration dates is something divers are notoriously bad at. Starting today, Divebase tracks them for you, right inside the diver profile.

The new section lets you add each of your dive insurances along with the details that matter: the insurer, the insurance holder, the policy number, and (most importantly) the validity period. Once saved, the insurance shows up as a card in your diver profile.

Who's the diver? You are. And until today, Divebase didn't know the first thing about you. That changes now with the diver profile, a new section that's all about the person behind the logbook. You'll find it in the left sidebar, right where it used to sit with a quiet "SOON" tag beside it.

The profile is where you introduce yourself. Tell Divebase your name and date of birth, where you call home, and a little more if you like: a contact email and phone, kept separate from your account login, and your blood group.

Some dive sites ask more of you than others. A sheltered bay and a deep wreck in current are both great dives, but they're not the same commitment. You can already tag your sites by interest; now you can grade them by difficulty too.

Difficulty is a single value on a scale from 1 to 5, where 1 is the most accessible and 5 the most specialized:

1. Easy: calm, shallow, forgiving conditions any certified diver can enjoy.
2. Intermediate: a little more depth or current, comfortable once you have a few dives behind you.
3. Advanced: depth, current, or conditions that reward genuine experience.
4. Technical: beyond recreational limits, the kind of site that calls for technical training and gear.
5. Special: the most demanding sites, reserved for divers with the specific training they require.

This might be the most important update since Divebase began. Today I'm unveiling the Divebase API: a REST API that lets you connect to Divebase and manage your whole logbook in code, from your dives and dive sites to your equipment, certifications, cylinders, and gas mixes.

That single change turns Divebase into a platform: a true dive database that anyone can read from and write to. Your logbook stops being something locked inside one app and becomes something you can build on.

A map is one of my favourite ways to make sense of a place. Frequent travellers know the feeling, and scuba divers doubly so: half the joy of keeping a dive log is showing off where you've actually been underwater.

You've been able to drop your dive sites on a map for a while now. This update gives that map a promotion: every dive site in your logbook sits on one interactive map, and it searches and filters exactly like the rest of your listings. Type a name, narrow the list, and the map keeps pace with whatever you're looking for.

Not all dive sites are equal. Each one has its own character: what you came to see, and the reason you planned the dive in the first place. Today I'm rolling out a change that lets you capture exactly that, by adding interests to any dive site.

An interest is a short, deliberate label for what a dive site is known for. The catalogue is intentionally small: a finite, easy-to-scan classification rather than an overwhelming pile of tags. In this first version there are five:

• Wreck: sunken ships, planes, statues, or any artificial structure on the bottom.
• Cave: any overhead environment, from caverns and tunnels to swim-throughs and full caves.
• Pinnacle: an underwater spire or seamount rising from a deeper bottom (what Italian divers call a secca).
• Wall: a vertical or near-vertical drop-off.
• Reef: coral, rocky reef, or boulder fields.

Interests show up in your dive site list, right next to the name, so the kind of dive is obvious at a glance.

Diving is fun. Visualizing your dive sites is fun, browsing your dive log history is fun... but manually typing every dive into your logbook? Not fun. We hear you.

When I started building a divelog, I knew nobody would use it unless there was an easy, convenient way to bring their existing dives in. Dives come from many sources and in many formats, and one of the most widely adopted is UDDF, the Universal Dive Data Format.

UDDF files aren't just for dive entries. They're little databases in their own right: a single file can carry your dives, but also the associated dive sites, your equipment, your diver certifications, and more.

Divebase now imports UDDF files. Today we pull out the dive list, the dive sites, the dive details, the per-dive gas usage, and even the dive samples, enough to build an initial version of the dive profile and to surface useful decompression information: the dive computer model, the gradient factors or conservatism setting, and so on.

You can build your gas mixes, you can define your cylinders, and the obvious next step writes itself: putting the two to work on an actual dive. A mix tells you what you breathed and a cylinder how much you carried; pair them on a dive and Divebase can finally answer the question every logbook dances around, how much gas did you actually use?

A new Gas consumption panel now rides in your dive's Overview. It's the summary view: every tank and mix you breathed on the dive, each with its blend, a pressure gauge, and the gas you got through.

Last time I introduced gas mixes and promised the other half of the Gases section. Here it is: cylinders. A gas mix tells you what you breathe; a cylinder tells you how much of it you carry, and the two belong together.

So why bother defining your tanks at all? Two good reasons, and a third for the gear nerds.

I've said before that a dive holds more detail than anything else in a logbook. That's no accident: the dive is the center of every diving experience, as we explored last time. And that experience takes many forms, from open circuit to rebreather, each with its own way of feeding you the gas you breathe.

The sidebar now carries a new section: Gases. It has actually been hiding in a few earlier screenshots, quietly under construction, and it's finally ready. It manages two essentials: gas mixes and cylinders. Let's start with gas mixes; cylinders get their turn in a later update.

Not every dive is the same kind of dive. Today I want to highlight a quieter feature of the Divebase logbook: the ability to record how you dived, not just where and how deep.

We call it the dive mode, and right now it understands five:

• Open circuit: regular scuba. You breathe from the tank and your exhaust bubbles up into the water. The familiar default most of us started with.
• Closed circuit: a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR). It recycles your breath, scrubbing out the CO₂ and topping up the oxygen, so almost nothing leaves the loop.
• Semi-closed circuit: a semi-closed rebreather (SCR). The middle ground, recycling part of the gas and venting the rest.
• Gauge / bottom timer: the computer steps back and acts purely as a depth gauge and timer, tracking no gas at all. A staple of technical diving.
• Freedive / Apnea: breath-hold diving. No tank, no gas, just one breath and the blue.

Every diver loves their gear. It's a love-hate relationship: the further you get in your diving, the more equipment you end up buying. Believe me, there's no finish line to this race.

After a few years you own dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pieces: suits, regulators, gloves, BCDs, tanks, and on it goes. A lot of it needs upkeep, and, just like your certifications, it pays to know when each piece is due for a service.

As a diver, one question follows me everywhere. What's your current certification? And, more often than not: what's the certification number? You've felt it too. You reach a dive center, or you finally step aboard the liveaboard, you can't wait to get in the water, and first there's the paperwork. And you need that number.

I've tried everything. A photo of the card on my phone, a line in my notes... but every time I ended up back where most of my diving already lives: my dive log software. MacDive let me keep every certification in one place, and I loved it for that.

So when I started Divebase, certifications were the very first thing I built. Before dive sites, before dives, before anything else. Here's how they come together today.

Every dive happens somewhere. In the last update you probably didn't miss that little box with a map, pointing at where the great Henry Desprez was sunk. That is what we call a dive site, and this time it gets the spotlight.

Dive sites are first-class citizens in the Divebase dive log. Here's a first look at how you collect them, describe them, and find them on a map.

Dives are the heart of any logbook. They're not only the information you'll come back to most, they're also the hardest to organize. A single dive carries an overwhelming amount of detail: the time, the dive site, the depth, the temperature... you name it.

We spent a good number of hours iterating on a design that strikes a reasonable balance between readability, density, and completeness. What you see today is just the tip of the iceberg, with plenty more still to come. Here's a quick preview of where things stand.

Every diver remembers their first descent: that moment you stop floating around on the surface and actually go somewhere. Divebase is at exactly that point. We've left the boat, the water's clear, and there's a whole lot to explore below. 🤿

This is the very first entry in what we hope becomes a long logbook of updates. Here's a work-in-progress peek at where things stand today. The app is still finding its sea legs, but the data you see below is no mockup: it's my own logbook, gathered over 17 years of diving.