Introducing Trips · Divebase Changelog

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: they're not just entries scattered down your logbook, they're a journey. Today Divebase gets a whole new section to hold them. Meet Trips.

A trip groups the dives you logged on a single journey into one place, 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 a trip and the whole journey is right there: every dive, every site, the total bottom time, the deepest point, all of it summed up for you.

This is a feature I've wanted 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, revisit, and look back on as one. So I built it.

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. The trip becomes the story of the whole cruise.
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, more serious campaign, often with a purpose beyond leisure.
Other — anything that doesn't fit the moulds above; the box is yours to fill.

I want to say a word about expeditions, because they're close to my heart. An expedition is more than a holiday: it's a campaign with a goal, and very often that goal is research. Marine biologists, archaeologists surveying a wreck, teams mapping a cave system, citizen-science groups running transects season after season: all of them dive with intent, and all of them need to keep the dives from a single campaign together, distinct from their recreational logbook. Grouping a research campaign as an expedition, with its dates, its location, and its operator, gives that work a home. If you dive for science, Divebase now speaks your language too.

Here's what a trip looks like once you've filled it. This is a liveaboard week in the Maldives: fourteen dives across twelve sites, the totals tallied at the top, the full dive list below, and every site on the trip pinned to a map on the side.

A Divebase trip page for a Maldives liveaboard, showing the dive count, total dive time, sites and deepest dive up top, the full list of dives, and a map of every site visited

Creating a trip

Trips live in their own section in the sidebar, right under your dives and dive sites. The index lists every trip you've logged, grouped by holiday, liveaboard, weekend, or expedition, with its type, dates, location, and dive count at a glance.

The Divebase Trips index, a table of trips with their type, dates, location, country, dive count and nights

Hit Add trip and you're in the editor. Give the trip a name, pick its type, set the start and end dates, and note where it took place. There's a field for the operator too, the dive center or liveaboard that ran it, so you'll always remember who to book again (or who to avoid).

The Divebase trip editor, with fields for name, type, start and end dates, location, country and operator

Adding your dives

A fresh trip starts empty. Your dives are already in your logbook; a trip just gathers the right ones together, so nothing is duplicated and nothing is retyped.

A newly created Divebase trip with no dives yet, prompting you to add the dives you logged on this trip

Click Add dives and the dive picker opens. Your whole logbook sits on the right, the trip on the left, and you move dives between them by dragging or with the + and × buttons. It's built to stay fast even when your logbook runs to hundreds or thousands of dives.

The Divebase dive picker, an empty trip on the left and the full logbook of over a thousand dives on the right, each with a button to add it to the trip

The handiest touch is the Trip dates filter. Since a trip already knows when it happened, one tap narrows the whole logbook down to just the dives that fall inside those dates, turning a list of thousands into the handful you actually took on this trip. Add them all in a few clicks, or search by site or dive number to pick out exactly the ones you want.

The Divebase dive picker with the Trip dates filter on, the logbook narrowed to only the dives within the trip's date range and eleven already added to the trip

An old idea, finally at home

The idea of a trip isn't new. UDDF, the Universal Dive Data Format, was among the first to model it, wrapping a set of dives into a trip element, and a handful of divelogs have offered their own take over the years. It's a good idea that never quite became standard, which is exactly why I wanted it built in from the start.

For now trips are something you create in Divebase; you can't yet import them. That's coming. When you bring in a UDDF file that already carries trips, Divebase will reconstruct them for you, and the same will follow for the other formats it supports. Until then, wrapping a handful of dives into a trip takes only a moment.

That's Trips. Go group a journey you're proud of, and, as always, dive safe! 🤿