Keeping a logbook for a course: Advanced Open Water and beyond

Why a course logbook is different

On a course, someone else needs to read your log. An instructor may check how many dives you have before accepting you, and a dive centre may ask for your last dives before taking you somewhere deep. Courses also have their own requirements for what has to be logged and signed, and those differ between agencies and between courses.

This guide is about keeping your own record in good order. It does not replace what your agency and instructor ask for: follow them, and when you are unsure what counts, ask your instructor.

What to record on a training dive

Everything you would log on any dive: date, site, maximum depth, dive time, buddy, gas and conditions. Add what makes it a training dive:

• Who taught it. Put the instructor's name in the buddy or guide field, or in the notes, so you can find it later.
• What the dive was. A line in the notes about the skills or the dive's purpose, for example "navigation and deep dive".
• The type. Mark the dive as training. Later you can filter on it and count your training dives apart from the ones you did for fun.
• The gas. On a nitrox or deep dive, write the mix and the pressures, so the numbers stay with the dive.

Do it the same day. Course days are busy, and by the evening the third dive of the day has gone soft in your memory.

Getting dives signed

Instructors still sign and stamp a logbook, and the signature is what many centres trust. If you log in an app, you do not lose that. In Loggerfish you can print your logbook, or save it as a PDF, with a column for a buddy or instructor to sign on every dive. Choose the dives from the course by their numbers, so the instructor gets a short, clean page.

There is also a field on each dive for who verified it, which is where a signed dive's name can go in the digital log.

If your instructor wants more than a list, Pro adds a logbook PDF for instructors: your experience by depth and type, each dive with its profile where there is one, and which dives came from a dive computer, which a buddy confirmed in Loggerfish and which you entered by hand. Loggerfish prints what you logged. It does not certify anything: the signature and stamp are your instructor's.

Keep your certifications next to your dives

A logbook is half of your record; the other half is your certifications. In Loggerfish you can add each course with its agency, level, status and date, the number of dives you had before and after, the instructor, where you did it, and the certification, member and instructor numbers. You can add a photo of your certification card, so it is on your phone when a centre asks.

Loggerfish can also show what you could train for next. It goes by the agency's published prerequisites, such as dive counts and earlier certifications, and by the dives in your logbook. It is informational only: Loggerfish is not a training agency and cannot grant or confirm anything. Your agency sets the prerequisites and the dive centre decides who may start a course.

After the course

• Add the new certification, with the date and your dive count at that point.
• Check that the course dives are marked and numbered correctly.
• Export a copy of the log. Every export is free.

If your course dives are in another app, you can bring them across first: Loggerfish reads SSI spreadsheets, Garmin files, Subsurface logs, UDDF and spreadsheets, with a preview before anything is saved. The SSI export guide has the steps for the MySSI logbook.