What to Record in a Dive Logbook: Full Checklist

A dive log serves three jobs: proof of experience, a planning tool for future dives, and a memory book. Each job needs different fields. Here is the complete checklist, sorted by how much each entry earns its place.

The essentials — never skip these

These fields prove the dive and cost you thirty seconds:

• Dive number. Your running total. Course prerequisites ask for it — see how many dives you need for Advanced Open Water.
• Date.
• Site and location. Site name plus region. “Blue Corner, Palau,” not just “Palau.”
• Time in and time out (or total dive time).
• Maximum depth. Straight from your dive computer.
• Starting and ending air pressure, plus tank size and gas (air or nitrox, with the mix).
• Buddy, guide, or instructor. With a signature if you are building toward a certification.

High-value extras — they pay off on your next trip

These turn a log from a receipt into a planning tool:

• Weights and exposure suit. The single most reused field in any logbook. Note what you wore, how much lead you carried, and whether you felt light or heavy at the safety stop. Next time you face the same suit and water type, your buoyancy is dialed in from dive one.
• Water temperature. At depth, not at the surface. Informs suit choices by season.
• Conditions. Visibility, current, surge, entry type. Patterns across entries teach you which sites work in which months.
• Wildlife. Species seen, or shape-and-color notes for the ones you could not name — my guide on identifying fish while diving shows how to capture enough to ID them later.
• Gear notes. Anything that leaked, rattled, or misbehaved. Your future self, deciding whether that regulator needs service, will thank you — more on that in keeping track of dive gear.

The memory line

One or two sentences about what made the dive this dive. Not a diary entry — a hook. “Turtle followed us for ten minutes, clearly hoping we would find food.” Years later, this line resurrects the dive; the depth number alone never will.

What you can safely skip

Honesty saves logbooks. Fields that go unfilled breed guilt, and guilt kills the habit:

• Pressure groups and repetitive-dive tables, if you dive with a computer. Your computer tracks your no-decompression status in real time — always follow it and your training, not a reconstructed table in a notebook. Log planning details only if your agency or instructor asks for them.
• Long narrative writing. If it feels like homework, cut it to one line.
• Sketches of the site, unless you genuinely enjoy drawing. A photo of the dive center’s site map does the same job.

The test for every field: will anyone — including future you — ever read it? If not, drop it without guilt. A short entry logged beats a thorough entry imagined, as I argue in how to log a scuba dive.

How Tortuba structures this for you

I built Tortuba so the checklist above is just… the form. Duration, depth, air, site, buddies, conditions, and much more are structured fields — a few taps each, fully offline. Buddies can be added by name or nickname, and instructors can sign your logbook right in the app.

Wildlife gets first-class treatment: a built-in guide to 10,000 species, browsable by body shape, so sightings become named, searchable entries instead of “some wrasse?” scrawled in a margin. Photos attach to dives, and when the memory line will not come, a writing coach helps you put the story together. Browse my animals index to see how logged species connect to locations worldwide.

A refresh with a new UI and cloud sync is on the way, but the principle will not change: record what you will actually use, skip the rest, and keep diving.