What to Record in a Dive Logbook: Full Checklist

I surfaced from a dive in Sulawesi convinced I would remember every second of it. Two weeks later my logbook read “32 m, 41 min, good viz” and nothing more. The fish that hovered inches from my mask for a full minute was gone — no name, no note, no way back to it.

That is the real question behind what to record in a dive logbook: which fields survive contact with a tired diver on a rocking boat. A log does three jobs — proof of experience, planning tool, memory book — and each job wants different lines. Here is how they sort out.

Prove the dive first

These take thirty seconds and they are the ones anyone else will ever ask to see:

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.

Nothing here requires thought. Copy the numbers off your computer before you rinse it and move on.

The fields you will actually reuse

This is where a log stops being a receipt. Every entry below answers a question you will genuinely ask yourself later:

Weights and exposure suit. The single most reused field in any logbook. What you wore, how much lead you carried, whether you felt light or heavy at the safety stop. Same suit, same water type, next trip: your buoyancy is dialed in from dive one.
Water temperature. At depth, not at the surface. This is what tells you which suit to pack next season.
Conditions. Visibility, current, surge, entry type. One entry says nothing. Twenty entries tell 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 covers how to capture enough underwater to ID them back on land.
Gear notes. Anything that leaked, rattled, or misbehaved. Six months on, deciding whether that regulator needs service, you will want this — more in keeping track of dive gear.

One line for the memory

Write a sentence about what made this dive this dive. Not a diary entry. A hook. “Turtle followed us for ten minutes, clearly hoping we would find food.” That line brings the dive back years later. The depth number never will — mine certainly didn’t.

What you can leave blank

Honesty saves logbooks. Empty fields 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 — follow it and your training, not a table reconstructed in a notebook afterward. Log planning details only if your agency or instructor asks.
Long narrative writing. If it feels like homework, cut it to one line.
Site sketches, unless you enjoy drawing. A photo of the dive centre’s site map does the same job in a second.

The test for every field: will anyone — including future you — ever read it? If not, drop it. A short entry logged beats a thorough entry imagined, which is the argument I make in how to log a scuba dive.

If a paper page isn’t sticking

That Sulawesi page is the reason Tortuba leans on a species guide rather than a blank text box — 10,000 species browsable by body shape, so the fish gets a name instead of a question mark. The rest of the checklist above is just the form: duration, depth, air, site, buddies, conditions, all structured fields, all offline. Instructors can sign in the app, photos attach to dives, and a writing coach nudges the memory line out of you. The animals index and locations show how sightings connect worldwide.

The app is free, and paper works fine too. Record what you will use, skip the rest, keep diving.