As my wife and I are avid scuba divers, we have certainly collected a decent amount of gear over the years. As a technical nerd of sorts, data and electronics tend to go hand-in-hand with this and I prefer to do most of my logging and dive tracking digitally as much as possible. Capturing the dive profiles from our dive computers and looking at the various statistics such as air consumption rates, water temperature profiles, and many other data points tends to be just another part of the hobby for me.

But… this begs a question that I quickly ran into: What software do I use to capture this information?

As is my experience with most software applications for niche products (such as dive computers), it always seems as though the manufacturers focus only on the product itself leaving the support infrastructure alone to flounder in a deep dark corner. We have two different brands of computers. First was our air integrated models from Oceanic, then we purchased a set of backup wrist-mounted computers from Aqua-lung. This way we have backups in case of failure, especially for extended trips with multiple dives. At the end of the day, I tried both vendor’s suggested tooling and logging software and to say I was under-impressed would be quite the understatement. In the case of Oceanic, I couldn’t even get the software to work, even after talking with their technical support teams… not a great impression.

While I believe Oceanic has been bought out since then (what company hasn’t anymore), Aqua Lung does offer newer cloud-based solutions. Again, provide all your information to someone else to manage and control… this seems like a great approach to something as irreplaceable as your dive logs and their associated memories. I wanted something I could control.

This brings me to a tool that I enjoy so much that I not only sponsor them with my own money on a monthly basis, but it drove me to write this blog post to spread the word.

Subsurface!

Subsurface is an open source dive logging tool, specifically designed to even support Technical Divers (going beyond recreational limits). Those added capabilities are nice, but not really needed for the type of recreational diving my wife and I do on a regular basis. That said, even with those added features, I never find them to be a detriment to the usage of the tools.

As an native Linux Desktop user, I find the ability to run the applicaiton on just about any Operating System (from my Wife’s Windows Laptop, to my Linux Laptop, to even our Android phones) makes this a no-brainer. Furthermore, the tool also enables you to download the dives from your dive computers and add various tags and other metadata to all your dives.

Finally, I have had the opportunity to correspond with the apps developer on a couple of occasions (Dirk Hohndel). Great individual and I certainly support this kind of open source development effort!

If there were such a thing as a 6 star rating… I would certainly give it one!

For more information on Subsurface, check out https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface or https://subsurface-divelog.org/

Subsurface Screenshot

-Russ