What is DiveCaching?
DiveCaching is all about adventure and fun. It’s an underwater game for certified divers or snorkelers that can be organized by your local retailer or by a group of divers and is ideal for staying involved in both local diving and for dive travel. If you’ve been out of the water for a while, this is also a great and fun reason to take a refresher scuba course and get back into diving!
DiveCaching is essentially an underwater “treasure” hunt that combines your certified scuba diving skills or snorkeling skills with some high tech equipment and simple underwater search techniques, while looking for a hidden “cache” of goodies. The premise is simple; divers hide a “treasure” or cache underwater, they post the location of the hidden cache online, and other divers search for it. When the cache is found, the finder logs their visit to the cache online, and puts the cache back where they found it.
Sometimes the finders enhance the cache. Other times the finders simply put the cache back in the hiding place for the next dive cacher to locate. After returning to the surface, the visit to the cache is logged online. There are many rewards for DiveCaching and everyone has their own favorite reason for participating. Some will thrive on the fun and adventure of discovery. Others enjoy exploring a new dive site or returning to one that they have not visited in a while. Still others enjoy practicing their diving skills or using new skills in navigation or search and recovery, or just simply being with friends and family. Some, especially the younger DiveCachers will love the treasure!
The cache itself is usually composed of a container holding a log book or log sheet, something with which to write, and various items that might be of interest to the dive cacher, such as collectible coins, lapel pins, key chains, beads, money, stones, or other treasures. These items, known as SWAG (Stuff We All Get) can include handmade items, stuff from the dollar store and anything else the DiveCacher can imagine. Items don’t need to be expensive but should be a reflection of the cacher’s personality. The cache container is hidden underwater and out of sight of non-caching divers or swimmers.
The surface coordinates of the item are recorded using a Global Position System (GPS) and are posted online so that other divers can find the cache. DiveCaching is a form of “Geocaching,” a decade-old land-based activity with more than 5 million participants worldwide who are looking for (mostly land-based) caches hidden by others and posted on the internet.
