Report on Decompression Illness, Diving Fatalities and Project Dive

Section 2 - Project Dive Exploration (PDE)Figure 2.5-1Percentageof the PDEsample by typeof dive seriesfor 2003(n = 2,703).Thermal protection employed by divers in the sample dependedon the geographic area where the dive was made. On a liveaboardthat operates in the Caribbean, 87 percent of divers wore wetsuitsor lesser thermal protection suits. In Scapa Flow, nearly all divers(99 percent) wore drysuits. Of the Beach and Day Boats dives, 5percent were done in dry or heated suits.The reported purpose of the dive in our sample was overwhelminglysightseeing (99 percent), with teaching / learning, photography,proficiency, spearfishing, or non-professional work declaredin less than 1 percent.2.5 Dive SeriesPDE recorded 2,686 dive series in 2003. Figure 2.5-1 breaks downthose series by the number of days of diving. Dive series comprisedmultiday diving in 73 percent of the cases, single-day repetitivediving in 17 percent of the cases and single dives in 10 percentof the cases. This pattern was similar to that evident in thedata collected from 1998 through 2002.32DAN’s <strong>Report</strong> on Decompression Illness, Diving Fatalities and Project Dive Exploration: 2005 Edition