Deep-Sea Sherpa

One of the most often used, and often disagreed upon, scuba hand signs is numbers. The following hand signals are used by cave divers and other technical divers because it can be implemented with one hand. In addition, these signs work as an alphabet, and does not require addition or counting of subsequent signs (ex. flashing 5’s).

Let’s compare the three common methods.

Cave Diving/Technical Diving

Each hand signal is a number, and the signals are concatenated. In the above example, 1 + 8 + 0 + 0 = 1800.

Some teams prefer to omit the last zero signals, since hundreds can be implied. Especially if the “question”+”gauge” signal was used to ask the team’s pressure.

OW/Two Handed

Each finger is 100, and the signals are arithmetically summed. In the above example, 1000 + 800 = 1800.

Counting 5’s

Each finger is 100, and the signals are arithmetically summed In the above example, 500 + 500 + 500 + 300 = 1800.

• Scuba Signs – Line and Reel
• Scuba Signs – Position in the water column
• Scuba Signs – Deco stop / safety stop
• Scuba Signs – Directions
• Scuba Signs – Issues

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Training by Don