Diving Safety and Decompression Protocols (Aquaculture)

Commercial diving for net inspection, mooring maintenance, mortality removal, and underwater biomass or benthic monitoring is a routine task on many cage and offshore farms, and it carries the same decompression sickness and barotrauma risks as any commercial diving operation, requiring certified training, dive planning that respects depth and bottom-time limits set by established decompression tables or dive computers, and properly maintained equipment rather than being treated as an incidental extension of general farm labor duties. A critical aquaculture-specific risk is diving in or near an active net pen with fish present, where entanglement in netting, mooring lines, or predator-exclusion structures can trap a diver, making net and structure-specific hazard awareness, not just general open-water diving competence, part of the required training for farm divers. Buddy diving (never diving alone) and surface-support personnel maintaining continuous communication with the diver are standard minimum controls, and a documented dive log recording depth, duration, and any symptoms experienced provides both an operational safety record and the data needed to identify a diver developing a pattern of risk from repeated dives exceeding safe cumulative exposure limits. Many farms with frequent diving needs increasingly use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) for routine net and mooring inspection specifically to reduce diver exposure to the highest-frequency, lowest-complexity inspection tasks, reserving human diving for situations genuinely requiring hands-on intervention an ROV cannot perform.