Every dive leaves a record

For all diving activities, a dive roster must be established. The regulation names exactly what it has to show, and it is a short list that is more demanding than it looks:

• the time at which the divers dived
• the depth they went to
• the pressure in the air cylinder when the dive ended

That third field is the one to notice. End-of-dive cylinder pressure is not something a boat remembers an hour later. It has to be read off the gauge and written down while the diver is still in front of you.

And it is kept. Not less than one year, at the centre, so that it can be seen whenever the relevant authorities require it. That phrasing makes it a production duty, not just a retention one: the record has to be findable on request, not merely undestroyed.

Shore dives get their own clause. Where diving happens separately at places connected to land, staff must watch the time the divers go down and the time they surface.

Every activity of people who go diving must be monitored by the centre's staff, going with the divers, directly or indirectly. The regulation then defines both, which is unusually careful drafting.

Direct monitoring is a staff member going to the dive site, watching the divers' activities, personally studying how they are conducting themselves, acting so that no problem arises, and resolving the problems that do.

Indirect monitoring is where the centre has planned the activity, and then responds properly to a problem should one arise, resolving it at the time it occurs.

Then the consequence, and it is pointed. Where a staff member is proven to have been negligent in monitoring divers, action may be taken by the relevant government authority against that staff member, or against the centre. Either or both. As with the depth rules, the regulation is willing to reach past the company to the individual.

The duty appears twice, in two different parts, which is usually a sign something mattered to the drafter. A staff member must give a short briefing before every dive — not every trip, every dive.

Part 9 then says what must be in it:

• the safety rules
• the maximum depth that may be gone to
• what the dive sites will be like
• the currents
• ascent skills
• the environment
• any danger that may be met with

Seven items, and a briefing that omits one is short of the clause. Ascent skills in particular is not a thing most standard briefings cover explicitly.

On completion of every dive, a safety stop of 3 minutes at 5 metres must be made. Not recommended. Must.

And when that stop is begun, the diver's tank pressure must be not lower than 50 bar. A safety-stop rule with a gas floor bolted onto it.

That second half changes what the first half means. A mandatory stop is a profile rule and a guide can enforce it in the water. A mandatory stop that must be entered with 50 bar is a gas planning rule, and it is decided long before the ascent — by turn pressure, by how the group is paired, by whether the guide called it early enough. A diver arriving at 5 metres on 40 bar has already broken this clause, and there is nothing to be done about it at that point.

For dives deeper than 9 metres, a 5-minute stop at 5 metres is additionally described as desirable — that one is encouragement, not obligation. We flagged the 9-metre figure for a second look because it is unusually shallow for such a threshold, but both independent decodes read a single digit 9, so it is not a decoding artefact.

Two flat rules and a training duty.

A buoyancy control device is compulsory in all diving activities. The regulation uses the word compulsory.

A diver going to dive alone must not be permitted in any circumstance whatsoever. That is close to the strongest phrasing anywhere in the instrument, and it is a duty on whoever would be doing the permitting — the centre — rather than on the diver who wants to.

And every centre must run a training programme at least once a year to familiarise all staff working in diving activity with how to act in situations where oxygen has to be given. Annual, all staff, not just the ones who hold the certificate. Our notes on the boat cover the requirement that oxygen equipment is aboard; this is the requirement that the people around it are current.

Two things we have already written about point at a chamber. Dive leaders must carry personal insurance covering decompression chamber treatment specifically, and every centre's emergency plan must set out how someone gets to the nearest medical facility. Neither is much use without knowing where the chambers actually are.

The ministry publishes the list. There are five in the country.

Four of the five sit on resort islands. Only ADK, in Malé, is a hospital. Where your nearest chamber is another operator's medical centre, the arrangement for getting a casualty to it is a relationship, not just a distance.

Check these numbers before you need them, not after. We are copying a list that the ministry dates to June 2023 and says it updates as changes occur — so the source page above is the authority and this table is a convenience. If you find something here that is out of date, the ministry asks to be told at scm@tourism.gov.mv, and we would like to know too.

We are a software company writing notes, not an emergency service. Nothing here replaces your own emergency plan, the numbers in it, or a conversation with the chamber nearest you about what they can actually take and when.

A certified diver may dive with another certified diver, with no divemaster monitoring them — but only on one of two conditions:

• the surrounding environment is the same kind as the environments where they did their training, or
• both logbooks show they are people who dive in environments that are not easy

And the converse is stated separately: even certified divers, where the environment differs enough that they cannot dive with ease using the skills they have, must dive only under a staff member's supervision.

Read together with the check-dive rule in our staff notes, the picture is consistent. The card is not the qualifying fact. The logbook is, and so is the match between where somebody learned and where they are now.

Clause 8 is short and it governs everything else we have written about across these notes: no exception to the recreational diving regulation may be permitted, except with written permission from the ministry.

So the 30-metre ceiling, the no-decompression rule, the no-exemptions list, the ban on solo diving — all of them have exactly one route around, and it is a written permission, in advance, from the ministry. Not a risk assessment, not a waiver signed by the diver, not professional judgement on the day.

Clause 6 sets the boundary of what all this applies to, with a twist worth knowing. "Diving" in this regulation means diving for recreation only. But it then adds that divers who dive commercially, for military purposes, or in connection with other kinds of work must also comply with this regulation when they dive recreationally. A professional's day job is outside the instrument; their weekend is not.

The regulation does not say what form the dive roster takes, whether it may be kept electronically, or who at the centre owns it. It says what it must show and how long it must survive.

It also does not say what "proven to have been negligent" requires, or which government authority takes the action. Chapter 1 covers inspection and penalties, and we have read it but not yet written it up — that is the next of these notes.

Every section names its chapter, part and clause.

One caution about who to ask. Clause 8 above names the Ministry of Tourism, which is the 2003 name. The department has been renamed at least twice since — Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture on the 2013 amendment, and ފަތުރުވެރިކަމާއި ތިމާވެށްޓާބެހޭ ވުޒާރާ, Ministry of Tourism and Environment, on the March 2026 procedure. For anything current, that last name is the one to go by.

Time in, depth, pressure out, per diver, kept a year and produced on demand; a briefing with seven required elements before every dive; annual oxygen training for everyone. This is the part of the regulation that is really about record-keeping, and it is the reason we ended up reading the whole thing. Have a look if it is useful.