Why Presence
The specialty beneath every specialty
Deep diving takes you deeper, wreck diving inside a wreck, night diving into the dark. Every specialty opens a new place or a new tool. Presence changes the diver, and that change comes with you on every dive you make from now on.
The reality
Incidents often begin with attention, not technique
Dive training teaches us very well what to do: clear a mask, control buoyancy, make an emergency ascent. But the data show that much of what goes wrong comes not from missing knowledge, but from something that was not noticed in time.
- 87%
In an Australian review of 1,000 diving incidents, human error contributed to 87% of them. A large share of errors came from haste and inattention.
Acott, 2005 - 76%
In aviation, 76% of situation awareness errors happen at the most basic level: something was not seen, monitored or noticed. Similar human factors have been documented in diving.
Jones & Endsley, 1996; O'Connor, 2007 - 4.7 / 10.7
Divers observed in Hong Kong touched coral 10.7 times on average, but reported noticing only 4.7 of those contacts. What we touch without knowing is more than what we see.
So et al., 2023
The mechanism
Under stress, attention narrows
Psychology has known it for more than half a century: as arousal rises, the range of cues we use narrows. We stop seeing our surroundings and lock onto a single point. Experiments with novice divers showed that task load and underwater conditions affected their response times to peripheral light signals.
That is why knowing the right technique is not enough. For the technique to come in at the right moment, the situation has to be noticed first: your own breathing speeding up, your buddy slowing down, the current turning, your gas going faster than you expected.
Technical training teaches you what to do. Presence teaches you to notice, in time, what needs doing.
The difference
Why it is different from other specialties
- An investment in you, not a place
- Wreck, night, deep: each is useful in certain conditions. Awareness works on every dive, at every depth and in every specialty.
- Not a new tool, a new way of seeing
- The course adds no new technical skill. It teaches you to apply the skills you already have with a calm, deliberate mind.
- Built on a published standard
- The course rests on an educational standard and an open methodology published with DOIs, and it has measurable performance requirements.
- For the ocean too
- A diver who notices touches less, sees more and behaves like a guest in the water.
What you gain
What changes underwater after the course
You see more
You learn to observe for minutes in neutral buoyancy without contact, and to notice detail even in a single square metre.
You read yourself early
You notice your breathing and tension changing before a small thing becomes a big one.
You read your buddy
You learn to read your buddy's state through breathing rhythm, posture and pace, and to support them the right way.
You stay composed in small problems
Stop, breathe, assess, act: in minor, non-time-critical problems you decide instead of react.
You leave a smaller trace
You become aware of your contact with the environment and make being a guest in the water a habit.
It counts toward Master Scuba Diver
As a PADI Distinctive Specialty it is one of the specialties that count toward the Master Scuba Diver rating.
The privilege
More than a certificate
A verifiable credential
Alongside your PADI eCard, a numbered Rubelis Beyond card that anyone can verify with its QR code.
Your place on the world map
Certified divers and instructors appear on the Presence map; you can too, if you wish.
Camera-Free Dive Day
On 4 September 2027, divers around the world dive without cameras on the same day.
One-to-one with the founder
Presence Atelier: a one-to-one programme with the course author Taylan Kırali, with limited places.
Honesty
What we do not promise
- Presence is not therapy or psychological support; we do not claim it treats anxiety or panic disorder.
- It does not replace emergency training. In genuine time-critical emergencies, standard emergency procedures practised in advance always come first.
- We are running a preregistered pilot study to measure the course's effects. We will publish its findings openly, whether positive or negative.
A diver who learns to notice never dives the same way again.
Sources
- Acott CJ (2005). Human error and violations in 1,000 diving incidents: a review of data from the Diving Incident Monitoring Study (DIMS). SPUMS Journal, 35(1), 11–17.
- Easterbrook JA (1959). The effect of emotion on cue utilization and the organization of behavior. Psychological Review, 66(3), 183–201. doi:10.1037/h0047707
- Egstrom GH, Weltman G (1966). Perceptual narrowing in novice divers. Human Factors, 8.
- Jones DG, Endsley MR (1996). Sources of situation awareness errors in aviation. Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine, 67(6), 507–512.
- O'Connor P (2007). The nontechnical causes of diving accidents: can U.S. Navy divers learn from other industries? Undersea & Hyperbaric Medicine, 34(1), 51–59.
- So J-Y, Kwok Y, Lai C, Fong H-W, Pang L-Y (2023). Underwater impact and intention–behaviour gap of scuba divers on coral communities in Hong Kong SAR, China. IJERPH, 20(5), 3896. doi:10.3390/ijerph20053896