How I Decide What Dive Gear to Buy

Every gear guide tells you what to buy. This one is about how to decide.

I own a reasonable amount of dive kit now, and almost none of it was chosen the way I expected to choose it. I thought I would read reviews and pick well. What actually happened is that I watched people better than me use things, asked them why, and only then went and read.

That order turns out to matter more than any of the individual decisions, so it’s what this page is mostly about.

One thing stated up front, because it changes how you should read the rest. I bought my BCD, my exposure suit and my dive computer in August 2026, and as I write this I have not yet dived any of them. The first proper trip is November. So what follows is why I chose each thing, which I stand behind. It is not how they performed, which I don’t know yet. This page gets a real update after November, and if the reasoning turns out to be wrong in the water, the update will say so.

1. The sequence, which is the actually transferable part

Four steps. It’s the order that does the work, not any one of them.

1. Notice what people are using. Over a week on a boat you watch a lot of gear being used by better divers in real conditions. No review can show you that, and you don’t have to ask anyone anything to get it.
2. Ask them why. Not “what would you recommend” but why did you choose that. The reasoning is the useful part, and it is the part reviews systematically leave out, because a reviewer has to justify a ranking and a diver only has to explain themselves.
3. Then research. Once you know which two or three things you’re really choosing between, blogs and reviews turn useful instead of overwhelming.
4. Then buy.

Most people run that backwards. They read first, drown in options, and buy on price or on whichever reviewer sounded most certain. I ended up doing it the right way round mostly because I dive roughly once a year: there was never any urgency to own things, so I spent several years renting and watching before I bought anything serious.

Starting with observation narrows the field before you research it. That’s the whole trick, and it’s the only part of this page I’d push on anyone.

2. Buy in this order: mask, fins, computer. Rent the rest.

The first two aren’t mine. They’re Azeem’s, the main instructor at the dive shop I use in Mumbai, who ran my confined-water training and has been on trips with me since. Reported · Azeem, Orca Mumbai I bought the mask and fins under his guidance and I’d pass that on unchanged. The computer I worked out myself, later, and it’s a softer recommendation than the first two. See below.

• Mask first, always. Cheapest personal item, largest effect on whether a dive is enjoyable. A rental mask that doesn’t fit your face leaks continuously, and a dive spent clearing your mask every ninety seconds is a bad dive. Fit is individual: hold it to your face with no strap, inhale gently through your nose, and see whether it seals on its own.
• Fins second, and this is the one guides skip. Fins are how you move and, more importantly, how you hold position without using your hands. Two reasons to own a pair, and neither is the one I’d have guessed:
  • Rental fins are usually weaker. Not merely worn out. The fins shops stock in bulk simply don’t move as much water as good ones, and in strong current the difference in effort is noticeable. That’s precisely the dive where it matters, and precisely the dive you don’t want to arrive at already tired.
  • Get open-heel ones worn with booties, not full-foot, and the reason is shore diving. You wade in and put your fins on in the water, with all your other gear already on. An open-heel fin with an adjustable strap goes on far more easily in that position than a full-foot one you have to force your foot into while being moved around by the swell. The booties are worth having anyway.
• Computer third, and I want to be honest that this one is optional for longer than the other two. Rental computers do the job. I used them for years without any real complaint, and anyone telling you that you need your own from day one is overselling it. What owning actually buys you is two things, and neither is safety: you can set it up in advance, at home and unhurried, rather than borrowing an unfamiliar device on a boat at six in the morning. Conservatism settings, units, alarms, gas mixes, all decided when you have time to think. And you get a continuous long-term record of your own diving instead of a history scattered across other people’s hardware. ⚠ One thing worth knowing before you shop: a lot of people now buy a dive computer that doubles as an everyday smartwatch, on the reasoning that a device you wear daily is a device you’ll actually be familiar with when it matters. It’s a genuine trade. You pay for the crossover, and dedicated dive computers tend to have larger, more legible screens underwater, but the usability argument is real and it isn’t the choice I made.
• Regulators, BCD, exposure suit: rent until you know what you want. They’re the expensive items, the bulky ones, and the ones where your preferences change once you actually know what you like.

And a few small things worth owning even while you rent

None of these costs much, and the reason for grouping them is that you can own every one while still renting your regulator, BCD and suit, which is where §3 says most people should sit for a good while.

• A moldable mouthpiece. It fits any rental regulator, and there are two reasons for it. Comfort: one moulded to your own bite stops the jaw ache that makes long dives quietly unpleasant. And hygiene, which almost nobody mentions out loud: a rental regulator’s mouthpiece has been in a lot of other people’s mouths. Yours costs very little and swaps over in seconds.
• A soft dive bag rather than a suitcase. This is a liveaboard problem specifically: there is nowhere on a boat to put a hard case. Cabins are small, and a rigid suitcase can’t be collapsed or stowed once it’s unpacked. A soft duffel folds flat under a bunk. ⚠ Size it generously. A backplate-and-wing on its own eats a serious fraction of a 60-litre bag before anything else goes in.
• Reef-safe sunscreen. You are getting into the water wearing it.
• Defog: optional, and I’d say don’t bother at first. You can buy it and it works fine. But most boats keep a bottle of the soap-based mix that everyone actually uses, and that works fine too. It is not a decision worth spending any thought on.

The mask thing nobody tells you. A new mask ships with a silicone release film on the inside of the lens. Leave it on and the mask fogs forever; no amount of defog will touch it. Scrub it off with non-gel, non-whitening toothpaste (whitening crystals scratch), small circles, rinse, test, repeat. Do it at home, not on the boat. ⚠ Do not use the flame method (the popular trick of burning the film off) on a frameless single-lens mask. It can weaken tempered glass, and frameless masks have shattered on hitting the water.

Exposure protection: the one category I have actually tested

Lived Unlike the BCD and the computer in §6, I’ve spent a lot of hours in varying amounts of neoprene, so the conclusions here are firmer.

A rented shortie in the Maldives was very comfortable. A full wetsuit was unpleasant to get into, and that matters more than it sounds, because you’re doing it twice a day for a week, on a moving deck, already tired.

For most tropical diving, a 2–3 mm rashguard and board shorts has been enough for me in the water. That’s the honest answer for warm destinations, and it costs almost nothing.

But the water isn’t where the cold gets you. The boat is. Sitting wet on an open dinghy in the wind on the way back, I shiver badly. ⚠ My tolerance for cold is low, lower than most people’s, so calibrate that against yourself rather than against me. The point stands anyway: people choose exposure protection for the dive and then get cold during the twenty minutes afterwards, which nobody warns you about.

Which is why I’ve settled on a two-piece, worn with a rashguard or over board shorts depending on the day. Two pieces means dialling it up or down without owning three suits, and you can strip the top off on deck when the sun comes out. The flexibility is the point, more than the warmth rating is.

3. Rent to buy yourself time, not to save money

Two questions get muddled here, and their answers point in opposite directions.

On economics alone, owning wins, and sooner than most guides admit. If you settle into one week-long trip a year, rental fees are a recurring cost set against a one-off purchase, and the purchase catches up well before the gear wears out. Kit lasts; my dive coach has had his fifteen years. If you’re going to keep doing this at all, owning ends up cheaper and better.

⚠ One caveat, because the input to that sum is shakier than it looks. Full-set rental rates vary by more than double between operators. The figures I’ve been given for the same week differ by that much depending on who I asked. That spread is the whole difference between owning paying for itself in two trips and in six. Ask your specific operator what a full set costs for the week before you run the numbers. Don’t use a figure off a forum, and don’t use mine.

But none of that is a reason to buy now. What should stop you isn’t cost. It’s that you don’t yet know what you want, and you can’t learn it from a website or from someone else’s recommendation, however good they are. You learn it by diving rental kit and noticing what irritates you, and by looking at what the experienced people on your boat are using and asking them why.

So treat the rental fees as tuition. What they buy is walking into a shop already knowing what you want, which is worth considerably more than the difference.

4. Where my own decisions actually came from

A table would make this look tidier than it was. Every one of these came out of a long process: asking a lot of divers what they used and, more importantly, why; reading a great deal; going back and forth; changing my mind. I’m thorough to a fault and none of it was quick. So here it is properly.

Mask. It fit. That is the whole reason, and it is why §2 puts fit above everything else. For a mask nothing else comes close, and you can only find out in person.

Fins. Gull, which is widely held to be about the best you can buy, and which I’ll admit I was predisposed towards because I have a soft spot for Japanese-made things. I also intend to hand-paint them at some point. That is not a performance argument and I’m including it because it’s true.

Dive computer. A Shearwater Peregrine, on a buy-once-and-forget-about-it basis. What actually tipped it was seeing them on technical divers’ wrists underwater and noticing the display was obviously easier to read than what I was renting. That’s §1’s observation step doing exactly its job. No spec sheet tells you a screen is legible at depth on a grey day.

BCD. A backplate-and-wing. Every blog says they’re better; my own reading says they need the least maintenance of any BCD type; and the reason that actually forced it: a BP/W is required for GUE Fundamentals, which I want to do. That’s buying for where I’m going rather than where I am, which is either good planning or a way of talking yourself into something, and I’m not fully sure which. ⚠ The honest counterweight: plenty of experienced divers prefer hybrid BCDs and they are not wrong. I went xDeep specifically because it’s well known and widely vouched for, and because I’d seen one being used by Symone, a diver I met in Egypt.

Exposure suit. Research said Sharkskin was warm; I tried one on and confirmed it. And it looked good on an Australian bloke on my Similan boat, which I’m including for the same reason as the fins.

Everything else: the shop that fitted it all, who had opinions and was right.

Two things that pattern shows, and I only noticed writing it down

First, look how many were tipped by seeing a thing on a person. The computer on technical divers. The BCD on someone I met in Egypt. The wetsuit on an Australian on a boat in Thailand. The reading told me what to consider. Watching someone actually use it is what closed the decision, every single time. That is the entire argument of §1 and I did not set out to prove it.

Second, two of those reasons are not performance reasons at all. I like Japanese manufacturing and I liked how a wetsuit looked on someone else. Gear guides write as though those aren’t factors. They always are, and pretending otherwise just means you end up justifying the thing you already wanted with an argument you constructed afterwards. Better to know which part of the decision was which.

5. The India question nobody answers: where does it get serviced?

This is the part I’d have wanted someone to tell me, and the answer surprised me. Researched

The conventional advice is “buy a brand with a service network in India.” I went looking for one and could not find an authorised service centre in Mumbai for any major regulator brand. The nearest authorised centres I could confirm were in Singapore. So the real question isn’t whose network is here. It’s how rarely do I need a network at all, and where do I send it when I do.

That reframes two decisions:

• Service interval becomes a spec worth shopping on. Brands vary from roughly annual to every two or three years. At about twenty dives a year the dive-count limit never binds (only the calendar does) so a longer interval is real money over a decade.
• Buying abroad stops being exotic. A shop in Bangkok quoted me servicing every two years with a two-to-three-day turnaround, which is a better answer than anything I found domestically.

Buying gear abroad, if you get that far

Not a first-year problem. But worth knowing before you’re standing in a dive shop holding a card, because I got a part of this wrong and it cost me.

• Dive shops abroad, Thailand especially, can be substantially cheaper than India, and trade or instructor-referred pricing more so again.
• India’s baggage rules are friendlier than most people assume, and on a large purchase the duty is generally a much smaller number than the discount that sent you abroad. Use the red channel and declare. I’m deliberately not printing the current allowance or rate: those change, and a confidently wrong customs figure is worse than no figure. Look up the live numbers before you fly.
• ⚠ The trap I walked into: the trade discount and the tourist VAT refund are effectively mutually exclusive. Thailand refunds VAT to tourists, but it needs a form issued at the counter, on the day, and trade-price shops are generally not registered in the tourist-refund scheme at all. I took the discount, assumed the refund would follow, and found afterwards there was no path to it. The discount was much the bigger number so it was still the right trade, but I’d rather have known I was making a choice.
• So ask “are you registered for the tourist VAT refund?” before you buy. Ten seconds, and it’s the difference between choosing and discovering.

6. What I own, and why: reasoning, not verdict

Reasoned, not tested Bought August 2026, first dived November 2026. Read this as why I chose things, not how they performed.

• BCD: a backplate-and-wing rather than a jacket. The air sits in a wing behind you instead of wrapped around your chest, which makes it much easier to hold flat, horizontal trim, and good trim is the single thing that most improves air consumption and stops you kicking the reef. Three specifics drove it: an aluminium plate rather than steel, because plate weight is a permanent baggage tax on every flight while boat lead is free everywhere, and it keeps more of your weight ditchable; a 28 lb wing rather than 40+, because one tank in warm water doesn’t need more lift and surplus wing is drag; and a quick-adjust harness rather than one-piece webbing, because one-piece is sized once and left, and I switch between a thin thermal layer and thicker suits.
• Exposure: a non-neoprene laminate, two-piece. (The two-piece part is the one decision in this list I’d already tested; see §2.) It contains no neoprene at all, so it doesn’t compress with depth: it doesn’t lose insulation as you descend, buoyancy at 5 m is buoyancy at 30 m, and it carries essentially no lead penalty. Two-piece for a reason I learned in a changing room: a two-piece is the easiest-donning thermal format there is, and laminate one-pieces are hard to pull on dry. Honest caveat: I run cold and took the warmer fabric, so the cost of that lands on deck in equatorial heat rather than in the water.
• Computer: a Shearwater, no air-integration transmitter. It runs fine without one.
• What I have deliberately not bought: a regulator. I rent. Regs are the expensive, configuration-dependent item, and I’d rather buy once I know the setup I’m settling into than buy twice. That’s the same advice as §3, applied to myself at sixty dives.

The caveat that sits over all of this: there’s enormous variety in dive gear, genuine pros and cons on every side, and price ranges spanning an order of magnitude. There is no one right answer. This is my answer, for my diving, at my frequency, in the water I dive. Take the sequence in §1 and the reasoning attached to each choice, not the brands.

7. The camera is a special case: wait

You’ll want one almost immediately. Don’t buy an underwater camera before about thirty dives. Not gatekeeping, physics. A camera in your hands is a camera in your hands, which means you aren’t managing your buoyancy. Before buoyancy is automatic, holding one reliably produces three things: you sink onto the reef, you burn air far faster, and your photos are bad anyway because you can’t hold still.

One thing worth knowing when you do get there, because shops rely on you not knowing it:

• ⚠ A dive torch is not a video light, and shops will happily blur the two. A video light needs roughly a 100°+ beam at 4,000+ lumens; a primary dive torch is a narrow 6–12° spot. Pointing a torch at a video frame gives you a hotspot in the middle of a dark image. Adjustable torches marketed as doing both generally don’t. Mine adjusts to 72° and is still nowhere near a video light.

Message me

If you’re about to spend real money on kit and want a second opinion, just message me. I’d much rather have that conversation than have you buy something off a table on a website, including mine.

And if you’ve dived any of what’s in §6 and found my reasoning wrong, tell me that too. I’ll be finding out myself in November.

Email: abhishek@terrak.ai LinkedIn: Abhishek Chaudhry

What’s changed

• 21 August 2026. Named Symone properly in §4, having hedged the spelling while I checked it.
• 21 August 2026. Added what I’ve learned about exposure protection, which unlike most of §6 I have actually tested: a rented shortie was comfortable, a full wetsuit unpleasant to get into, a rashguard and board shorts enough in warm water, and the cold that matters isn’t underwater, it’s sitting wet on the boat afterwards.
• 21 August 2026. Cut the GoPro generation note here too. It was a specific limitation on a specific camera generation, and this page is about how to decide what to buy rather than how to operate one thing you already own.
• 21 August 2026. Stopped hedging about budgets across all three diving pages. Diving is expensive, it stays expensive, and writing as though there’s a cheaper version for readers on a tighter budget was pretending. The pages now say so once and move on.
• 21 August 2026. Added the small things worth owning even while you rent: a moldable mouthpiece (comfort, and the hygiene point nobody says out loud), a soft dive bag rather than a suitcase because there is nowhere to stow a hard case on a boat, reef-safe sunscreen, and defog, which honestly isn’t worth thinking about.
• 21 August 2026. Replaced the table of buying decisions with the actual reasons. A five-row table made a long, multi-input process look like five clean handoffs. The real version includes that I bought Japanese fins partly because I like Japanese things and intend to hand-paint them, and a wetsuit partly because it looked good on someone else, both of which are true and both of which gear guides pretend away.
• 21 August 2026. Softened the dive computer advice, which was overstated. Rental computers do the job; I used them for years. Owning buys you setup-in-advance and a long-term record, not safety. Also added the computer-as-smartwatch option, which plenty of people prefer and which I’d left out. And corrected the attribution: the mask-and-fins-first rule is Azeem’s; the computer I worked out on my own.
• 21 August 2026. Better reasons for the fins advice. I’d said open-heel because they fit more feet. The real reason is shore diving, where you put your fins on in the water with everything else already on, and an adjustable strap is far easier there. And rental fins aren’t just worn, they’re weaker: in strong current the extra effort is noticeable.
• 21 August 2026. Two corrections within hours of publishing. I’d written that I couldn’t afford gear in my early years. I made that up; money was never the reason. And the table of who influenced each purchase was far too tidy: every one of those decisions involved a lot of people, a lot of reading and a lot of going back and forth. Both fixed.
• 21 August 2026. First published. §6 is reasoning rather than verdict; the kit in it has not been dived yet. A real update follows Raja Ampat in December.