Spécialité PADI Search and Recovery Diver — Marsa Alam

Every diver eventually watches something disappear into the blue — a dive computer off a wrist, a camera out of a hand, a mooring block that needs moving. The Search and Recovery specialty is the course that turns "it is gone" into a job you know how to do.

Over two days and four dives you learn the five standard search patterns and, more importantly, when each one is worth using: the expanding square for a small object in a known area, the U-pattern and the jackstay for larger sweeps, the circular pattern when you have a fixed reference. You run them on a line, in real conditions, until the pattern stops being a diagram and becomes something you can hold in your head while managing depth, air and a buddy.

The second half of the course is lifting. You tie proper knots underwater with gloves on, rig a lift bag to an object, and control the ascent — which is the part that catches people out, because a bag that runs away is genuinely dangerous. You practise until it is undramatic. By the final dive you plan and execute a full recovery of a heavier object with your buddy, start to finish, with the instructor watching rather than directing.

Marsa Alam suits the course particularly well: the sheltered sandy bays along this coast give clean, shallow ground to run patterns on, without the boat traffic of a busier harbour.

Prerequisites: PADI Adventure Diver or higher, or Open Water Diver with the Underwater Navigator specialty, and a minimum age of 12. Counts toward the PADI Master Scuba Diver rating.