A Diver’s Evernote
More than an electronic logbook
The first thing a diver gets after certification is a logbook. Every dive will be logged in it: date, time, duration, conditions, exceptional occurances and observations made. The purpose is not just to remember all the dives you ever had, but also to prove your level of experience as a diver, as every log shall be stamped by the accompanying dive master or signed by the buddy (partner) of the dive.
So, if you want to dive, you shall have your logbook with you. But then you have to carry it for the whole journey and are always at risk to lose that diary of your dive memories.
Fortunately Evernote has already taught me to store all my ideas, my plans, everything I want to remember for later use, electronically in one space, easy to organize. Consequently I have now inserted all pages of my dive logbook into Evernote. Henceforth I can have my diving experiences with me everywhere I go. No more need to carry a heavy book full of pages while traveling. I can just take some loose pages with me for the dives to come and spare space and weight in my backpack.
I will now always be able to prove my experiences with the offline Evernote Logbook on my Laptop or Smartphone; can search all the different dives easily and even group them around my keywords or tags.
But not just my past, also my future diving experiences have found their place in Evernote. In my “diving” stack right next to the “logbook”- notebook is another one: “dive sites”, where I collect all information concerning places, where I want to dive in future. Here I store articles about dive locations, which I have found on the web and clipped with the Evernote Web Clipper or photographed from magazines I have read.
I also store a lot of other informations concerning my hobby. There is one notebook with articles about tips, tricks and a lot of useful dive related knowledge, another one with pictures of the user manuals of my diving equipment and a last one with photographs of my certificates and permissions. In total I have replaced a pile of papers and books with just a little bit of the memory of my smartphone and am out and about always better informed as ever possible before.
This does not have to be the end. Why not have a special divers edition of Evernote? A form already created for an electronic logbook with (searchable) boxes for all the informations needed (date, time, duration, air consumption, temperature, visibility and so on). Even better, Evernote also contains all the features necessary to spare an additional fish identification app. These are just composed of photos of the different kind of fish and associated descriptions. This is nothing else than an Evernote notebook. Combined with the advanced search options in Evernote such a notebook might even provide a superior user experience than a specialized app. Furthermore the fish identified after diving could even be linked with the observations to be recorded in the logbook. That would create a wonderful dive app just inside of Evernote.
Do you have an Evernote (or other electronic) logbook, too? Which features did you use? How do you organize it?
