Every guest who books an Indonesia liveaboard fills in a medical questionnaire, and a fair number of them fill it in wrongly. Not dishonestly. Wrongly, in the sense that they read a question about heart problems, remember the blood pressure tablets they have taken every morning for nine years, decide that hardly counts as a heart problem, and tick no. The form is then useless, which is a shame, because it is the only part of the booking process designed specifically to keep them alive.
The questionnaire has a reputation as paperwork. It is not. It is a screening tool built by a committee of diving physicians, and its only job is to work out whether you should see a doctor before you go scuba diving in Indonesia. It does not diagnose anything. It does not ban anyone. Tick a box and the form sends you to a physician, who then makes the actual decision. That distinction matters more than anything else on this page, and it is the part guests most often get backwards.
What follows is a walk through what the form actually screens for, condition by condition, and what the published guidance says about the conditions guests ask us about most. It is not medical advice and it cannot be. We run boats; your doctor knows your history. The aim here is narrower and more useful: to tell you what the questions mean, what a yes actually triggers, and how far ahead you need to sort it out.
Why the form exists, and why a boat changes the maths
Land-based diving is forgiving of uncertainty. If something feels wrong on a day boat off Sanur you are back on a beach within the hour and in a hospital in Denpasar the same morning. A liveaboard removes that cushion. Komodo is comparatively well served, since the chamber at Siloam Hospitals in Labuan Bajo has been running since 2018, but from the middle of a Banda Sea or Forgotten Islands crossing you can be more than a day of boat and aircraft away from definitive care. That is the whole reason the screening matters more out here than it does anywhere else.
The form screens, it does not judge
The industry questionnaire is deliberately over-inclusive. It casts a wide net and accepts that it will catch plenty of people who turn out to be perfectly fit to dive. Roughly speaking, if a condition could plausibly cause a sudden change in consciousness, restrict airflow out of the lungs, prevent a pressure space from equalising, or limit your capacity to swim hard for a few minutes, it is on the form somewhere. That is a broad brief and it produces a lot of yes answers.
Most of those yes answers end in clearance. A physician reads the history, does the relevant test, signs the sheet, and the guest dives an ordinary week. The number of guests who are genuinely told no is small. The number who could have been cleared easily but left it too late is much larger, and that is the failure mode worth designing your booking around.
What remote actually means here
Guests hear "remote" and picture a long boat ride. The more accurate picture is a chain of steps, each of which takes time. A problem develops on a dive. The boat recovers everyone and gets underway. It makes a port, and the port may not have a clinic worth the name. From there it is a road transfer, then a flight, and the flights out of eastern Indonesia are not frequent. Then, if the problem is a diving injury, a chamber.
None of this is unusual for expedition diving and none of it should put you off. It does change what counts as a sensible risk. A cardiac event that would be survivable in a European city is a different proposition ten hours from a runway, and that is precisely the scenario the over-45 section of the form is trying to avoid. If you want the detail on what actually happens when a diving injury occurs out here, our guide to decompression sickness on a liveaboard covers the evacuation chain properly.
The ten questions we ask, and where they come from
Our own guest form has a medical section with ten questions. They are not something we invented. They compress the industry questionnaire into the shortest set that still catches everything that matters, and they map almost one to one onto the boxes on the full form:
We ask about lung, breathing or heart problems. About loss of consciousness, migraines or seizures. About blood pressure. About psychological treatment. About physical activity limitations. About back problems, hernia, ulcers or diabetes. About eye, ear or nasal problems. About stomach or intestine problems. About surgery in the last twelve months. And about prescription medication. At the end there is a checkbox confirming you answered sincerely, which is there for a reason we will come back to.
If you answer yes to any of them we will ask for a physician's clearance before you dive. Not before you board, and not before you snorkel, but before you get in the water with a cylinder. Knowing that in advance is the single most useful thing on this page, because it turns a potential problem at the dock into an appointment you book at home six weeks earlier.
The questionnaire, box by box
The form used across most of the industry is the Diver Medical Participant Questionnaire, produced by the Diver Medical Screening Committee and published through bodies including the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society. The current version carries the date 1 January 2026. If a dive centre hands you something older, the substance is broadly the same, but it is worth checking you are filling in the current sheet.
How the funnel works
The structure confuses people, so it is worth explaining. The first page is a short list of numbered questions. Most of them are gateways: answer yes and you are directed to a lettered box further down that asks more precisely about that area. Answer no and you skip the box entirely. This is why the form looks enormous and usually takes four minutes. Almost nobody fills in every box.
A couple of the numbered questions are not gateways at all. Question three asks whether you struggle with moderate exercise, and it defines that concretely: walking 1.6 kilometres in fourteen minutes, or swimming 200 metres without resting. A yes there goes straight to requiring clearance, without a box. That question is doing a lot of quiet work, and we will come back to why.
| Our guest form question | Corresponding area on the industry form | What it is really screening for |
|---|---|---|
| Lung, breathing or heart problems | Question 1, Box A | Air trapping on ascent, cardiac events under exertion |
| Blood pressure issues | Question 2, Box B | Coronary risk, usually combined with age |
| Eye, ear or nasal problems | Question 4, Box C | Failure to equalise, recent surgical sites |
| Loss of consciousness, migraines, seizures | Box E | Sudden incapacity underwater |
| Psychological treatment | Box E | Medication effects, panic risk at depth |
| Back problems, hernia, ulcers or diabetes | Box F | Hypoglycaemia, gas trapping, mobility |
| Stomach or intestine problems | Box G | Reflux and aspiration, gas expansion |
| Physical activity limitations | Question 3 | Exercise capacity in current |
| Surgery in the last 12 months | Question 5 | Unhealed tissue, residual gas spaces |
| Prescription medication | Across boxes | Sedation, dehydration, altered response |
Box A: heart, lungs, breathing and blood
This is the heavyweight box and it opens if you answer yes to the first question. It asks about chest, heart or heart valve surgery, implanted devices such as a stent, pacemaker or neurostimulator, a history of pneumothorax, and chronic lung disease. It asks separately about asthma, wheezing, severe allergies, hay fever or congested airways within the last twelve months that limit your exercise. It asks about angina, chest pain on exertion, heart failure, immersion pulmonary oedema, heart attack or stroke, and about taking medication for any heart condition. It asks about recurrent bronchitis with a current cough, or emphysema. Finally it asks whether anything affecting your lungs, breathing, heart or blood in the last thirty days has impaired how you function.
That last one is the sleeper. It is a thirty day window, which means a chest infection you had three weeks ago belongs on the form even though it has nothing to do with your long term health. Guests almost never think to include it.
Box B: the over-45 box that catches most people
Box B opens for anyone over forty-five, and it asks four things: whether you currently smoke or take in nicotine another way, whether you have high cholesterol, whether you have high blood pressure, and whether a close blood relative died suddenly, or of cardiac disease or stroke, before the age of fifty. That last one includes a family history of heart disease before fifty more generally, covering abnormal rhythms, coronary artery disease and cardiomyopathy.
This box produces more clearance requests than any other, and guests find it irritating because none of those four items feels like an illness. A statin and a mildly raised reading do not feel like a heart condition. The reasoning behind the box is blunt, though, and it is worth knowing: close to thirty per cent of recreational diving fatalities have a cardiac event as the disabling injury. Not a gas problem, not an equipment failure. A heart event. Immersion raises cardiac preload, cold raises it further, peripheral vessels constrict, blood pressure rises, and all of that happens while you are doing sustained moderate exercise in a place where nobody can start compressions.
The published guidance is proportionate about it. Asymptomatic candidates over forty-five with coronary risk factors should be evaluated by a physician, and where the calculated five to ten year risk of a cardiovascular event exceeds ten per cent, the recommendation is to investigate for coronary disease unless the person can give a credible history of exercise capacity that makes significant disease unlikely. In practice, for a fit fifty-five year old on one blood pressure tablet who runs twice a week, that conversation is short.
Box C: ears, sinuses, eyes and teeth
Box C opens if you report trouble with eyes, ears, sinuses or teeth, and it asks about sinus surgery in the last six months, ear disease or ear surgery, hearing loss, balance problems, recurrent sinusitis in the past twelve months, and eye surgery in the past three months.
Ears are the most common reason a diver has a bad week that is nobody's fault, and the reason they appear on a fitness form rather than only in a technique guide is that some ear histories are structural. A healed perforation, grommets, a stapedectomy or any inner ear surgery are a different category from simply being slow to clear. If your difficulty is technique rather than anatomy, our guide on how to dive deep without ears hurting is the more useful page, and the mechanics of what pressure does to those spaces sit in our guide to barotrauma in scuba diving.
The eye surgery window surprises people. Three months is the form's threshold, and there is a specific reason behind the caution: anyone with an intraocular gas bubble should not dive at all while any of it remains, because changing ambient pressure alters the bubble's volume against the inside of the eye. Laser refractive surgery is a much lighter matter than intraocular work, but the form does not distinguish, so the physician has to.
Boxes D to G: the rest of the form
The later boxes cover ground that guests rarely anticipate. Box E deals with behavioural health, persistent neurological injury or disease, recurring migraines within the past twelve months or medication taken to prevent them, blackouts or fainting within the last five years, and epilepsy, seizures or convulsions. Box F covers recurrent back problems in the last six months, back or spinal surgery in the last twelve, diabetes of any kind including gestational diabetes within the last twelve months, an uncorrected hernia, and active ulcers. Box G handles the gut: ostomy surgery without clearance to swim, dehydration needing medical intervention in the last seven days, untreated stomach or intestinal ulcers, frequent heartburn or reflux, active ulcerative colitis or Crohn's disease, and bariatric surgery within the last twelve months.
Pregnancy sits on the form too. The guidance is unambiguous and it is one of the few genuinely settled questions in diving medicine: diving is not recommended at any stage of pregnancy, or for women actively trying to conceive, because venous bubbles formed during decompression have been shown to be potentially harmful to the foetus. We deal with that properly, alongside contraception and cycle timing at sea, in our guide to diving on your period and pregnancy at sea, so it is not repeated here.
What changed for 2026
The committee revises the documents periodically and the current participant questionnaire is dated 1 January 2026. The changes between revisions tend to be refinements of wording rather than wholesale reversals, which is why a physician's letter written against a slightly older version is usually still acceptable. The practical significance for you is smaller than it sounds. Use the current form, make sure the version date at the foot of the first page is the newest available in your language, and do not assume a form you filled in for a course in 2019 still represents your health.
Severe, relative and temporary: how the risk is actually graded
Behind the questionnaire sits a second document, the Diving Medical Guidance, which is written for the physician rather than the diver. It is the more interesting of the two, because it abandons the yes and no of the form and sorts conditions into three tiers. Understanding those tiers is what stops guests catastrophising about a box they have ticked.
The three tiers
Severe risk means the person is thought to be at substantially raised risk compared with the general population, and the consultants who wrote the guidance would generally discourage diving. Relative risk means a moderate increase in risk which may be acceptable, decided case by case on the individual. Temporary risk means a problem that rules diving out for now but resolves, after which the person dives normally.
Most of what guests worry about lands in the second and third tiers. That is the useful thing to take away. A healed eardrum perforation, controlled hypertension, being overweight, recurrent sinusitis, a history of tympanoplasty, inflammatory bowel disease that is currently quiet: all of these sit in relative risk, which means a physician weighs them rather than refuses them.
| Tier | What it means in practice | Examples from the guidance |
|---|---|---|
| Severe | Generally discouraged from diving | Epilepsy, untreated symptomatic coronary artery disease, implanted defibrillator, open eardrum perforation, Meniere's disease, pregnancy |
| Relative | Decided case by case on the individual | Controlled hypertension, obesity, eustachian tube dysfunction, healed perforation, quiescent inflammatory bowel disease, anxiety disorder |
| Temporary | Rules out diving now, resolves later | Recent dehydration needing treatment, current chest infection, unhealed surgical sites, recent sinus surgery |
The short list of genuine stoppers
A small number of conditions are treated as absolute or near-absolute contraindications, and it is fairer to state them plainly than to leave people hoping. A diagnosis of epilepsy is considered an absolute contraindication to diving. A history of spontaneous pneumothorax will in most cases be absolute too, even after surgery intended to prevent recurrence, because procedures such as pleurodesis do not correct the underlying abnormality in the lung. An intraocular gas bubble rules out diving while it remains. On the cardiac side the guidance lists several diagnoses that render a candidate unsuitable, among them cardiomyopathy, congestive heart failure, moderate or worse pulmonary hypertension, long QT syndrome and other channelopathies, atrial septal defect and an implanted cardiac defibrillator.
Two qualifications belong with that list. Traumatic pneumothorax is treated quite differently from spontaneous, because the likelihood of a later spontaneous event is very low. And successful treatment can move someone out of the disqualified group entirely: the guidance gives the example of a candidate with coronary artery disease, including previous heart attack, who has been successfully revascularised, and who may be suitable if inducible ischaemia can be excluded and adequate exercise capacity demonstrated.
Why relative risk is the category that matters
Nearly every argument about fitness to dive is really an argument about how much a moderate increase in risk matters in a particular setting. The same relative risk reads differently on a house reef in Bali and on a crossing where help is a day away. This is where a good diving physician earns their fee, and it is also why a clearance letter that says a little about the diving you intend to do is worth more than a bare signature. A doctor who knows you are doing four dives a day for six days in current, a long way from a chamber, is assessing the right question.
The conditions guests ask us about most
These are the questions that arrive in our inbox, roughly in order of frequency. None of what follows replaces the assessment your own doctor will make, and the guidance itself is careful to say that the decision rests with the individual and their physician. What it can do is tell you what the conversation is likely to be about, so you arrive at the appointment with the right information rather than a blank look.
Can you scuba dive with asthma?
Often, yes, and the criteria are more specific than most people expect. The Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society and the British Thoracic Society both advise that asthmatics should not dive if they have wheeze brought on by exercise, cold or emotion. Those three triggers are the deciding factor, because all three are routine features of a dive: you swim hard against current, you get cold on a long safety stop, and the gas coming out of a cylinder is cold and dry by the time it reaches you.
People whose asthma is currently well controlled, who have normal lung function tests, and who pass an exercise test may dive. The guidance is explicit that a mildly obstructed spirometry tracing on its own is not a contraindication, provided there is no deterioration after exercise and the person performs well on the exercise test. What does rule someone out is a history of severe or unpredictable acute attacks. If you are cleared, you are expected to carry your usual inhalers and not to dive while you have symptoms suggesting a flare-up, which on a six day trip means being willing to sit out a day.
One practical note for booking: an exercise test takes arranging. This is the single most common reason a guest ends up scrambling, and it is entirely avoidable by starting early.
Can you scuba dive with diabetes?
Yes, within a framework. The baseline position in the guidance is that diving is generally contraindicated for people on insulin or certain oral medications, because a rapid drop in consciousness from hypoglycaemia underwater means drowning. The exception is large and well established: diving conducted according to the consensus guidelines for recreational diving with diabetes, agreed at a joint workshop between the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society and Divers Alert Network in 2005.
Those guidelines are specific, and worth reading in full if they apply to you. In outline, they ask for an age of at least eighteen, a delay after any change in treatment of three months for oral agents and a year after starting insulin, no episode of high or low blood sugar needing third-party help for at least a year, no history of hypoglycaemia unawareness, HbA1c of nine per cent or below measured within a month of assessment and at each annual review, and no significant secondary complications. Anyone over forty is additionally assessed for silent heart disease.
On a diving day the protocol is hands-on. Blood glucose should be at least 150 mg/dL, roughly 8.3 mmol/L, and stable or rising before entering the water, established with three tests at sixty minutes, thirty minutes and immediately before the dive. The dive is postponed if the reading is below that, or above about 300 mg/dL. Oral glucose is carried on every dive, glucagon is kept at the surface, and glucose is checked repeatedly for twelve to fifteen hours afterwards. The consensus also caps the diving itself at around thirty metres, sixty minutes, no mandatory decompression and no overhead environments.
That protocol is workable on a liveaboard, and it is much easier when the crew know about it in advance. Tell us at booking rather than at the first dive briefing.
Can you dive with high blood pressure or a heart condition?
Controlled hypertension sits in the relative risk tier, which means it is commonly accepted after assessment rather than automatically refused. Being on medication for it is not a disqualifier by itself. What the physician is looking for is the state of the arteries underneath, and whether your exercise capacity is adequate, which is why the over-45 box exists and why a stress test sometimes follows.
Established heart disease is a longer conversation and depends heavily on what was done about it. Several diagnoses are treated as unsuitable outright, listed earlier. Others become acceptable after successful treatment. Anyone with exertional chest pain, breathlessness, palpitations, unexplained fainting, a murmur, hypertension or a family history of premature cardiac death should be investigated before diving, ideally with a physician trained in diving medicine and possibly a cardiologist.
What about ear surgery, grommets and a burst eardrum?
This is where the answer separates sharply by anatomy. An open eardrum perforation, tube myringotomy, a history of stapedectomy, ossicular chain surgery or any inner ear surgery are all listed as severe risk. So is Meniere's disease, and so is a history of vestibular decompression sickness. The concern is straightforward: water reaching the middle ear, an inability to equalise safely, or a structural repair that can fail under pressure.
A healed perforation, a history of tympanoplasty or mastoidectomy, eustachian tube dysfunction, recurrent middle ear infections or sinusitis, and a deviated septum causing symptoms all sit in relative risk instead. Those are assessment questions, not refusals. The distinction between an open perforation and a healed one is the whole ball game, and it is a question for an ENT specialist rather than a dive operator.
Migraines, fainting and epilepsy
Epilepsy is the clearest no in diving medicine. A diagnosis of epilepsy is considered an absolute contraindication, and that position is not controversial. Blackouts or fainting within the last five years go on the form for the obvious reason, and a head injury that caused unconsciousness is assessed for the risk of a future seizure.
Migraine is more nuanced and more common. Recurring migraines in the past twelve months, or taking medication to prevent them, belongs on the form. The reason is not simply that a migraine underwater would be unpleasant. It is that conditions where neurological symptoms come and go, migraine with aura being the obvious example, can be genuinely difficult to tell apart from neurological decompression sickness. On a boat, that ambiguity is expensive: it can trigger an evacuation that turns out to have been unnecessary, or worse, it can lead someone to dismiss real symptoms as a familiar headache.
Recent surgery, eyes and teeth
Surgery in the last twelve months is a question on our form and on the industry one, and the reason is tissue that has not finished healing, plus any gas that a procedure may have left behind. Sinus surgery has a six month window, eye surgery three months, spinal surgery twelve. Unhealed oral surgery sites are listed in relative risk, as are full prosthodontic devices and a history of mid-face fracture, because you have to grip a regulator mouthpiece for an hour at a time and the mid-face contains air spaces that can rupture.
Dental work deserves a mention of its own because guests dismiss it. A temporary crown or a recent filling with a void under it can trap gas and cause real pain at depth. Getting dental work finished a few weeks before a trip rather than a few days before is a small piece of planning that saves a surprising number of ruined dives.
Weight, fitness and the six MET question
Question three on the form, the one about moderate exercise, is doing more work than its plain wording suggests. It asks whether you can walk 1.6 kilometres in fourteen minutes or swim 200 metres without resting. The underlying standard in the physician guidance is a capacity to sustain exercise at around six METs, which is roughly six times resting metabolic rate. That is a pragmatic expectation for a recreational diver, with the caveat that diving occasionally demands short bursts above it.
Obesity appears in the guidance as a relative risk on three grounds: it may predispose to decompression sickness, it can impair exercise tolerance, and it is a risk factor for coronary artery disease. That is a statement about physiology, not a dress code, and plenty of larger divers are perfectly fit by the six MET standard. The question that actually matters is whether you can swim hard for a few minutes when a current turns, because Indonesia will ask that of you sooner or later. Our guide to diving in currents in Indonesia is honest about how much of it there is.
Prescription medication
We ask about prescription medication separately because the drug is sometimes more relevant than the condition. Anything sedating is the obvious concern, since nitrogen narcosis compounds it at depth. Beta blockers can limit the heart rate response to exertion. Anticoagulants appear in the guidance in their own right, including platelet aggregation inhibitors, because bleeding into an ear or the inner ear after barotrauma is a worse event on an anticoagulant.
Seasickness medication belongs in this conversation too, and it is the one almost nobody declares. Most of the common options are sedating to some degree, and the week you take them is the week you are diving four times a day. We cover choosing between them in our guide to preventing seasickness on a liveaboard. Alcohol interacts with several of these and with dehydration generally, which our piece on drinking and diving goes into.
Getting cleared before you fly, not at the dock
Almost every genuine problem we see with medical forms is a timing problem rather than a health problem. The guest was always going to be cleared. They simply left it until the fortnight before departure, discovered their GP wanted a test that had a three week wait, and arrived with an incomplete sheet.
Who can sign it
The physician's evaluation form is completed by the doctor assessing you, and in most countries that can be your regular GP. For anything cardiac, pulmonary or neurological, a doctor with training in diving medicine is worth seeking out, and the guidance says so repeatedly. The difference is not seniority. It is that a diving physician knows what six METs means in the water, why cold air from a cylinder matters to an asthmatic, and why a healed perforation is a different question from an open one. A GP who has never assessed a diver may either refuse out of caution or sign without understanding the exposure, and both outcomes are unhelpful.
Divers Alert Network maintains referral lines and can point you toward physicians with the relevant training, which is usually the quickest route if your own practice draws a blank.
What to take to the appointment
Take the actual form, all three pages of it, rather than a description of it. Doctors assess against the physician's evaluation sheet, and handing over the participant questionnaire alone leaves them guessing at what is being asked. Take a short written summary of the diving you intend to do, and be concrete: number of dives a day, days in a row, expected depths, water temperature, presence of current, and how far the boat will be from a hospital and a chamber. That last detail changes assessments, and most divers never think to mention it.
If you have had a relevant test recently, bring the result rather than the recollection. Spirometry, a stress test, an echo, a recent HbA1c: any of these can save an entire round of referrals.
How far ahead to start
Six to eight weeks is comfortable for a straightforward case. Three months is sensible if you suspect you will need a specialist opinion, an exercise test or an ENT assessment, because those are the appointments with real waiting lists. Guests booking a trip more than a year out sometimes get their clearance immediately and then find it is stale by departure, so check whether your operator wants it dated within a particular window. We do not need it a year early. We need it before you dive.
Why concealing something is the worst available option
There is a checkbox at the end of our medical section confirming you answered sincerely, and it is not decoration. Quite apart from the safety argument, which should be sufficient on its own, there is a commercial one that guests underrate. Dive accident policies and travel insurance both tend to have exclusions for undisclosed pre-existing conditions. If you conceal a condition, dive, and then need a chamber, you may be uninsured for exactly the event you were insured against. Ordinary travel insurance frequently excludes diving injuries, chamber treatment and evacuation in any case, which is a separate trap and one we go into in our guide to decompression sickness on a liveaboard.
The honest version is also usually the easy one. The overwhelming majority of declared conditions result in clearance and an ordinary week of diving.
If you turn up without the paperwork
You will not be thrown off the boat. You will not be able to dive until it is sorted, which on a remote itinerary can mean not diving at all, because there is no clinic in the middle of the Banda Sea to produce a signature. In Labuan Bajo it is sometimes possible to see a doctor on the day, and on a Komodo itinerary that occasionally rescues a trip. Sometimes. It is a poor plan and an expensive one, and it converts a holiday you paid for into a week of snorkelling.
What we do with your form, and what to tell the crew
The form is not filed and forgotten. It shapes how the week is run for you, which is the part guests do not see and the reason it is worth filling in carefully.
When we ask, and what happens next
The medical questions sit inside the guest form you complete before the trip, alongside your certification details, emergency contacts and dive insurance information. If everything is a no, that is the end of it. If anything is a yes, our office will come back to you and ask for a physician's clearance, and the earlier that exchange happens the less stressful it is for everyone.
We also ask for your diving insurance details in the same form, including the policy number and the emergency contact number for the insurer. Direct bookings with us include diving insurance during the trip, subject to conditions, which covers rather more than most people assume but is not a substitute for travel insurance covering cancellation, baggage and non-diving medical problems.
Things worth telling the guides even when the form says no
A form is a blunt instrument and there are things it does not ask that are genuinely useful to a dive guide. Whether you are a slow equaliser and want to descend on the line rather than free descend. Whether you have one ear that always lags. Whether you are prone to anxiety in low visibility, or dislike being first in the water. Whether you are on seasickness medication and feel woolly on it. None of these are medical clearances. All of them change how a guide positions you in a group and how closely they watch you on a descent.
Cruise directors would rather hear these on day one than deduce them on day four. If you are new to multi-day diving and want a sense of how that first day is usually handled, our guide on whether beginners can do a liveaboard covers the shape of it.
Shaping the week rather than cancelling it
The outcome of a declared condition is very rarely all or nothing. Far more often it is a modified week. Shallower profiles on the first two days. Nitrox on air tables, which buys a wider margin, and which we explain in our guide to whether nitrox is worth it on a liveaboard. Sitting out the third dive rather than the fourth. Skipping the deeper sites while still doing the best of the reef. Diving three days of six rather than all six.
That flexibility exists because the alternative, a guest quietly pushing through a week they should not be diving, is the outcome everyone wants least. It is also why the eighteen hour rule at the end of the trip is worth planning around properly, which we cover in our guide to how long to wait before flying after diving.
Fill the form in honestly, fill it in early, and take it to a doctor who understands what you are about to do. That is the whole of it. The paperwork is a nuisance for about twenty minutes and it is the cheapest insurance on the trip.
