7 Tips to Prevent Losing Your GoPro While Scuba Diving

Losing your GoPro while scuba diving is a quick way to put a damper on your dive day. Don’t ruin your vacation with these handy tips to prevent losing your beloved camera!

I’ve seen it a 100 times: eager divers losing their GoPro while exploring the underwater world. Pictures? Lost. Memories? Faded. The $400 you spent on the thing? Down the drain. It happens all too often.

And as a professional scuba diver in South Florida, I’m sick and tired of diving to the bottom of the ocean to search for lost cameras (although, it’s a fantastic opportunity to make extra tip money). But who wants that kind of stress?

This article will provide you with the most common reasons why divers lose their beloved action cameras, what you can do to prevent losing your GoPro in the first place, and if you do lose it, how you can help recover it before it’s lost at sea forever.

Top Reasons Why Divers Lose Their GoPro While Scuba Diving

After years of watching divers in their natural habitat, these are the most common reasons I’ve seen as to why divers lose their cameras:

1. Faulty Fasteners, Bands, or Clips. Sometimes the mechanism you use to secure the GoPro to yourself simply gives out. The fastener snaps, the wrist band withers away, or the clip malfunctions. I’ve seen all of the above.
2. Divers trying to do too much. Admittedly, I’m guilty of this myself every so often. Hunting lionfish, lobstering, or taking pictures with my GoPro. I can’t make up my mind on what I want to do, so I try to do all of them! The result? Reckless carelessness and lost equipment.
3. Diving beyond your limits. A cardinal sin in scuba but it happens. Diving beyond your limits inevitably results in panicked divers. You know what panicked divers do? Drop GoPro cameras.
4. The screw comes loose. I almost lost my camera because of this, the screw on the bottom of the camera actually came lose and dropped off my mount! Thankfully, I caught the GoPro before it plunged into the abyss!
5. Carelessness. And lastly, careless divers tend to do stupid things – like drop cameras.

How to Prevent Losing Your GoPro While Scuba Diving

After seeing so many cameras sink to the bottom of the ocean or drift away in the current, these are my best tips to prevent any of it from happening in the first place.

1. Diversify.

Many GoPro accessories for scuba diving use bands, fasteners, or a variety of clips to secure your camera. Make sure you diversify these. Meaning, don’t rely on one single mode of attachment. If you use a band, add an extra clip somewhere. If you use a clip, add an extra fastener. Just a fastener? It’s time to add a band. You get the picture.

Obviously, this is dependent on the type of handle you’re using with your GoPro. Here are a few that we think work well:

2. Dive With a Clear Objective.

Per your Open Water training, you should be doing this anyway. But if you’re like me, this may get lost from time to time. It happens.

However, both you and I know we need to be diving with a clear objective. Don’t try to do too much during your dive! If you’re hunting lionfish, ONLY hunt lionfish. If you’re trying to catch lobster, ONLY catch lobster. The same goes for taking pictures and video on your GoPro.

Tunnel vision is a real thing. And it’s even more prominent when you’re hunting for dinner. That GoPro loosely wrapped around your wrist is the LAST thing you’re thinking about while bagging your 3rd lobster of the day.

3. Know Your Limits.

Just the other day while diving South Florida’s largest artificial reef, Tenneco Towers, we had a diver go in full panic mode. Seeing 100 feet on her dive computer was just too much and she started shooting for the surface. Not good.

Now, a panicked diver clearly isn’t concerned of their own safety, let alone the safety of their GoPro. So, inevitably, she dropped it.

Again, per your Open Water training, dive within your limits and bad things won’t happen!

PSA: we had a safety diver in place who calmed her and steadied her ascent. She was okay! Oh, AND I found the camera for her on the bottom at 130 feet!

4. Freshwater Rinse.

As I mentioned earlier, the small screw which fastens your GoPro to the slider attachment can be a real problem. Particularly if you never freshwater rinse and dry it! Why?

1. The screw can rust or corrode from the saltwater, losing the threading which holds it in place.
2. Or the epoxy holding the plastic turn-dial to the metal screw can erode away separating the two. Thus, rendering your GoPro free from its bondage when you least expect it!

This happened to me. The screw popped loose and my GoPro slowly fluttered downward. Luckily, I was able to catch it before it really went goodbye forever.

Double and trip check your screws and give them a separate freshwater rinse. In the long run, the threading will stay strong and the epoxy will hold firm.

5. Accessorize like a Pro.

Amazingly, I’ve witnessed people using no accessories for their GoPro – they merely held onto the camera itself. I was horrified.

I can’t think of a better way to lose your GoPro than that. That’s why we wrote a separate article so you can accessorize your GoPro in the best way possible for scuba diving. Check it out and let us know what you think!

And if you do end up losing your GoPro…

It happened. You dropped it and you’re freaking out. Where in the hell did that thing go? It was just wrapped around my wrist.

Well, fear not. Not all hope is lost yet.

Believe it or not, I’ve recovered quite a few GoPros in my day. And I’ve always been unable to find quite a few too. So if you DO lose it, your chance of recovery can be dramatically increased with these two tips:

6. Sink or swim.

Some GoPro handles sink. Some GoPro handles float. Which one is best for you? Well, that’s entirely dependent on the dive site you’re exploring.

If you’re diving a shipwreck that rests in depths beyond recreational limits, or a wall of coral along a continental shelf that drops off thousands of feet below you, you may want something that floats. After all, if you were to drop it, your GoPro is now the newest edition to Davy Jones’ Locker.

Additionally, if you’re drift diving, float handles work well as the camera will ascend and bob at the surface near the boat that’s following you.

On the flip side, if you’re diving a relatively shallow reef, or a stationary dive, a camera handle that sinks may be your best bet. You or your divemaster can conduct search and rescue patterns to recover the lost goods!

We recommend owning one of each so you can switch handles depending on the type of dive! However, in most cases, a floating handle is more beneficial and easier to recover.

7. Add some flair.

However, the biggest reason I’ve recovered some GoPro’s are the colorful flair divers add to their camera! Bright colors and unique features make the GoPro standout in a sea of coral, sand, and stone. One in particular that I remember was this pistol grip – a bright blue feature that’s SUPER hard to miss underwater.

However, any vibrantly colored accessory should do the trick!

And if all is truly lost…

You may just have to invest in the latest GoPro model to replace your outdated one. Tough stuff, but it was probably time to upgrade anyway.

Today, the latest and greatest model on the market for scuba diving is the HERO9 Black. With 5k capabilities and a front LCD screen, your underwater selfie game will step up 10-fold.

Just try not to lose this one…