Is this depth graph my dive?

Sometimes it's your recorded curve, and sometimes it's a standard illustration carrying your real numbers.

Sometimes. If your dive arrived with recorded depth readings, that curve is genuinely yours, and if it didn't, the graph is a standard illustration with your real numbers pinned to it: start time, max depth, and the time you surfaced.

We draw the illustration rather than an empty box because those three numbers are worth showing. It's a picture of a dive though, not a picture of your dive.

Which dives draw their own curve

  • FIT files, from Garmin, Suunto and other computers that export FIT
  • dive files that carry a depth reading per moment rather than one summary line: MacDive, Subsurface, UDDF, DL7, and the CSV and JSON exports that include the readings
  • Apple Watch dives, which reach us through Apple Health

Note: sometimes the readings in a file can't be pinned to one particular dive, or don't agree with the depth the dive itself reports. That dive gets the illustration instead. A curve from the wrong dive would be worse than no curve at all.

Which dives get the illustration

  • dives you logged by hand, since nothing was recording
  • Shearwater Cloud .db files and other SQLite logbooks, where the readings sit in the file in a form we can't read yet
  • dives that arrive from a connected account, such as Suunto
  • any export that carries dive summaries rather than readings

Suunto appears in both lists, which is not a mistake. A dive that arrives over your connected Suunto account comes to us as a summary, so it draws the illustration, while the same dive uploaded as a FIT file brings its readings with it and draws your curve.

When there's no graph at all

The graph needs a start time, a max depth and a duration, because those are the three labels on it. A dive missing any of the three shows no graph rather than a blank one, and filling the gap in brings it back.

Your friends' dives, and share cards

Open a friend's dive and you'll see the illustration, even when their own copy has a recorded curve. The curve travels with your logbook so it's there offline, and we don't ship a copy of everyone else's.

Share cards always use the illustration, on purpose. A share card is a postcard of a dive, not a record of it.

Can I read times off the curve?

A recorded curve is the shape of your dive rather than a timeline you can measure against a clock, so treat the depth at any given moment as close rather than exact. The one point that is exact is the deepest one, because we make sure it survives onto the graph.

Something look wrong on a dive you know was recorded? Tell us and we'll take a look.