Hello and welcome to my blog Tips for Divers.

My name is Stefan, I am the author of this blog: Born in 1983 and I am living with my family in a suburb of the city Karlsruhe in Germany. Next to this blog I am working as an employee.

My scuba diving career started in the year 2000 with the beginner’s course – VDTL * diver. I did this course with the dive club of the „Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe“ (research facility). Through the years I did all my following courses with the instructors of this dive club. The highlight of this career as a recreational diver was an eight week internship at a dive center on Fuerteventura, Spain. During this internship I became „assistant dive instructor“ within the organisation VDTL (Verband Deutscher Tauchlehrer).

In 2004/ 2005 I got in contact with the DIR-philosophy of scuba diving and the organization Global Underwater Explorers (GUE). The way how these boys and girls were diving was fascinating for me! After a lot of internet research and buying new gear I went to the northern part of Germany to do my GUE Fundamentals course. And even I did several hundert dives within the years before, I learned so much in this course!

In 2012 I became a Tech Diver. I participated in a GUE Tec 1 course in Croatia.

At the moment I assist in the recreational education of my dive club and try to do as many Tec 1 dives as possible. There are sooooo many wrecks to visit…

About the blog

The blog Tips for Divers was set up in March 2013. It is the English version of the German blog „Tipps für Taucher“. The German blog was set up in January 2011. During this period of time I was unemployed and looking for a new job. But next to writing applications I got really bored during the day. The internet was a very fascinating thing for me. And therefore I always wanted to have my own website.

The idea was to collect all the tips and tricks that can be found in the internet about improving or repairing scuba equipment. Esepcially in the field of DIR equipment you could find tips in the internet. Most of the time you had to search these articles between reports of expeditions or travel stories. There has been no website that focussed on equipment. I love to work with the scuba equipment, set it up and improve things. Therefore I decided to set up „Tipps für Taucher“ as a blog about equipment and how-tos.

My goal is to describe the topics as deatilled as possible. Next to the text the pictures are a very important part of each blog post.

After the German blog got more and more visitors, people from all over the world started to read the blog posts … and – of course – where asking for an English translation. I decided to start Tips for Divers in 2013. And especially on Facebook the blog got a huge amount of fans within just a few weeks.

Some statistics (January 2018)

Personally I am really excited, how many people from all over the world read the blog posts and tips! Even if 3 does not have as many blog posts online as its German counter part, the blog is visited quite well.

In January 2017 it had 3.010 visitors and 8.230 page views.

Tips for Divers has more than 15.000 followers on Facebook.

Future projects

In the past few months the blog was updated in a very irregular way. I really would like to post regular new posts, and at the moment I am quite confident that this will work. For my motivation I did a little list on things I would like to improve with Tips for Divers:

The following projects I would like to start for the blog:

• Frequent updates: My goal is to publish content on a more regular basis. The German blog has so much content that „just“ has to be translated. One update per month is my goal.
• Movies: Next to the how-to blog posts I would like to work much more with videos. Personally I am a youtube junkie. I would like to add one video to every blog post.
• Ebook: The ebook about stage tanks has been published in summer 2016. At the moment it is just available on itunes. I aim to upload it to 1-2 other platforms so that it will be available also for people how do not use Apple products.
• Go doving: And finally my personal goal: I want to do a lot more dives. My bucket list is so long. And I really want to see all of these destinations. The baseline was set in May 2017 with a wreck week in Protofino, Italy.

This was a brief „about me“. Thanks for reading and following Tips for Divers. If you have any questions or feedback please leave a comment or send me an email through the contact form!

Save diving!

Stefan Franck

(January)