Recreational vs. Commercial Diving: When Your Skills Apply – And When They Don’t

You’ve taken a Search and Recovery course—great! That means you’ve learned valuable skills like using lift bags, search patterns, and reels. But before you dive in to retrieve lost items or offer to help someone recover something underwater, it’s important to understand the boundary between recreational diving and occupational (or commercial) diving.

Recreational diving includes any diving done for fun, training, or personal development. Even when you’re applying more advanced skills—like recovering a lost dive light or lifting a small object from the bottom—it’s still considered recreational as long as:

In other words, if you and a dive buddy are out practicing skills or helping each other out during a fun dive, that’s well within the scope of recreational training—even if you’re using your search and recovery skills.

The moment you’re asked to do a dive for someone else, on their behalf, or in exchange for compensation, things change.

Here are examples of activities that would typically be considered occupational or commercial diving:

Once a dive becomes “work,” Alberta’s Occupational Health & Safety (OH&S) diving regulations apply. These rules exist for good reason: commercial diving is higher risk, and it requires significant safety infrastructure to be done legally and safely.

In Alberta, any dive performed as part of employment or a business activity falls under OH&S legislation. This includes:

This isn’t overkill - it’s a safety net that has been developed after real-world diving accidents and fatalities.

If you're doing a recovery dive for someone you don’t know well, or someone is offering to pay you for the work, you need to ask: “Am I crossing the line into occupational diving?”

If the answer is yes, you're stepping into a regulated environment that requires a lot more than recreational dive training.

Your Search & Recovery course was designed to give you the tools to practice specific dive skills - searching, lifting, and problem-solving—in a recreational setting. 

These skills are perfect for:

It doesn't matter; even if your skills are excellent, you’re still operating without the legal protection and team support that commercial divers rely on.

We get it - divers are helpful people. It’s tempting to jump in when someone loses a phone, a drone, or a wedding ring. But when there’s real money, liability, or pressure involved, you have to think twice.

Helping a friend on a casual dive? Probably fine.
Getting paid to recover a stranger’s phone, or a boater's 10-hp outboard motor in a murky Alberta lake? That’s commercial/occupational diving.

Not only could you be breaking the law, but you could also be putting yourself and others at serious risk - without even realizing it.

If you’re interested in underwater work and want to make it part of your profession, that’s fantastic. Just make sure you follow the proper path:

You can also keep advancing your recreational diving safely by taking courses like:

These won't qualify you for commercial/occupational dive work; however, these will help build your capability and awareness within the scope of more challenging recreational diving, and will keep you safer and dive smarter. They are also good to have if you intend to take commercial dive courses. 

The Bottom Line
Search & Recovery is a great specialty course. It teaches real-world skills, and it’s a ton of fun to practice. But like any tool, it’s important to use it in the right context.

Just because you can dive, doesn’t mean you should dive in any situation.

If you’re doing it for fun, for yourself, or with a buddy, go for it. If you’re being asked to perform a job underwater - stop, think, and make sure you’re not stepping outside the law or your training.