Scuba Diving Merit Badge

Six requirements, and two of them are other qualifications

This is the shortest badge on this site. It is not the easiest, and the two facts are unrelated.

• Requirement 2 is the Swimming merit badge. A whole badge, with its own counselor, its own blue card and its own swim tests, and it gates requirements 3, 4, 5 and 6.
• Requirement 4 is an Open Water Diver certification, earned from a scuba organisation that the Scouting America scuba policy recognises. That is a commercial qualification taught outside Scouting, by an instructor who is not your merit badge counselor, to a syllabus that is not this one. What is left: requirement 1's first aid and CPR, requirement 3's discussion of the Scuba Diver's Code, requirement 5 on aquatic ecosystems and requirement 6 on careers: is four requirements of conversation and research.

Requirement 1 is outside the gate. Start there.

Requirement 2 says "before completing requirements 3 through 6". It names 3 through 6 and stops, so requirement 1 is not behind it.

That is the useful thing on this page. First aid for diving injuries and a CPR demonstration are exactly what you can be getting on with while the Swimming merit badge is still running, and they are not trivial: requirement 1(a)'s list runs from hypothermia and squeezes through decompression illness and nitrogen narcosis to injuries from aquatic life.

Before you count on requirement 4, go and read the policy

Requirement 4 does not say "learn to dive". It says earn a certification from an organisation recognised by the Scouting America scuba policy. Which organisations those are, and what conditions Scouting America attaches, are set by that policy and not by the badge page, so this page does not restate them, and neither should anyone else's summary.

Check the policy, and check it with the certifying organisation, before you book anything. A certification from an organisation the policy does not recognise does not satisfy requirement 4.

There is nothing to choose on this badge

No requirement here offers an option, an alternative, or a "do two of the following". Every part applies to everybody. That is rare enough to be worth saying, and it is why this page asks you no questions when most others do.

What this page is

The Scuba Diving merit badge, laid out so that its two large external dependencies are visible before you start counting requirements. It is not a copy of the requirements: each step is a short label with a link to the official requirements, which are what actually governs and which change from year to year.