AmbergrisCaye.com Home Forums The Cayes Ambergris Caye Snorkel Equipment

I use disposable contact lenses while diving. I take an extra set just in case.

Blue Hole Divers and FantaSea both rent prescription masks for a nominal fee (about $5)

Thanks for all the feedback, some good ideas there.

Babarak, what do you mean by prescription masks?

Can you wear them with glasses on?

The prescription masks are instead of glasses. Won't be your exact prescription unless you have one made for you for big bucks. The ones they rent are more like small, med, large correction so not exact but makes a HUGE difference snorkeling.

Take a copy of your prescription with you and they can come fairly close as they use preground diopters (usually half diopters from (-1.0 up to -8.0) that drop in and replace the existing lenses in the mask. Kind of like using the reading glasses you can buy at Walmart, etc., close but not perfect. They can play around with lenses and get pretty close so you can actually halfway see. Just remember the view will be different on land versus water due to the whole refraction of light and water. The cost to buy a mask like this runs around $160 versus the rental cost if you are just going to use it once or twice.

That's true about the cost. I paid $50 for my mask and $120 to have two custom lenses bonded to the inside with optical adhesive. I can't get away with the diopter inserts because my astigmatism is so bad. The good thing though is that when I lost my prescription glasses in BVI last year on a day trip, I was able to drive my Jeep back to my place that night using my goggles. Yep, I looked like a total fool, but it got me home If you wear contacts, you could try using them, but if you flood the mask, your contacts are history.

The Protech gear shop on Front Street sells stick-on lenses in various prescriptions for far-sighted people. Glass ones that are cemented in permanently or plastic ones that hold in by surface tension and can be removed and re-used. For near sight you have to use concave-faced replacement lenses, available only for (some) masks which take two lenses. Protech is getting a few with typical simple prescriptions for rental at its dive center but doesn't expect to sell them as there is too wide a range of possible prescriptions. Reef Divers had three such masks but I have no idea what happened to them.

The option of wearing contact lenses can work, but if you get water in your mask you may lose a lens, or at least get floating debris/salt behind it. OK as a stop-gap but not an idealsolution.

If you have near sight there really isn't any sensible option to buying a two-lens mask which fits properly and then getting prescription lenses made for it. Expect to pay (in the US) somewhere between $100 and $150. It's worth it - think how much your holiday costs you (flights, hotel, diving/snorkelling, etc) and think how much less pleasure you will have if you can't see properly.

I dove for years with disposable soft contact lenses (until I had lasik). I never lost a one, though there were a few times that I thought I had done so.

This most often occurred after surfacing and removing my mask on the boat. I'd have a bit of water in my eyes and my vision would be blurry. It would turn out that my contact had floated a bit off the center of my eye. Lightly dabbing my closed eye with a towel and then blinking would easily recenter it.

Certainly, if you are going to go with contacts, use disposables and make sure that you have a few spare pairs with you. That way, if you do lose one, it is not a catastrophy.

Many of my diver buds, also dive with disposable contacts.

We snorkeled with hard lens contacts.

Eyes intact, no difficulties with contacts.

We don't dive, can't add anything to that