We’ve had several prescription dive masks made over the years, but now as we’ve gotten a bit older the old ‘bifocal’ issue has come into play. We kept wondering how all those other divers were getting pictures of small nudibranchs and critters, but we were barely able to see anything up close!
Well, it was time to address this.
We found a place called SeaVision that makes their own lenses and can make bifocal masks. While they make their own masks also, we were hesitant to buy a mask without trying it, so we opted to get masks and send them in for their BYOM (bring your own mask) program.
Choosing a prescription mask
The first step for selecting any prescription mask it to choose a mask that you are comfortable in. You don’t want to spend a lot of money on lenses just to find out that the mask will leak. We recommend trying the mask first and being sure you’re comfortable with it. There are many shapes of masks that work for different face sizes and types.
Type of lenses and skirts
There are also single lens masks and dual lens masks. For SeaVision, they only work with the dual lens dive masks for now. We think the dual lens may be stronger too, maybe we’re just used to it. There are also full-face masks with built-in regulators but maybe we’re just old school and prefer the traditional “squeeze the nose to equalize” masks.
We also saw masks with clear skirts and dark skirts. We’ve always preferred a dark skirt so that there is no distracting light affecting the vision. Like looking out the window from a dark room instead of getting reflections.
Dive mask lens material. You can find stick on lenses that you can adhere to your own mask. Some of these are relatively cheap but we’ve heard from other divers that they can come loose and fall off. We’ve had prior lenses made for us where they glued in a plastic lens over the existing mask. These generally worked well for us for distance viewing and we’d look through the clear mask under the glued-on lenses to read gauges or see small critters up close (that is, before we needed bifocals!).
SeaVision actually replaces the lenses in the mask with their own hardened plastic optical lenses made in-house to the prescription. We heard they can’t do all prescriptions (so check first) but we were approved for both our bifocal prescriptions that we got from our optometrist. Be sure to include the pupillary distance. Our initial prescription didn’t have that, and we had to go back to ask for it.
They also offer magenta and yellow lenses, but our research suggested these might block some light like sunglasses do, and we opted for clear lenses for the best all-around use.
Conclusion
So, we went ahead and sent in our masks and prescriptions and tried them out at our local favorite dive site, the Blue Heron Bridge. Now that we used them on a few dives we are happy to have gone ahead with the purchase. At first the illusion that a circular section of the sea floor appeared to rise like a mound as we looked down to find critters was pretty strange, but we’re getting accustomed to that.
We expect our new prescription masks will come in handy for some of the future dive trips on our radar and of course for local diving too. It’s great to finally see more of the small stuff we love.
While we opted for the SeaVision masks, there are other manufacturers and opticians that can also make prescription masks. If you have experience with other manufacturers, let us know.