Best GoPro Dive Accessories for UK Diving (2026)

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A GoPro on a dive changes how you remember the water. You surface, open the app, and there it all is again in sharp 5K: the wreck coming out of the gloom, the seal that buzzed you on the safety stop, the shoal that swallowed your buddy for a second. The camera is the easy part. The kit around it is what decides whether that footage is worth keeping, and the accessory that matters more than any other is a proper dive housing. Get the FitStill 60m housing and a red filter and you have covered most of what makes underwater footage look good, for less than the cost of a decent regulator service. If I could give one piece of advice to a diver filming with a GoPro, I'd tell them to sort the housing before anything else.

The short answer: the accessory that actually lets a GoPro dive is the housing. A HERO13 is only rated to 10m on its own, so a 60m dive housing is the difference between snorkelling and diving. After that, a red filter to bring the colour back, and a floating grip so one slip doesn't cost you the whole camera.

Quick Picks

Why These Picks

I've spent a long time reading through what divers actually complain about with GoPro footage, and it is almost never the camera. It is a housing that fogged on the descent, colour that went grey at 15 metres, or a camera swinging around on a mask strap until the footage is unwatchable. Every pick here fixes one of those specific problems. They are budget accessories rather than boutique rigs, because for recreational UK diving the expensive stuff is rarely worth it. If a thing on this list doesn't solve a real problem, it doesn't earn a place in your kit bag. My pick, if you only buy one thing to start with, is the housing, and I'd recommend it to any diver filming underwater.

The Kit at a Glance

One thing to be clear about first. These are accessories for a camera you already own or are about to buy. If you haven't settled on the camera itself, most UK divers land on the GoPro HERO13, and I go through the alternatives in the underwater camera guide for UK diving. Everything below assumes a GoPro or GoPro-shaped action camera, because that is what the vast majority of divers are actually filming with.

The Dive Housing: The One That Actually Matters

Here is the thing most people get wrong. They see "waterproof to 10m" on the GoPro box and assume it will handle a dive. It won't. Ten metres is the top of the water column. Recreational diving routinely takes you to 18, 25, sometimes 30 metres, and the bare camera is not rated for it. Push it past its limit and the first you know about it is water behind the lens and a dead camera. The housing is not an optional upgrade. It is the part that makes the camera a dive camera at all.

The FitStill case is rated to 60m, which is well past anything you will do on a recreational ticket, and it fits the HERO13 all the way back to the HERO9. That depth headroom matters even if you never go deep, because a housing rated way beyond your working depth is a housing you never have to think about. It has a slot at the front for a clip-in colour filter, which is the next pick, and the buttons pass through so you can still start and stop recording with gloves on.

Is it GoPro's own housing? No, and that is worth saying plainly. GoPro's official dive housing exists and it is a little slicker, but it costs several times as much and the third-party FitStill does the same job for the money you would rather spend on gas fills. The honest trade-off is that the buttons are stiffer than the bare camera, and in cold British water it will fog unless you drop an anti-fog insert inside, which is a problem I come back to below. For the price, that is a trade worth making every time.

The Red Filter: Getting the Colour Back

Water is a colour filter you cannot switch off. Red light disappears first, then orange, and by the time you are at 15 metres an uncorrected clip is a wash of blue-green with all the life drained out of it. People blame the camera. It isn't the camera. It is physics, and the fix is a piece of tinted acrylic that clips over the housing port.

A red filter puts the warm end of the spectrum back, and the difference on a reef or a wreck at depth is night and day. Grey, flat footage becomes footage with actual colour in it. The one rule that trips people up: a dive filter is cut for a specific housing, and they are not interchangeable. This FitStill filter is made for the FitStill housing above, so buy them as a pair. A filter cut for GoPro's official housing will not sit right on a third-party case, and a loose filter at depth is a filter you will lose.

A UK-specific note. British water is often green rather than tropical blue, and in the greenest inland sites a straight red filter can overcook things. Some divers prefer a magenta or dedicated green-water filter for quarries and murky vis. For sea diving around the coast, red is the right default. And do take it off in the shallows, because above about 8 metres there is still plenty of natural red and the filter will leave everything looking orange and strange. If you want to see what a difference light and colour correction make across different cameras, the underwater camera guide covers it in more depth.

A Tray and Handle: Steadier Shots and a Place for a Light

The single biggest jump in quality most divers can make, after the housing and filter, is holding the camera properly. A GoPro in your hand or clipped to your mask moves every time you do. Turn to check your gauge and the footage lurches. A tray gives you a stable platform, a grip to hold, and, crucially, an arm to mount a light on.

The ORCATORCH H02 is aluminium rather than flimsy plastic, and it gives you something solid to hold with cold or gloved hands, which matters more than it sounds when your fingers stop working properly on a February dive. Framing becomes deliberate instead of accidental. And when you are ready to add a video light, the accessory arm is already there waiting for it. That last point is the real reason to buy a tray: a filter recovers colour that natural light still contains, but on a dim UK wreck or a deep wall in poor vis there is no red left to recover, and only a light fixes that. If you are weighing up lights, I go through the options in the dive torch guide.

Honestly, the case against a tray comes down to bulk. It is another thing to pack, another thing to rinse, and for pure point-of-view diving where you just want the camera pointing forward, it is overkill. If you film handheld and never plan to add a light, skip it and put the money towards the filter and a spare battery instead. But if you are starting to care about how the footage looks rather than just capturing it, this is the accessory that moves the needle.

The Floating Grip: The Cheapest Insurance There Is

Somewhere on every popular dive site is a GoPro sitting on the bottom, dropped by someone who fumbled it on a descent or a current. It costs a few pounds to make sure it is never yours.

A floating hand grip does two jobs. It gives you a comfortable, non-slip handle, and if the camera ever slips out of your hand it floats to the surface instead of vanishing into the blue. The bright colour makes it easy to spot on a boat deck or in a kit bag too. For the price, there is no reason not to have one. The only thing to be aware of is that it adds buoyancy you have to manage: on a descent the camera wants to float, so clip it off or tuck it away until you are down. On a drift dive that buoyancy can catch the current a little. Small prices for never watching your camera sink.

Anti-Fog Inserts: The Fix Nobody Mentions

You do everything right, seal the camera in its housing on a warm boat, drop into cold water, and by five metres the inside of the port has fogged into a grey haze that ruins the whole dive's footage. This is the most common way a dive gets filmed through a fog, and almost nobody warns you about it.

It is not a leak. It is condensation. Warm, slightly humid air gets sealed inside the housing, then the cold water chills the port and the moisture condenses on the inside of the glass where you cannot wipe it. Anti-fog inserts are small reusable strips that sit inside the housing and soak up that moisture before it can fog. You dry them out between trips and reuse them for a season. They cost almost nothing, they take five seconds to drop in, and they solve a problem that is otherwise infuriating. If you dive UK water, where the warm-camera-cold-water gap is large, treat them as essential rather than optional.

In What Order to Buy It

You do not need all of this at once, and buying it in the wrong order wastes money. Here is the sequence that makes sense.

Start with the housing. Until you have it, the camera cannot dive safely, so nothing else on this list is any use. It is also the single most expensive item, so get it out of the way first and dive within the camera's shallow limit until it arrives if you have to.

Buy the filter at the same time as the housing, or immediately after. The two work as a pair, and there is no point owning a housing that goes to 60m if everything you film past 10m comes back grey. Order them together so you know the filter fits.

Add the floating grip and the anti-fog inserts next, because together they cost very little and each one prevents a specific disaster: a sunk camera and a fogged dive. There is no reason to delay two accessories this cheap.

Leave the tray and any video light until last. They are the biggest jump in quality, but they are also the biggest jump in cost and bulk, and you want to know how you actually dive with the camera before you commit to a full rig. Plenty of divers are perfectly happy and never buy them. Get the first four sorted, dive with them for a season, and you will know exactly whether a tray and a light are worth it for the diving you actually do.

Getting Footage Worth Keeping

The kit only takes you so far. The rest is a handful of habits that separate footage you keep from footage you scroll past.

Get close. This is the one that matters most. Water robs colour and sharpness with every metre between you and your subject, so the closer you are, the better everything looks, filter or no filter. A fish filling half the frame from a metre away beats the same fish as a speck from five metres, every time.

Shoot slightly upward. Angling the camera up towards the surface puts natural light behind your subject and gives you a brighter, more three-dimensional shot than shooting down into the dark. It also catches the sunlight coming through the water, which is where a lot of the atmosphere in good dive footage comes from.

Hold it steady and move slowly. The camera exaggerates every twitch. Slow, smooth movements, and pausing on a subject for a few seconds rather than sweeping past it, give you clips you can actually use. Count three seconds on anything worth filming before you move on.

Film more than you think you need. Storage is cheap and dives are not repeatable. Roll on the descent, the safety stop, your buddy kitting up on the boat, all of it. You cut it down later, but you cannot film a moment that has already passed.

When You Outgrow the Basics

Once the housing, filter, floaty, and anti-fog are second nature, there are two upgrades worth knowing about, and one that usually is not.

A video light is the big one. A filter recovers colour that natural light still holds, but past a certain depth, or inside a wreck, or on a gloomy day in poor vis, there simply is no red left in the water to recover. Only artificial light brings it back, and the difference on a UK wreck at 30 metres is dramatic. A light mounts straight onto the tray arm, which is the main reason the tray is worth having. I go through what actually works in the dive torch and video light guide, because a torch built for navigation and a light built for filming are not the same tool.

A dome port is the niche one. It sits over the lens and lets you shoot those half-in, half-out shots where you see the reef below and the boat above in a single frame. They look fantastic, but they are fiddly, bulky, and only really pay off if you are chasing that specific shot. Most divers never need one.

And the thing that usually is not worth it: a second, fancier camera. Divers convince themselves the footage would be better with a more expensive body, when the honest answer is nearly always that better technique, a light, and getting closer would do far more than new hardware. Spend on the accessories and the habits before you spend on another camera.

What to Avoid

Phone-pouch "waterproof" cases. The zip-lock and single-gasket pouches sold for phones and small cameras look like dive housings and share almost nothing with them. They are rated for splashes and shallow pool use, not the pressure at 20 metres, and they flood. Divers have killed flagship phones and cameras trusting them at depth. If it does not state a proper depth rating in metres and use a hard shell with a locking latch, it is not a dive housing.

Making a mask-strap mount your only mount. A mount that clips to your mask strap gives a true point-of-view angle, and it is tempting because it is cheap and hands-free. The trap is that the footage swings wildly every time you turn your head to check a gauge or your buddy, and hours of it become unwatchable. As an occasional angle it is fine. As your main setup it will disappoint you. A tray gives you far more usable footage.

Mismatched filters. Buying a red filter cut for a different housing than the one you own is a guaranteed way to end up with a filter that will not clip on, or one that falls off at depth. Match the filter to the housing, every time.

Skipping the filter and then wondering. People buy the camera and the housing, shoot a reef at 18 metres, and are baffled that it looks grey and lifeless. That is the missing filter, not a bad camera. It is the cheapest fix on this whole list, so do not leave it out.

What to Look For

If you are building a kit from scratch, these are the things that actually matter, in order.

Depth rating first. A dive housing should be rated well beyond your working depth. Sixty metres is the sensible standard: it covers every recreational dive with a huge margin, so the housing never becomes the limiting factor. Anything rated to only 10 or 20 metres is barely more than the bare camera and not worth the outlay.

Housing and filter as a matched pair. This is the one people get wrong. Filters are cut to fit a specific housing's port, so buy them together and from the same maker. A universal-looking filter that "fits most GoPros" usually fits none of them well.

Buoyancy and trim. Every accessory you bolt on changes how the rig sits in the water. A floating grip makes it want to rise, a metal tray makes it want to sink. Neither is a problem once you know about it, but think about how you will carry and hold the whole thing, not just the camera.

A standard mount ecosystem. GoPro's two-finger and three-finger mount system is the universal standard, and almost every tray, grip, and mount uses it. Staying inside that ecosystem means everything clips to everything else. Own something with a proprietary mount and you are locked into one brand's accessories.

Battery and cold. Cold UK water flattens action-camera batteries fast, and a fogged, dead camera on the second dive of the day is a miserable thing. Carry at least one spare battery, keep it warm on the boat, and swap it between dives. This is not an accessory so much as a habit, but it saves more dives than anything else here.

Care after salt. Salt water is hard on seals and hinges. Rinse the housing closed in fresh water after every sea dive, let it dry before you open it, and check the main O-ring for grit before each trip. Five minutes of care is the difference between a housing that lasts years and one that floods.

Which of these you prioritise depends on how you dive. A holiday diver filming reefs needs the housing, filter, floaty, and anti-fog and little else. A UK club diver working wrecks in poor vis will get more from adding a tray and a light than from any camera upgrade. Where do you actually dive, and what have you been missing in the footage you already have?

What I'd Buy Today

If I were kitting out a GoPro for UK diving tomorrow, I would start with the FitStill 60m housing and its matching red filter, add a floating grip for a few pounds, and drop an anti-fog insert into the housing before every dive. That is the whole kit for most divers, and it is the line between footage you delete and footage you actually show people. Get the FitStill 60m housing on Amazon and build out from there. If money is tight this month, the housing and a floating grip alone will get you diving safely with the camera, and you can add the colour later.

Sort the kit once and you stop thinking about it. You drop in, the housing does its job, the colour holds, the port stays clear, and you spend the dive actually diving instead of nursing the camera. Then you get back on the boat, open the app, and watch the whole thing again while it is still dripping. That is the point of filming a dive, and the right kit is what gets you there.

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