In this article, we demonstrate an experimental underwater wireless optical communication (UWOC) system in the presence of air bubbles and weak turbulence for varying turbidity levels of the aquatic optical medium. The major limiting factors of the UWOC system are: absorption, scattering, and beam fluctuations; these effects can be mitigated by employing transmitter/receiver diversity schemes and channel codes. In this proposed system, we have employed receiver diversity (selection combining (SC), majority logic combining (MLC), and equal gain combining (EGC)) techniques augmented with Bose‐Chaudhuri‐Hocquenghem (BCH) codes to improve the performance of on‐off keying modulated UWOC system. The bit error rate (BER) expressions are derived for the proposed system and results are validated using analytic and experimental means. The results show that the proposed system, that is, the receiver employing SC, MLC, and EGC receiver combining techniques augmented with the BCH code provides a transmit power gain of 4, 6, and 8 dB respectively, when compared with the uncoded single‐input single‐output system, at a BER of 10⁻⁵.