IN 14 DIVE TRIPS TO BONAIRE OVER THE PAST 25 YEARS, one thing was clearly fixed in my mind: you didn’t waste boat dives on sites that were accessible from shore. Like several of my favorites, Old Blue (now called Tolo) and Oil Slick Leap. On my 15th visit in early January, I had a revelation, and perhaps a lesson in looking at things differently. As I’ve gotten older, I realized I had to cut back on
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MY POST IN THE ORIGINS SECTION, “The Far Side of the World: Geohistory & the Triangle of Diversity,” helps explain why we in the U.S. pay much more money and travel much longer distances to dive in the Pacific rather than the Atlantic/ Caribbean. ICE AGE EXTINCTIONS At one time ocean life was uniformly distributed worldwide along the Equator, but the movements of continents and the rise and fall of sea level ensured that many
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IN THE WATERS AROUND BIMINI and the chain of small cays stretching southward, the sea bottom is mostly sand, punctuated by coral heads large and small and dive sites with names like “Bull Run,” “Krispy Kreme” and “Orange Cay.” And “The Strip,” an amazing dive. A low wedge of coral in the midst of the sand, about 200 feet long and 25 feet wide, it overflows with fishes in the daytime. At night, the fishes are mostly
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WHILE THE FLORIDA GULF COAST HAS BEEN PART OF MY LIFE FOREVER, I’ve only been in the Florida Keys for one brief visit and diving my way down them has long been on my Bucket List. The Juliet, my favorite liveaboard ever, sailed down the Keys in mid-May, from Miami to Key West and I went with it. It was a mixed trip – I can never say enough good things about the Juliet’s terrific, and terrifically attentive,
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DIVING FLOWER GARDEN BANKS NATIONAL MARINE SANCTUARY, is a spectacular experience, one of the U.S.’s under-appreciated gems. A pair of totally underwater salt domes in the Gulf of Mexico, about 100 miles off the Texas/Louisiana coast, would seem an unlikely place to find a rich coral reef. But as a two-day liveaboard boat dive, it’s a relatively accessible dive destination for those of us in Texas with a pressing need to get underwater in an
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