Coral Reef Travel

Although scuba diving, dancing and riding a bicycle built for two can each be done alone, the joy of sharing these activities is half the fun.

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Unlike dive guides, you don’t do it every day, yet you still must deal with the highly specialized skills and gear that make diving a challenge. The result is predictable: sometimes all divers, even dive magazine editors, do dumb things. Here are 27 of them.

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As a former cold-water diver in California, I wore full wetsuits with a hood, gloves and knee pads for protection from the sharp edges of the rocky marine terrain. When I moved to the Caribbean as a dive professional, I considered coral reef diving “sissy,” and thought to myself, I’ll show these local guys a thing or two about real diving!

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Behind the myths and misconceptions, it’s simply a gas. Here’s your complete guide to what you’ll be breathing tomorrow and where to breathe it.

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You’ve crossed the equator and the International Dateline and dived in three oceans and every mudhole from Maine to Monterey. But unless you’ve caught these 13 acts, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

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Explorers of the deep have always had the deck stacked against them. Society has always deemed “up” to be a very good thing and “down” to be something quite awful. The ancient Greeks celebrated an ethereal kingdom of nectar-sipping gods perched high on Mount Olympus, but trembled at the thought of Hades lurking in his deep, subterranean torture chamber. These prejudices remain with us today. Catch Jimmy Swaggart on a Sunday morning–redemption awaits the righteous high in heaven; teeth-gnashing awaits sinners in Lucifer’s deep inferno.

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As marine life photographers and naturalists, we constantly search for hidden places that serve as alternate realities to the familiar world of coral reefs and blue water, places where land meets the sea, where different environments merge, where strange and supremely adaptive life-forms flourish.

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Three great white sharks circled our cage. As a 16-footer brushed the thin steel wire, I sucked hard on my hookah’s regulator. Nothing. No air. No choice. I clambered up the 10-foot cage wall to the window above. As I stood on the cage’s top and reached for the boat, I felt a great white sniff my boot.

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Here off Congo Cay, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, I seem to be having an awfully good day. There’s a pack of tarpon cutting up massive waves of silversides, and we just passed a grizzled hawksbill that lumbered by this close. And we started this dive by settling down in the sand to stroke the leathery back of a massive southern stingray. That’s magical stuff to any diver, new or old, so my first word of advice to any diver considering the Virgin Islands: Don’t believe the hype about this being a “beginner’s destination” not worthy of receiving the bubbles of the hard-core nitrogen junkie.  (more…)

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This regular column presents the anatomy of a scuba diving accident and the lessons to be learned from it. The incidents described are real. Names of locations and people have been changed or deleted. (more…)

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