What is your favorite dive destination?

[sharkattack]

Best Cold Water
British Columbia

Best Warm Water
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba


However, Monterey/Carmel is my favorite just because it's close.

 

[shoredivr]

Cold water: Fish and invertebrates: Quadra Island off Vancouver Island

Wrecks: Arabia and Forest City, Tobermory, Ontario tied with the wrecks of the St Lawrence River

Warm water: Fish and invertebrates: Ribbon Reefs of the Great Barrier Reef
Fish life and total ease of shore diving, 24/7, Bonaire hands down

 

[matts1w]

Best sightseeing- Munda, Solomon Islands

Best spearfishing- Gulf of Mexico 30-40 miles off Fort Myers Beach, Florida USA.

 

[scubacoots3]

cozumel and key largo

 

[((C-Diver))]

Curacao is the place to have a wonderful diving expierience. my favorite dive destination is at Yan Thiel Beach, beautifull coral reefs and more..

Chris..

 

[hogpark7430]

Roatan

 

[aubie85]

So far? Cancun I am going to Cozumel in March, so we'll see....

 

[aubie85]

Top 10 according to Scuba Travel...

Yongala, Australia
Blue Corner Wall, Palau, Micronesia
Thistlegorm, Egyptian Red Sea
Barracuda Point, Sipadan Island
Shark and Yolanda Reef, Egyptian Red Sea
Navy Pier, Western Australia
Manta Ray Night Dive, Kailua Kona, Hawaii
Elphinstone Reef, Egyptian Red Sea
Richelieu Rock, Thailand
Great Blue Hole, Belize

I find that strange. Where is Scuba Travel getting their data? I've been reading most of the responses of this thread and I see mostly Bonaire, Grand Cayman, Curacao, Roatan and Cozumel (IDK, maybe the places they listed are really the top 10 if the cost of the trip was not a problem). I will keep those places in mind though

 

[Thalassamania]

My favorite dive site is a small seamount out on Cashes Ledge in the Gulf of Maine, know as Ammem Rock. Here’s why (I hope you’ll bear with a long story, part of which I told before):

Underwater science is usually rather dull. Hours spent collecting data. Data that’s not particularly interesting in and of itself. Data that becomes interesting only when conjoined with similar data from other sites and times. The media stars of underwater science like Sylvia Earle and Bob Ballard reach out from the pages of a glossy book or beckon from a tightly edited video production, crisp and seductive images that intersect at a precise and meaningful conclusion right there on the last page or in the last minute.

Real life is not like that, at least not very often. It’s repetitious … hour after hour, cold, uncomfortable, usually strenuous, occasionally dangerous. But every once in a while, every once in a long while, there’s magic. Something really special happens that makes up for all that’s come before, something really special. This was one of those times.

It had been a hectic and eventful trip so far. I’d staged a close escape from one of those classic binds, I had to be on a research cruise, and our ship was leaving the dock with the morning tide on the same day that I was to deliver a paper at the annual AAUS meeting.

My boss insisted that both things get done, he's like that, used to be in charge of the Thor-Agena rocket for North American Rockwell. He also insisted that I deliver the paper, not my co-author. And somehow I’d come up with a creative solution. The ship was leaving Woods Hole and transiting the Cape Cod Canal on its way to the Gulf of Maine. If my talk was moved to the first slot in the morning and there were no hitches, I could be back in time to meet the ship at the north end of the canal just after sundown. And if I were late … Plan B goes into effect, a night-time, “casualty evacuation drill” with a USCG helo a good friend flew out of Otis. That’d be the cover for my ride out.

On Friday I stowed the last of my gear on the ship and I caught an oh-dark-thirty flight out of Boston down to Florida. A quick cab ride and I was at the podium going over the slides that illustrated a paper I’d coauthored with Rich Pyle of the University of Hawaii on the use of mixed gas, open circuit scuba down to five hundred feet.. Twenty minutes of talk, ten minutes of questions, I shook the moderator’s hand as I shoved my Certificate of Appreciation into my case and scooted out the back to a waiting cab that took me back to the airport. I ran for a plane back to Boston and on the plane I switched my tan Sunday-go-to-meeting suit for a pair of 501s, a black U. C. Berkeley sweatshirt and my topsiders.

My work study student Dave Sipperly was waiting for me curbside at Logan. I threw my leather flight bag and black Halliburton, the one covered with dive stickers, on the back seat, jumped in front and off we sped; south toward the Cape. Down Highway 3 to 6a, over the bridge at Sagamore and left onto Tupper Road, left again to Town Neck Road and once more on to Coast Guard Road. There, at the north end of the canal was a small U.S. Coast Guard station. We pulled in past the whitewashed rocks, and I got out, retrieving my briefcase from the rear seat. I pulled a set of CANDIVE coverall from my flight bag, which Dave would at my house, I was done with it. We’d made good time, the ship was not due for a good half hour and Plan B could go by the board.

I pulled my ICOM M5 out of the Halliburton, slid a charged battery pack on the bottom and keyed it to channel 16. “Whiskey, Victor, Foxtrot, Quebec.” I repeated the call ship’s call sign three times and then identified myself as Portable One. “This is Whiskey, Victory, Foxtrot, Quebec port one, come in.” No response yet. I had some time to kill and the damp air was cooling now as the sun dipped below the land behind the canal. I shivered slightly and went into the Coast Guard station.

I found the O.D. and explained that I was meeting a boat out of the Hole, and that it would heave-to outside the north end of the canal and send a Zodiac for me. The Coasties seemed happy to have something to break their routine; they offered up a mug of hot coffee and asked if I wanted to use their longer range base station to call the ship. The O.D. volunteered to save us time and potential confusion by running me out in their boat.

I could see the ship in the canal. I pulled on the bright orange coveralls that Jim English, CANDIVE's Operations Supervisor gave me when we’d worked with the Deep Rover submersible at the Caribbean Marine Research Center during Sylvia Earle's record dive the year before (but that’s a story for another time). We went down to the dock, hopped into an overpowered Boston Whaler and sped out toward the oncoming ship, blue lights flashing and sirens screaming. We passed the ship starboard to starboard, headed in opposite directions, came about in a tight turn and pulled up along side the moving and much larger vessel. At about eight knots our boat slid smoothly over to the Jacob’s ladder hanging amidships on the starboard rail. When the Coastguardsman shouted, “Go!” I leaped from the port gunwale of the Boston Whaler and grabbed on to the Jacob’s ladder. The small craft veered off to starboard, throttled back and then came back up along side of me. I leaned out and the Coastguardsmen handed my case up to me. I passed the case up over the rail to a fellow Explorers Club member who was making the cruse with us and clambered aboard. Not exactly the way I usually start a cruise, I was really having fun with “action movie” aspects of the situation.

Supper was still on in the mess. I had a meal and then we all got to work. The compressor van had to be hooked to ship’s power and run. The air had to analyzed and the bank brought up to pressure. Filling whips needed to set up at the waist and a 10,000 PSI Kevlar line run from the compressor up on the O1 deck down to the filling station. All our gear for the next day’s dive needed to be unpacked and readied. Contact with Offshore Medical Services had to made and communications with our contingency helicopter evacuation facility needed to be tested. With everything done, I rolled into my rack about 22:00 hrs and was out like a light.

Eight bells woke me. I got up, showered, pulled on my coveralls and went up to get some chow. No one else from the science party was up yet so I had a chance to spend some time with the ship’s folks. I went over the general dive procedures with the Captain, who had stayed up beyond his usual midwatch so that we could talk. The Coxswain set up the diving Zodiac and we went over the boat and all of its gear. By now it was seven bells in the morning watch and the science party was drifting into the mess, pouring coffee and sitting down in the library and the lab.

We were due on station at Ammen rock in the Gulf of Maine at about 12:00 hrs., the start of the afternoon watch. We were planning our first dive about two hours after getting on station. The science party spent the morning setting up their computers and laboratory equipment. Each of the divers got his or her gear unpacked and stowed in the wet lab that had been turned over to dive locker space. As I hung up my black Viking suit one of the University of New Hampshire grad students was heard to exclaim, “Oh! No! It’s Darth’s wader’s.”

Dive procedure’s pretty straight forward. The Zodiac is on the deck. You assemble your rig and put it in the boat. You put your weight belt in the boat. Then you go and get your suit on. By the time you’re dressed in, the ship’s crane has put the loaded Zodiac and the Coxswain in the water and the crew had rigged a Jacob’s ladder over the rail. The water is about nine feet down that ladder. The Zodiac is held against the side of the ship with a bow painter and a stern line and you clamber down the ladder into the boat. You put your gear on in the boat while it motors to the site. On the way the you run through pre-dive checks and once there, back roll off the inflatable gunwales into the water.

We needed to service some current meters, tide gauges and continuous plankton recorders. The bottom’s about 110 feet. It was a great day, visibility was more than 100 feet. There were immense numbers of herring in the area for their late summer spawning. Down we went through the loosely organized school to the tide gauges. It took about ten minutes to dump the data and reset the gauges; the herring cast enough shadow that we needed our dive lights to see what we were doing.

Our tasks done we were getting ready to leave, in the blink of an eye there was a snap from an eerie deep green to pitch black. Mounds of herring pressed closely in on us. I was blind. No gauges, no buddy, not even my light was visible. I raised my light and pointed it straight toward my mask. The beam burst into a million mirrored reflections off the herrings’ scales. I took a slow deep breath and felt myself life off the bottom and begin to ascend. Carefully I maintained slight positive buoyancy with my lungs. I could not see my gauges. I could not judge my upward progress. My field of vision was filled with the scintillations of my light reflecting off the herring that had closed tightly in upon me.

As fast as the dark had arrived it was gone. My eyes were momentarily dazzled. I exhaled sharply and sank back into the darkness beneath me. Another breath started me up slowly. This time, just as my head broke out of the tightly packed herring school, I exhaled gently and transformed my ascent to a hover. From my chin down and out as far out as I could see, there was a black mass of squirming fish so closely packed that there was little room even for water.

I turned to my left through about three-quarters of a rotation. I could see one of my three comrades coming up out of the herring mass, perhaps twenty feet away. She ascended about ten feet and pitched back to horizontal, leveling out and smoothly neutralizing her buoyancy. A circular shaped motion of her light indicated she was fine, had seen me and inquired as to my status with that unique economy of the underwater “OK.” I brought my seemingly detached left hand up out of the darkness and responded with a circle of my light.

Suddenly, she pointed sharply to her left, arm stiff and outstretched. I swiveled my head right, and there is one of the most incredible sights I’ve ever witnessed. Six Giant Bluefin Tuna move toward us, in formation, they pass between us. Each fish, the size of a dinner table that would seat eight, moving fast, yet without apparent effort.. They glide past, each with a huge left eye that stutters for a tiny moment as it find me for a fraction of a second and then moves on to seek it’s normal prey. We watch them almost disappear, circle to the right, and move to the other side of the herring school. They come right back by us and go left to the other side of the seamount.

The black shinny mass beneath us starts to break up, the herring resuming more normal individual distances and expanding their school upward and outward. Once again enveloping me in a darkness that slowly lightens to the deep green we saw at the start of our dive. I swam up to my teammate and joined her hover. We moved to the down line and ascended to our deep stop. Being out of the lee of the seamount now the current was rather stiff, we tied off our Jon lines, waited a minute and then ascended to our 20 foot stop.

Decompression complete we signaled the Zodiac, the Coxswain waived us off as he was already heading to pick up our other two comrades at an alternate surface float. Once we were in the Zodiac everyone was talking excitedly about the Tuna, there had been a big school of them working the herring and every one of us had been blessed with a good long view of at least several.

 

[downdeep]

I just love your stories, Thal.