where do you dive?

where do we all go diving? i live in the u.k & mostly use a company on the south coast of sussex called wittering divers. nice freindly staff. shop is stuffed with goodies. we go out on ribs as far as 18 miles (thats not spare ribs!) mostly wartime wrecks. more wrecks here than most other parts of the world. just a shame the vis is poor a lot of the time. any way there is a book called dive sussex that contains all the info on diveable sites. 386 in number as i look at it now. check out their site www.witteringdivers.co.uk

I live in an area surrounded by water. Lake Pontchatrain, Lake Maraupas, Lake Borne, the Mississippi River and various tributaries and yet, none of them are dive sites.
So, to dive, we (me and the other diving souls who live in these parts) must either go south to the Gulf of Mexico for Rig diving or travel east to Florida for Gulf diving and/or Florida Springs diving. Or fly to the carribean.
If you like cool crystal clear fresh water diving, then Florida is the place to be. If you like cool crystal clear fresh water cave diving, call the van lines because Florida is where you need to be.

Dive site? Heck we are writing our own book on that though not literally, yet.

Here in southern Maine I have over a dozen nice ocean shore dive sites with varying entries and amenities. Most are free parking except for a few parks with modest fees. Another dozen or so freshwater sites are within an hour. Many of these are not found in published guide books. For us it's about keeping your eyes open and not being too fussy. Some very prosaic looking sites have provided some pleasureful dives.

The first thing I need is a point of access, If I can park and get to the water then we look to see if it's a safe enough location. If we have that then we try to dive there. You never know what's down there until you dive it. Of the top of my head I can't think of only a few I would probably never dive again.

Travel to Bermuda, Florida and soon Bonaire is all nice stuff but it's no substitute for jumping in at the end of the work day or making a comfortable day trip from home.

Pete

hey guess what ? its the same here! you can book a "proper" dive so to speak or with a couple of mates do a local shore dive. you guys must have heard of brighton, well its a dive site. find a parking spot, kit up, across road, down shingle beach then surface swim to end of pier (boardwalk?) its a long swim but worth it. its about a 7mtr dive so time isnt an issue really. you can hear the fairground above you & pick up all the fallen cash off the bottom(it falls thru the decking!) last time i came back with 17pounds, whats that about 30 dollars? then long swim back

I dive mostly flooded quarries that have been turned into scuba diving parks. There's usually quite a bit to see & do(Sunken boats, cars, planes, helicopters & swim- throughs). The quarries range in depth from 30'- 120'. I also occasionally dive in abandoned & flooded strip mine pits. We've found a couple of vehicles & underwater trees.

yep we have that too. in center of england is stoney cove, an old granite quarry, goes down to just beyond 40 mtrs. have all sorts of stuff in there including an old ocean going tug thats been sunk for us to play on/ in. not had too many replies but diving seems similar betwee UK & U.S. thats apart from warm clear water. i did two dives last summer with 20mtr+ vis at more than 30mtr depth.

We are incredibly lucky who live on Puget Sound. Within an hour's drive of me are more than a dozen nice shore diving sites, and we have charter boats that run in the South Sound and the north, and up in the islands as well. There are wrecks in Lake Washington, if you have the intestinal fortitude to deal with the opaque darkness at the bottom of the lake. And the sea water is teeming with life, so it takes a very, very dull site not to provide at least some entertainment (and when that happens, we throw out of air drills at one another, or things like that).

A day of diving costs me an hour's driving and the price of the gas in my tanks, which, given the incredible program of my LDS, which sold me a year's Nitrox for one price, runs me about one or two dollars per tank . . .

this is great. i thought being in th u.k we would be isolated, you know, cold ,murky, low vis a lot, but it seems diving is similar. one thing i have learnt is that even if its a really poo dive every one is in the same boat so to speak, we all have something in common & its the comradeship that goes with diving. just going is something extraordinary compared to joe average. what i,m saying is that even bad dives somehow turn into good times