Reviews of the best dive spots in the world

[moonracer]

I noticed that a lot of people including myself look for recommendations about where to go for scuba diving vacations. So, I thought about a website where people can review their favorite dive sites and read reviews about places where other people dove. Sort of like Yelp for scuba divers.

Would a site like this be helpful to you? Also, if you know of something like this that already exists, please post a link!

 

[drrich2]

Hi:

One example would be ShoreDiving.com, a site that acts to meet the needs of those of us who love shore diving. The popular Bonaire Shore Diving Made Easy book is another example, in print, and I liked the Lonely Planet series Diving and Snorkeling Bonaire book.

Undercurrent is a paid subscription site that posts an annual 'chapbook' with reviews of various sites & operators.

Trip Advisor can be useful for researching some destinations, particularly if you want to look at non-diving activity options, and ScubaBoard is good for reviews of destinations, sites and operators.

Now, let's take a look at what you're considering.

1.) Ideally, it would be nice if such a thing were part of ScubaBoard.com, since that'd bring it a big audience and participant pool.

2.) If you want lots of reviews, you need some sort of online form people can fill out, and to decide what fields to create, and how much different things to have people rate. And you need room for narrative; Undercurrent reviews are a good example.

3.) You need to decide whether you are talking about profiling destinations (e.g. Cozumel), dive sites (e.g.: Palancar Gardens, Santa Rosa Wall) or dive operators (e.g.: Living Underwater, Aldora). In some places, such as Roatan, which operator you dive with has a big effect on what sites you're taken to; on Bonaire, not so much. In Roatan, some destinations make shore diving practical (e.g.: CocoView, Reef House Resort), and some do not. And what about live-aboards?

4.) If you profile destinations, will you cover non-diving activities? This can be a big issue for some people.

5.) How extensive do you want this to be? You say 'the best dive spots in the world.' Do you want only 'top notch,' or do you dream of having every dive quarry open to the public listed? Are you mainly thinking ocean, or do you figure to have freshwater lake diving sites included?

Let's look at some examples.

1.) One could stay at Hotel Cozumel, I assume, book diving independently with Living Underwater, and do all boat dives. Could use steel 120 cf tanks. Might hit a number of different sites. So, is your site going to review Cozumel as a whole, the dive sites, Living Underwater, or Hotel Cozumel?

2.) One could stay at Buddy Dive Resort in Bonaire, do a dozen boat dives up the west coast, & 6 boat dives, while eating out in the evenings. Do you review Bonaire, Buddy Dive, west coast dive sites, etc...?

3.) One could stay at Reef House Resort in Roatan. Do you review Roatan, Reef House Resort of the region of Roatan that's dove from RHR?

You may say 'all of the above,' but odds are you'll have a main focus, such as telling divers where to go (e.g.: Cozumel), where to stay (e.g.: which hotel or resort), who to dive with (e.g.: Aldora) or which sites to dive.

Or maybe you can devise an organizational hierarchy, but it needs to be easy to navigate.

Do you foresee any 'head-to-head' destination comparisons? I enjoy these 'face offs,' because they are what we go through when picking a dive destination from varied options, even though each is special and it's an 'apples to oranges' comparison. How does one compare land-based boat diving in Cozumel to shore diving in Bonaire to rain forest hiking and pinnacle boat diving off Saba to a live-aboard in Belize? Not easy, but this is just what we do when we pick trips.

So yeah, a site that could do all that could be helpful.

Richard.

 

[KeithG]

Undercurrent.org

 

[Rhone Man]

Yeah, the problem tends to always come back to size. I suspect I am well up in the top percentile of travelling divers, but even I have seen only the tiniest sliver of what there is to see. So advising people in comparative terms is hard. Particularly as my experience in any one place is highly variable (weather, good/bad day for marine life, bad group ruining it for others...). Plus of course different people like different stuff; some people like wrecks, but they bore others. Same with macro stuff.

Take the Philippines. If people ask about the Philippines I share my experience of Moalboal. But Moalboal is one of probably nearly 1,000 dive destinations in Philippines, but itself contains about 35 sites (of which I did about 10). Pretty hard to make fair comparisons in global terms. You can repeat that for hundreds of other well know diving destinations, giving you a list of tens if not hundreds of thousands of sites. Very, very rare to meet someone who has even done 1%.

And that is before you get to criteria unrelated to diving like (i) expense, (ii) difficulty of getting there, (iii) availability of other stuff like good food or nightlife, etc.

Lastly, there is an intrinsic irony to such lists - famous places tend to get a higher profile even though ironically they are packed full of divers because they are famous regardless of quality. Truthfully, many super-famous sites can be a bit average. The real gems, far off the beaten path and known only to a few, tend to stay that way and remain special largely because people tend not to shout about it! I have done 99% of my diving in BVI, and the places I dive are the places others don't go. And that's how I'd like to keep it. Tourists can have the tourist sites, but friends and family only on the more remote sites.

 

[robint]

ScubaBoard is the best resource I have found for many reasons. The biggest reason is that the reviews are from all types of divers, all levels of divers, and all income brackets. When I read reviews on some of the other sites, I see people that I don't necessarily have much in common with regarding needs, $$$ spending budget, etc.

I used to depend on the trip reports on another scuba forum, but when they redid their website a few years ago, they lost all their trip reports. Plus that website was geared more towards the wealthier dive population and most trips I could not afford. Posting a trip report there from a 'regular' diver was met with snide remarks and rude criticism, too. Another one of those websites was slanted towards one destination and most of the reviews were by people who never go anywhere else. You have to know the fanbase to understand the reviews.

So that said.... I always read trip reports HERE on SB as well as casually check a few other dive websites. My biggest influences are here on SB though, with posters I have chatted with or who I know over the years have similar interests. Tons of great info here that you are not going to find anywhere else.

robin

 

[Doc]

Also, if you know of something like this that already exists, please post a link!

www.:sblogo:.com

The most widely read internet forums otherwise are invisibly beholden to advertisers or heavily moderated so as to not alarm casual travelers and upset local island operators. Some small-scale "newsletters" are merely ways for the owners to travel the world on tax deductions against publishing business expenses. Don't bite the hand that feeds you, N'est-ce pas?

Some of the most popular internet travel sites (Both Dive Vacation or just Vacation with some Diving types) are just rife with implanted reviews and "plausibly deniable" advertising. A few snake oil salesman are so good at huckstering, they have created a sizable following notwithstanding~ they can charge for subscriptions and only inspire one word posts here on SB, or in the case of Trip Advisor, you can get no-cost volumes of heavy-hand moderated misinformation from snorkelers.

Did I mention this super-secret message board? Use this link to get it for free: www.scubaboard.com

 

[Lorenzoid]

Between Undercurrent and Scubaboard, I've got all the information I need.

 

[moonracer]

Thanks for all the feedback. I'm going to see if a site like this could add to the great resources already out there.

 

[PatW]

There is another problem. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

To put it another way, certain kinds of dives appeal to different divers.

My wife loves wall diving. Her favorite spots are south Caicos and Little Cayman. She also likes to poke around on sand flats with a magnifying glass looking for head shield slugs. How many divers would enjoy doing that?

Most divers love shark dives. Neither my wife or I really get excited about sharks. We like seeing them but seeing a sea hare or a frog fish is a bigger deal to us.

So how can a dive site be rated if four different divers can dive it and come away with very different levels of satisfaction?

 

[Wingy]

wannadive.net, divetheworld.com - I get my resources here.

Its a very very subjective thing. Rhone Mans post is spot on. Im not ever going to salivate over a wreck in cold green water. Other divers would find nothing appealing about going for big fast drifts and bluewater drop offs. To each their own.
I tend to like spots with less divers that are harder to get to and lesser known, but as mentioned I will only ever see a tiny percentage of what are the worlds great dive sites .