Dive Travel
Who Owns You?
True story: A couple has a great time on a liveaboard trip due mainly to the considerate and knowledgeable guidance of the cruise director. The couple wants to remain in contact with the cruise director so they exchange email addresses. After finishing his contract, the cruise director decides to begin his own travel program. He sends out a trip announcement for a trip on another liveaboard (same country), and the couple that knew him from the original liveaboard joins this trip. They have a fantastic trip. But the ex-cruise director just made two enemies: his former employers and the original booking agent, who both who accuse him of “stealing” their clients. Times are hard everywhere. It’s an especially tough market for dive travel when disposable income for things like vacations is not flowing like it did back in the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is a niche market with small profit margins and an even smaller population of divers worldwide who can afford the higher end dive trips. There is a lot of competition for clients, and it’s getting a bit ugly. People like that former cruise director and even people like Burt and I wear a few different hats just to make ends meet. So the other day, when a friend called and asked us to work as a guide for a private client who had chartered a local liveaboard and was bringing a group of friends to Indonesia, we were delighted. That is until the owner of the boat said he didn’t want us there. He was afraid we’d... More »
Dad and Daughters take Family Vacation Diving with Great White Sharks
PADI and NAUI Professional Divemaster and Assistant Instructor Roger J. Muller, Jr. takes his Daughters on a Trip to Remember By Sally Deering Some families vacation in the mountains, some visit Florida's Disneyworld, but Roger J. Muller, Jr. of Hoboken, New Jersey, Professional Divemaster and Assistant Instructor who holds 80 PADI, NAUI, TDI, SDI and SSI certifications decided to give his daughters Kelsey, 19, and Taylor, 15, a trip to remember. Muller took his daughters, who are also certified divers, aboard the Nautilus Explorer to Ensenada, Mexico's Guadalupe Island where they plunged 40 feet below the water's surface to observe the behavior of the mysterious Great White Sharks. Muller chose the Nautilus Explorer, which takes small groups of scuba divers on unique diving expeditions to give his daughters a memorable vacation away from the daily demands of their busy lifestyles. Muller, a Certified Professional Insurance Agent oversees Muller Insurance, the family business, in Hoboken, and in his spare time serves as General Manager and Captain of the Hoboken Rockets Ice Hockey team; Kelsey is a sophomore studying economics at Harvard College in Cambridge and Taylor is a high school sophomore. "It's a wonderful bonding experience," Muller says. "They get the opportunity to see Great White Sharks in their natural habitat and learn about shark advocacy. It's also five days on a boat with no Internet access or cell phones to text boyfriends." Based in British Columbia, Canada, the Nautilus Explorer takes divers to the giant mantas and dolphins of Socorro Island and adventures into Alaska, British Columbia, the Sea of Cortez, the California Channel ... More »
Cocos Island: An Ocean Oasis
Cocos divers are a committed bunch. (Some might opine that they should actually be committed... to a room with padded walls wearing jackets with sleeves that tie behind you.) First of all, it's not a cheap investment and there's the little matter of a two-day sea crossing of nearly 400 miles just to get there. Upon arrival you are afforded the opportunity to be surrounded by hundreds (maybe thousands) of schooling hammerhead sharks. And tuna the size of NFL linemen, mantas, various billfish, dolphin, bait balls, scores of marble rays the size of coffee tables, and a million or so schools of big eye jack and other species I'm still trying to identify. And, of yeah, you've got an odds on chance of swimming with a whale shark or two and seeing a humpback whale. I began leading trips to Cocos back in 1996 when we used the Sea Hunter fleet as a proving ground for the first editions of the Draeger semi-closed circuit rebreather. If there was ever a location that was better match for the silent stealth of rebreathers, I can't imagine where we might look. [caption id="attachment_1115" align="alignleft" width="400" caption="Schooling hammerheads"][/caption] Cocos had already made its reputation as the best big animal dive region in the world. The advent of affordable rebreathers just made it better. Sort of like initially visiting the wild animals of the African Serengetti from a mile away through a spotting scope and then donning a cloak of invisibility to walk among them up close. Prior to 1996, if you wanted to have any real chance at close encounters with the legendary schooling hammerheads, you were forced to dig in to a nook on the bottom, wait for a wave of sharks to approach, and then hold your breath as long as you could. Once the exhaust... More »
Stormy Weather
The weather has been in the news lately. Between earthquakes, tsunamis, droughts, fires, tornadoes and so forth, everyone has been affected by the unpredictable nature of the planet's weather. I can't remember whether it is supposed to be a La Niña or El Niño year, but out here in Indonesia the weather has been very erratic, except in its unwavering atrociousness. The water along the southern coast of the archipelago has been so unseasonably cold that several boats just blew off diving some of the better critter spots near Pantar Island. In Papua, it has rained steadily throughout the "dry" season. Visibility was off everywhere due to surge, waves, and storms. In early April we were supposed to meet our liveaboard in Ambon, and then cross the Banda Sea to Raja Ampat. But things were so bad out there that we had to reroute and only dive in Raja Ampat, which has decent protection in just about any weather. When you hear about waves several meters high and winds blowing a gale, you don't second guess the captain. You just go with his judgment even if it means that you'll disappoint a few clients, miss a few dives. There are things we can do something about, and there are things that we can't fix. Weather, water temperature, and visibility come to mind. We weren't the only people trying to cross the Banda Sea a few weeks ago. There was a small boat with just six guests that was trying to move southeast between Banda and Alor. Even though the captain was instructed not to leave harbor, the guests raised such a fuss about not being able to dive where they had planned, that the crew chanced it. This boat ended up drifting far from its intended arrival port and finally had to... More »
Wruck Diving in the Philippines
When Ben Davison first approached me about writing a blog for Undercurrent my first thought was "Great, I can write a puff piece about my organization, Seacology, for my favorite dive magazine." But then I channeled the voice of my friend and fellow blogger Bret Giliam saying "Duane, first write about an interesting dive adventure before you discuss Seacology. You've led dive trips all over the world. Write about that." Okay, Brett, I hear you. If readers want to know about Seacology they can read Bret's article of several years ago in Fathoms. Instead I will take this opportunity to write about the wonderful wruck (no, that's not a typo) diving of Coron Bay in the Philippines. During World War II, the Japanese anchored a fleet of ships in Coron Bay, 180 miles southwest of Manila. The ships were well camouflaged and covered with trees so that they would resemble islands. While comparing aerial reconnaissance photos taken at different times, a very perceptive navy analyst realized that several of Coron Bay's "islands" had moved. Orders for an air strike on this Japanese fleet went out and U.S. Hellcat bombers on carriers based 350 miles away soon took off for Coron Bay. Since the bombers had to cover a very long distance before they reached Coron, their time over the Bay before running out of fuel was extremely limited. Some say their actual mission lasted no more than twenty minutes, but in that brief time the entire Japanese fleet was wiped out. Coron Bay now has eleven diveable wrecks, including some, such as the Tae Maru oil tanker, that are over 500 feet long. Most of the dives are somewhere between 30 and 120 feet deep and several of the wrecks still have construction supplies in their holds and anti-aircraft guns on... More »
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