Kava ceremony 
Kava ceremony
People seem to either love it or hate it.
Before I swore off shore based diving, I was sitting in a little tin boat, in three foot swells in the rain, doing a 45 minute surface interval between the first and second dive of a two tank trip. I was slightly sea sick, bored, cold, hungry and had to pee. (There are only two types of shore based dive boats by the way…those with no head, and those with broke heads).
About that time the 130’ Cayman Aggressor was putting out to sea. Her guests were on deck, eating fresh baked cookies, reading novels, or napping in their cabins. Their backs didn’t hurt from lugging equipment to the boat, and if nature called, they had their own en-suite bathroom in their cabin, unless they wanted to use the one on the dive deck. If they got cold, they could go below and take a hot shower, or if that was too much work, they could use the hot showers on the dive deck. Their boat hardly rocked while ours bounced. One of the seven deadly sins is envy, and I know why…at that moment, I hated them one and all.
About that time my thoughts were interrupted by the 20ish “dive master” who saw exactly what I saw and commented: “I just don’t know why people go out on those things when there is such good shore based diving available.”
So how can two intelligent people observing the same thing have such divergent opinions?
Before we go farther, we need to define what we are talking about when we say “Live aboard dive boat”. I am talking about Aggressors, Peter Hughes, a hand full of independents around the world, and probably Mike Ball’s boats in the S. Pacific.
I am not talking about the boats that offer dormitory style accommodations and hot dogs for dinner, such as Black Beard Cruises.
At 20, healthy and single, one of your main priorities is maximizing opportunities for meeting the opposite sex. Shore based diving, and Black Beard type cruises fit the bill nicely. Aggressors do not. What I’m sure he saw was 130’ with no escape for a week and no opportunities for advancing his sexual agenda. Live aboards such as the Aggressor tend to be, couples, marrieds and sometimes families. If you didn’t bring it with you , you’re probably not going to sleep with it.
Next at 20 years old activities like camping and being cold and miserable are a new adventure. At 40, you’re just cold and miserable.
Once when Sue and I took a two day advanced scuba diving course at Lake Travis in Austin, everyone else camped out by the lake at the end of the day, cooked hot dogs and got rained on. We drove back to Austin, stayed at the Driscol Hotel, and ordered steaks from room service on the drive back so that they arrived at the room about the time we got out of the hot shower.
At 20 just scuba diving is an adventure. Hey! I can breath underwater. I can go deep! I can be daring. I can push the limits. I can get the bends and live to brag about it. All the fun things that bouncy little boats and short surface intervals have to offer.
After a hundred dives or so you either get very very bored or very very interested. To get very very interested you need to learn about your underwater environment and the marine life. On live aboards, you hear divers talking about symbiotic relationships, and nudibrancs and vestigial appendages, and behavior patterns….I learned more about marine biology from fellow passengers on my first live aboard than most people would learn in a college course.
Once you learn a little and get interested in what is going on around you, you have to slow down. “I go to the pool to swim,,,I go scuba diving to look”.
This brings us to the most dangerous creature in the ocean… the dreaded split finned dive master.
Many people think he or she is there to keep them safe and show them the sites. O’ contrair..mon ami. The dive master is there to keep you moving and run you out of air. This is called a “guided dive”.
In that assembly line called a Dive certification course, (which in most cases is a captive audience to sell expensive equipment to), they didn’t have the time or inclination to teach buoyancy control. As a result many of the divers that resort dive masters see, are overweighed, under trained and a greater potential danger to the reef than a super tanker with a drunk captain.
It isn’t lost on the resort dive master that the reef draws the tourists, the tourists pay their salaries, and that sexually they are in a “target rich environment” the likes of with they will never see again. Therefore, if they keep you moving, you don’t sink, thrash around on the reef, and ruin their meal ticket.
Beyond that, even dive masters, haven’t mastered the art of underwater seduction. Every moment that they spend with you underwater is an opportunity missed. The more and faster you swim, the faster you run out of air and the faster they get back to the hotel bar.
They don’t have a lot of sympathy for those of us that want to wait in one spot for five or 10 minutes to video a tube worm as it unfolds like the a flower opening. Or, I might add can stay underwater for over an hour and still come up with 1000# of air.
If you scuba dive to study or photograph marine life, swimming and dive masters are your enemy. Swimming burns up air. The longer and slower you are underwater the more you will see. Don’t swim!
With live aboards you will usually dive off the back of the of an anchored boat in a sheltered dive site with little or no current. You go in when you decide, stay as long as you decide, and come out when you decide. You don’t for example have to surface when someone in the group runs out of air and you still have 1500 pounds and 20 exposures left.
Or, you stay on the mother ship and dive from small tenders. You go in as a small group, split up underwater and surface where ever you are, when you are cold, tired, out of film or low on air. (Or on night dives, when all three of your expensive, back up, water proof, flash lights have flooded and destroyed $20 worth of rechargeable batteries.) You don’t swim to the boat, the boat comes to you. THAT’S WHY BOATS HAVE MOTORS S!!!
Because of the above, I don’t do guided dives. Virtually the only place where you can scuba dive and be left completely alone to set your own pace, and agenda is off a professionally run live aboard.
During our certification course, on the first day, we were told: you don’t need to be in shape to scuba dive, you don’t need to know how to swim, and scuba diving isn’t expensive.
It may not be expensive if you dive in the zero visibility mud puddles we call lakes in Texas, but to go anywhere any rational person would want to go, gets expensive fast. When you take up underwater photography, you enter a whole new realm of expense.
Shore based dive operators must spend hours at the bar thinking up creative ways to provide opportunities to damage expensive camera equipment.
The crowded little tin boat full of disoriented nervous strangers sleping heavy dive equipment is a good start. Where do you put you camera? On the floor of course surely it will be safe there.
Where do you change film between dives? Bouncing around in 3’ seas with your camera in you lap while you or those 6” on either side of you drip salt water, hair and cookie crumbs (the luxury shore based boats will usually provide Wal-Mart brand cookies during the surface interval) on to your “O” rings and camera innards.
If it isn’t raining, and half the time it isn’t, the boiling sun will work very hard to turn salt water into rock hard crystals in inaccessible crevices which will ultimately cause you camera to flood.
Also an integral part of shore based diving seems to be lifting, and toting. Tanks, cameras and gear to the boat, tanks, cameras and gear from the boat, tanks to get filled, tanks back to gear, gear on to tank, gear off of tank…….On a live aboard dive boat, you put your gear on a tank on day one and take it off on day last. Tanks are filled in place between dives. When you go diving, the crew carries you gear to the dive deck, you put it on and step into the water.
Live aboards Sue and I recommend:
Tour directors that we recommend:
Charter service: