Scuba Tips for Places Where I Lived all Around the Pacific Ocean
I have had the pleasure to live in a number of really interesting and exceptional places. In all of these places I had the chance to scuba dive. Sometimes, on online scuba forums, some dude asks the question “which is the best place to scuba dive”? there is no such best place. Many places have their own unique attractions underwater, with a unique fauna especially if you look in somewhat isolated places like Australia.
So here we go…
Sydney
I lived in Sydney from 2011 to 2014. Lovely city, a bit pricey, but lots of top food, art, music, and diving. A great place. I did my instructor training in Sydney at Abyss Scuba in Ramsgate, highly recommended. The warm-temperate fauna in the area around Sydney has animals which you can see nowhere else in the world:
La Jolla/San Diego
In 2002 to 2006 I did science at the amazing Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. On many weekends during that time I went scuba diving. A tad cold, maybe, the ocean there, but so much fascinating fauna to see. The kelp is a fascinating place to experience:
Dauin
This is where I live now (or, to be precise, right next to it). The place has a rightly deserved reputation as a muck diving paradise. Rare scorpionfishes, mimic octopus and Wunderpus, sea slugs, flamboyant cuttlefish, it’s all here. I made an interactive map, with videos explaining many of the dive sites in the area. Here it is:
Okinawa
From 2006 to 2011 I lived in Okinawa, Japan. To be honest, I didn’t like that place, the Japanese countryside is highly xenophobic, and the institute where I worked had too much of a focus on bureau-crazy and meetings, and less on science… I wouldn’t recommend Okinawa as a diving tourism destination, it’s more expensive and less interesting (though somewhat similar) than the Philippines underwater, and the language barrier makes travel in Japan for a foreigner difficult. There are foreign language dive shops in Oki, stick with these, on several occasion the Japanese dive shops refused to take me on a boat dive since I was a foreigner. But, if you are in Japan for work anyway, check it out, there are interesting nudibranchs there. Here is an album on Flickr from my Oki diving days:
