A liveaboard changes your relationship with the ocean in ways that are difficult to anticipate until you’ve done one. The change isn’t dramatic on the first day. You board the vessel, stow your gear, meet the other divers, eat dinner,…
Wrecks make reefs. This was the first thing I learned about wreck diving, and it’s the thing that keeps me coming back to them. A ship sinks. The steel corrodes slowly, the paint fades, the superstructure colonises. Within five years,…
The first time I drift dived a channel pass, I forgot to kick. This sounds like a small thing. For a diver trained to be active in the water — to fin constantly, to fight current when it pushed me…
There’s a moment in freediving that scuba diving can’t replicate, and I’ve spent years trying to find the right words for it. It happens after the breath-up — the preparation breathing on the surface — and the first few metres…
The worst thing that ever happened to my diving was getting a camera. I don’t mean that entirely seriously, but I mean it more than half seriously. Before the camera, I was a diver. I moved through the reef, I…
My most experienced dive buddy once told me that the most boring-looking dive sites in the world contain the most interesting things in it. I thought he was winding me up. Then he took me muck diving in Lembeh Strait,…
Nobody told me the reef would be louder at night. I knew it would look different — that was the whole point of the night dive, the reason I’d signed up for it at a small liveaboard operation off Osprey…
I have never had a serious diving accident. I want to be careful about how I say that, because it could be read as smugness, and it isn’t meant that way. The more accurate statement is: I have never had…