#dive adventures

[caribbeanscuba-diving]

Caribbean wreck diving ( over 40 ship- and airplane wrecks from Anguilla to the US Virgin Islands)

Which are your favorite Caribbean wrecks?

[caribbeansaving]

Scuba Diving in St Maarten / St Martin with Ocean Explorers

Ocean Explorers was the very first dive shop in St Maarten, est. in 1977 by long time resident Leroy French and since than we have been exploring the reefs and wrecks the island. They have discovered the best that St Maarten has to offer so either you are visiting St Maarten for the first time or you are one of the many return divers, they always try to have something unique to amaze you! Ocean Explorers have received a PADI recognition for Outstanding Services for the last 17 Years that they are a PADI DIVE CENTER and have earned over the past years a reputation of one the best and most experienced dive shops in St Maarten…

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Do you have questions? Send us an email at: [email protected]

[surfacecurrents]

Over and Out

Yesterday the winds finally died down, so we visited Gurnet Rock for our last dive of the season. No work. Just play!! The water was 73°F, the swell was intense, and there were fish everywhere. I even found the most perfect(ly legal) shell specimen that I've seen all year. Sad to say this is my last string of underwater pictures, folks.

...Until the next dive adventure.

[surfacecurrents]

MIZ Survey Dive (Pt II)

Continued from Part I!

For their second survey dive, the students laid a 30-m transect across a series of patch reefs near Three Hill Shoals. The visibility was terrible and everything was covered in fire coral, so hopefully the environment was different enough to find a change in marine invertebrate diversity.

There was so much suspended sediment that very few of my photos turned out. These 3 were probably the best:

Chocolate Chip Sea Cucumber (Isostichopus badionotus)

School of juvenile Tomtates (Haemulon aurolineatum) swimming over a bed of fire coral.

Left to right: Mustard Hill Coral (Porites astreoides), Sponge (Porifera spp.), and Fire Coral (Millepora alcicornis).

[surfacecurrents]

The Madiana

It's shipwreck week in dive class! The Madiana was once a Canadian steamship that ran passengers and general cargo around the Atlantic Ocean. On February 10, 1903, Captain Roderick Frazer directed his boat straight into a reef during stormy seas. The water was so choppy that an assisting tugboat could get no closer than 1 mile away! The crew managed to launch some lifeboats and row to their awaiting rescue without any casualties while the Madiana slowly sank to its final resting place. 

Some of the wreck was salvaged for supplies during WWII, but the bulk of the frame and two boilers still remain in 25 feet of water near North Rock. Click on the jump for a load of pics!

[surfacecurrents]

Three Hill Shoals Transect Dive

Duuude. Three Hill Shoals is chock full of my favorite macroalgae!! (Sidenote: Every time I say "dude" like that, I feel like the turtle from Finding Nemo. Then I think wistfully about becoming a surfer. Wouldn't that be gnarly!? Duuude.) ANYWAY, Caulerpa racemosa is my fav because it resembles green grapes. They seem fluffy, but are actually quite resistant when you try to pop them. (It's okay, I'm not a marine biologist, I like rocks and substrate. I can kill whatever I want.)

And despite my GoPro's best attempts at focusing on everything EXCEPT the organism at hand (it's like he knows I don't have a viewfinder!), I got a halfway decent shot of the miniature vineyard.

[surfacecurrents]

South Shore Reef Transects

One of the most widely adopted methods for studying a reef is the Line-Point Intercept (LPI) Transect. You lay out a 10-meter tape across the reef and swim along slowly, marking down each type of benthic organism every 20 cm. If nothing is there, you comment on the state of the ocean floor (sand, rock, rubble, or turf algae?). Some version of this method is used in nearly all environmental and ecological studies - bird counts, tree counts, etc. ...but when you're underwater, a million things can happen to mess up the data.

We went out on a slightly choppy day and used this exercise as the students' first true science-diver lesson: Working underwater is a lot like being an astronaut.

Your gear is always in the way. Masks limit your vision and fog up, fins double your foot length, and that stupid snorkel keeps hitting you in the head.

Currents and swell are constantly pulling you away from the place you're trying to observe. Assuming, of course, you've already figured out how to control your buoyancy. Most of you haven't.

It's hard to swim in a perfectly straight line when you're laying a tape measure on the "ground." There's a 99% chance that it's going to land upside down so you can't see the numbers anyway.

It can be exasperating to write legibly on an underwater clipboard.

Do you even remember all of the species' Latin names and their corresponding AGGRA code? Ain't no on-site field guides available.

All things considered, the students did pretty well. Hmmm... maybe I should wait on that statement until I've seen their actual data.

Queen Parrotfish - Initial Phase (Scarus vetula)

Bermuda Chub (Kyphosus sectatrix) 

White-Spotted Filefish - Orange Phase (Cantherhines macrocerus)

Diver-In-Training (Scientus diverata)