Only about 20 kilometres off the coast of Playa Del Carmen lays Cozumel Islands, the largest of the Mexican Islands.
Mexican Islands are rather small, even Cozumel despite being the largest it is only approximately 45 kilometres long and about 16 kilometres wide. You can go around the whole island in a short time. Not by foot of course. The best would be to rent a scooter and explore.
The gulf of Thailand boarders Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. Once called the gulf of Siam it is now one of the most popular destinations for back-packers and divers. Exquisite food, cheap accommodation and easy diving conditions definitely makes it a top destination.
The island that describes itself as "the last outpost of diving civilization" and where the ocean bed drops off to the dizzying depth of some 600m. An island that names its dive sites Turtle Patch, Barracuda Point and White-Tip Avenue - and they really do live up to their names.
A couple of days ago I had a thought... I actually realized that in the last 16 years ( time flies tooooo fast after your 20th birthday, it’s a fact!), I spent almost one third of my life breathing underwater : I mean, with the Scuba gear of course...I haven’t developed any gill yet! But still... most of my memories, nowadays, are related to the underwater World!
If you like warm water, amazing beaches and thousand of fishes all around visit the wonderful Maldives Atolls.
The Maldives lies in two chain of 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean, there are 1,190 coral Islands (more than 200 inhibited). The climate is a tropical-monsoon with warm temperature all year around and there are two different season, the dry season from December to April the monsoon blows from north-est, the wet season from may to November the wind comes from south-west.
Sharks, stingrays, barracudas, nudibranches, seahorse, dolphins, turtles, whales, gorgonias, annemonies, cleaning shrimps, moray eels, jacks… they are my colleagues, friends and business partners, mostly. In a normal year I spend more hours with them as for example on a subway.
When people starts their dive education, they still don’t know, that soon they gonna be underwater even in the dark nights, while others are already preparing the dinner or going out to bars... I have to tell you, that even with years of working in the dive industry, there is still something exciting to everyone, including instructors and dive guides.
As a dive shop, our top priority always seems to be to get people into the water and bring them back happy and safe. But, as a reef ecologist, and really just as any aquatic life enthusiast, there’s also a greater responsibility we don’t always think about. We need to protect the ecosystems that support not only the dive industry, but all maritime industries, and of course, an incredible amount of fish, invertebrate, plant, and microbial life.
As new divers, we all want to see the big stuff : turtles, sharks, eels, and rays are the stars of the underwater world for a reason! But, as most of us progress, we start to notice and take an interest in the smaller and harder to spot ocean life. This passion for the small fish lifes is usually just referred to as macro.
