Click here to explore a map of the Roatan Marine Park dive sites! I’ve been developing the new website for the Roatan Marine Park (coming soon to http://www.roatanmarinepark.com), and a big part of the site is the interactive map of all the dive sites around Roatan. Explore the dive sites around Roatan! Powered by Google maps and TIREngine, you can zoom in on beautiful satellite imagery of the dive sites surrounding Roatan’s incredible coral reef system. Click on any site to learn more information, or use the drop-down box above the pull up a full dive site description. Have you seen some lionfish? Know of a damaged or missing dive site mooring? The map is integrated with the Roatan Marine » read more «

Well this is pretty crazy… The thought floats to the surface of my consciousness as my bubbles cascade against the gnarled ceiling just inches above my head, slipping through invisible porous slivers in the ironshore and cascading through a impossibly interwoven stream of eons-old coral fossils to escape, unnoticed, on the surface twenty feet above my head. Twenty vertical feet, I remind myself. I am wedged forty feet inside a tiny fissure in the fore reef at Hole in the Wall dive site near West End, Roatan, Honduras. An ominous hallway of unexplored darkness looms before me, beckoning me to shed my dive light deeper into the cave. The last inklings of Caribbean sunlight illuminate my hands as I loop » read more «

Suspended eighty feet underwater, I have a few seconds to take in my surroundings. My heartbeat—the only sound I can hear—marks the time. My lungs are now less than a third the volume they were twenty seconds ago. Abdominal muscles clenched, I restrain the spasms of my diaphragm, willing myself to ignore the steady toxic accumulation of carbon dioxide in my body. Mere minutes from drowning, I am relaxed. The crack in which I am suspended is visible from the surface. Minutes earlier, as I floated on the surface deliberately slowing my breathing in anticipation of the dive, I studied the contour of this particularly severe crack in the reef, noting its abyssal blue hue atypical of most sand chutes. » read more «

Believe it or not, the best dive course you’ll ever take has nothing to do with scuba diving. As a PADI Instructor, there’s a lot of dive courses I love teaching. There’s nothing like seeing a student take their first breaths underwater during the Open Water Course, or watching divers make the crucial improvements in self-awareness in the PADI Rescue Course. However, one course always seems to get glossed over in the PADI system: the Emergency First Response course. It’s sad, too, because in my honest opinion this is the single most important course anyone can take. The day-to-day applications of Emergency First Response course extend far beyond scuba diving. In just the last year, I have: Dealt with the » read more «