There is a new page on this blog. It is called DiveAtlas, it is free, it requires no account, and it does one thing: it tells you which dive destinations are worth travelling to for a specific animal, and in which months.
You search for what you want to see, you set the month you can actually take off work, you set your certification level, and the map narrows. Every destination opens into a grid, one row per species, twelve columns, one per month.
Why another one of these
Because the existing ones answer a different question than the one divers ask.
Most dive destination databases record that a species has been observed at a site. That is a legitimate thing to record, and it is not the same as telling you where to go. Search for whale shark and you get Hurghada, because a whale shark did pass by once, some years ago, in front of someone with a camera. The result is a list of hundreds of sites, most of which are places where your real chance of the encounter is somewhere around one in a million.
DiveAtlas is built from the opposite end. Search for oceanic whitetip and you get four destinations, not four thousand. No guarantees, obviously, but they are the places people travel to specifically for that animal. If a destination is listed here for a species, it is one of the places on Earth for that species. Nothing is in the database because a sighting once happened.
What it will not do
It will not give you odds. Nobody can. You can dive Daedalus in October and see no hammerheads at all, and you can spend August in Tonga without meeting a humpback. Any percentage you find on a website was invented by whoever built the website.
What the database records is seasonality and reputation, which are the only two things that can honestly be recorded. The rest belongs to the sea.
The usual disclosures
It is compiled by hand, by one person, and it is not finished. There are destinations missing and there are certainly errors. If you find one, or if you know a place that clearly belongs in here and is not, write to me and I will fix it. Corrections from people who have actually been in that water are the fastest way this thing improves.
The destination cards contain affiliate links for liveaboards and flights. If you use them, they pay for the hosting, at no additional cost for you. If you ignore them, the tool works exactly the same.
Or read some of my posts about diving travels:
- my scuba diving travel guide
- the Red Sea and the Thistlegorm wreck (Egypt)
- the Maldives
- Raja Ampat (West Papua, Indonesia)
- Cozumel (Mexico)
- Mafia Island (Tanzania)
- the cenotes in Yucatan (Mexico)
- Marettimo (Sicily, Italy)
