Your most expensive dive

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Esprise Me

Kelp forest dweller
Staff member
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Location
Los Angeles, CA
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Inspired by the "Cost per dive" thread. There are beach dives where you only pay for gasoline and a tank fill; there are dive trips to developing countries where everything is cheap; there are dives people get paid to do. But what's the most you've ever spent on a dive? Feel free to be creative with your answer, including unplanned adverse events in your calculations; just be sure to tell the story behind it.

My answer is the Mandalay Bay Aquarium dive I did in Vegas for $650, described here: Review of Shark Reef aquarium dive at Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas

I bet some of you can beat that...
 
Sadly, a 1992 dive off the Sonoma Coast of California, when conditions radically changed over about forty-five minutes; and I managed to get tossed into a bed of red and purple urchins (the former, whose spines can well exceed 8 cm), on the way back, which effectively nailed my 7 mm suit to my back and thigh.

The use of a Leatherman® by a friend, removed a number of spines; but many, being brittle, broke beneath the skin, and I contracted a nasty staphylococcal infection, within a few days; and spent the better part of a week in the hospital.

Never order "catch of the day" in a medical setting for dinner -- a decision which I later attributed to the fever that I had been experiencing. Couldn't touch it.

Wish that the cost had been a few weeks on the Coral Sea and PNG; but that proved far cheaper . . .
 
$700 (3-dive offshore trip, crew tips, tank rentals, hotel, and fuel) / 3 dives = $233.33/dive. I know..”weak sauce” compared to tech dives.
 
My trimix certification dive. So, 6 of us flew together to Fort Lauderdale to take AN/DP, trimix, and gas blender from a well known instructor and board member of a training agency. Very long story short, we were run out of FLL by Hurricane Wilma, and over a week, spent one day in the pool.

After a period of time, 8 of us (the 6 students, instructor, and instructor girlfriend) flew to Cozumel to complete the dives. This required flying with a booster which was left in Coz, and buying helium in Cozumel in 2002, an extremely expensive proposition. We were able to complete a single dive on trimix.

That one dive, including RT airfare from HOU to FLL and HOU to CZM, a week in hotel FLL, a week in CZM, airfare for instructor and his GF (who didn’t actually go to CZM) class fees, helium fees, and abandoning a 15/45 booster in Cozumel I figured cost my wife and I $25,000. So for 1 trimix dive and a pool session, I got gas blender, AN/DP, and normoxic trimix certs for both IANTD and TDI.
 
$125 US + $20 DM tip for a two tank dive to the oil rig "Little Sarah" with American Diving out of S. Padre Island, TX. in 2010.
 

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