shopguy
Contributor
I'm looking for the same, although I might be more "shore dives" focus than just "shore based". My first try was a few months ago, spent a month in Puerto Rico. I knew it wasn't famous for the best diving, but it was easy with current travel restrictions, and in my home country (although it felt more like Mexico, which I also enjoy). The shore diving doesn't have enough options for me, since most of the sites require a near perfect day to be safe, and it is very often windy there. Crash Boat Beach on the west side of the island was the only place we could dive every day and have good to great conditions -- it made the trip worth doing again. If you like boat dives though, you could stay busy and have lots more options. Sadly though, Internet was hit/miss for me. I have about 5 online meetings per week, and I didn't miss any of them, but a couple times I did have to drive around to find a decent signal and call in, because the wi-fi in the AirBnb (in San Juan) wasn't working. If you can find a place with good Internet though, I'd stay on one of the smaller islands around PR, the boat dive we did just off of Culebra was awesome. I will probably try that if I go back, this time the smaller islands had extra travel restrictions making it much harder to do.
Since I'm so focused on shore diving, I'm researching Bonaire, which seems to be the "shore diving capital of the world" -- but Internet seems to be a hard thing to get a REAL feel for. I guess because most reviews so far are written by people on vacation, and getting away from the Internet. Maybe more info will be available as more people are working from home and from these vacation type places. For me anyway, knowing that I can send emails or upload/transfer files isn't the important part, it is "at exactly 5pm-6pm today, can my Internet handle an online meeting, and not drop out for even a few seconds". If it happens a couple times, oh well, but if it happens very often, that ends my freedom to work from anywhere. I don't need bandwidth either, at home I only have dialup speed Internet (literally, 256kbps upload speed, maybe 2mbps download on a good day), but it works fine, at least it doesn't cut out very often. Most reviews talking about "good Internet" are more focused on being able to stream videos/Netflix at 100mbps, not really reliability of 99.99% uptime when you need it.
Since I'm so focused on shore diving, I'm researching Bonaire, which seems to be the "shore diving capital of the world" -- but Internet seems to be a hard thing to get a REAL feel for. I guess because most reviews so far are written by people on vacation, and getting away from the Internet. Maybe more info will be available as more people are working from home and from these vacation type places. For me anyway, knowing that I can send emails or upload/transfer files isn't the important part, it is "at exactly 5pm-6pm today, can my Internet handle an online meeting, and not drop out for even a few seconds". If it happens a couple times, oh well, but if it happens very often, that ends my freedom to work from anywhere. I don't need bandwidth either, at home I only have dialup speed Internet (literally, 256kbps upload speed, maybe 2mbps download on a good day), but it works fine, at least it doesn't cut out very often. Most reviews talking about "good Internet" are more focused on being able to stream videos/Netflix at 100mbps, not really reliability of 99.99% uptime when you need it.