Night Diving as primary diving

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I think your best bet is to go someplace with good onsite shore diving where the pool is always open. As previously mentioned, Bonaire and Cocoview are what jump to mind, I think Cocoview would work well, the setup is good for it and you can get a good variety of shore dives from that one spot. Places in Bonaire you'd have to check if/when they lock things up. A few places on Grand Cayman might work. Sunset House you get tanks while the shop is open and put them in your locker for later - you might need an extra locker.) Coconut Bay, Lighthouse Point? - I don't know their routines as far as doing something like this. The previous shop at Turtle Reef would let you label and leave out tanks for night dives after they were closed, though there would be no rinse tanks or anything later. I think after hours people would also come in with tanks from elsewhere and dive there. That might all be the same with Sundivers there now.

Might be a place or 2 in Curacao that would work, like a few apartments and condos serviced by Go West diving - perhaps All West apartments, or maybe Marazul - I'm not familiar with how convenient 24x7 tank and gear availability is there, but it might work. (At their main shop at Kura Hulanda night diving is less convenient than it might be. Unless somethings has changed you have to move your gear to a different locker a small distance away for the evening as they lock the gear room, as well as squirreling away all the tanks you need too. Probably doable, but you'd want to talk to them.)

I think the closest you'll get on a liveaboard is a duskish dive and a night dive, but hard to imagine one that does more than one each night. Even if you find a boat that frequently sits on a dive site for the evening instead of heading for a sheltered mooring for the night, the procedure on most is to have a couple staff on deck watching in case of a problem. So I doubt you'd find one keen on you diving all night. (The crew needs to sleep sometime.) Organized dives with shops, whether shore or boat, you're lucky if there is one each night, often only 1-2 scheduled in a week.

You might google some of the specialty night diving things , like fluorescent night diving. Maybe someone, someplace, offers a specialty trip that focuses on night more, though I've not seen such a thing. (You could always get into organizing trips and see if you can find enough vampire types to fill such a thing. :)


Thanks for these suggestions - I will be looking into them. I'm very familiar with Bonaire, but not the other places you mentioned. I think I will have to end up coordinating something like that myself - agreed.
 
I think you're on to something here. I really think there is plenty to do night diving wise, and especially photography wise, I can easily fill a whole week of capturing the night critters. If I don't end up finding an outfit to do this with, I might organize my own buddy group - probably in Bonaire. So I will keep you posted. I can be a DM on the trip but not sure how many other DMs would be interested. Hmmm. I really want to make this happen. NIGHT SAFARI WEEK!
Why do you feel you need a DM?
 
I like having a DM that knows the area, both underwater, but also resources above water as well in case of emergency. I would consider this a strong element of my dive planning, wherever I go.

I am also interested in night diving up here in Northeast, where there is plenty of life and I can re-dive lications that I have dove in daylight.
Lastly, night diving with drysuits means less likely to overheat in a DRYSUIT like on a hot, sunny day dive.
I am hoping I can make a whole summer fall out of DRYSUIT diving day and night.
 
We got to prefer night diving in the Northeast (when we still dove here) just because of the overheating issue.
 
I don't know if people understand the "2" tank rule most dive shop's have on Bonaire... The point is that they don't want people taking way more tanks then they are going to use.. It's to easy for them to having 100's of tanks sitting in the back of trucks not being used.. Now if you are heading north to dive and ask for "3" tanks for each diver it's never been a problem for me or any other diver I know.. Same thing with night diving. Ask , And they'll help you out.. The other thing is grabbing "Air" as the extra cylinder if they're short on Nitrox tanks..

Jim...
 
I like having a DM that knows the area, both underwater, but also resources above water as well in case of emergency. I would consider this a strong element of my dive planning, wherever I go.

I am also interested in night diving up here in Northeast, where there is plenty of life and I can re-dive lications that I have dove in daylight.
Lastly, night diving with drysuits means less likely to overheat in a DRYSUIT like on a hot, sunny day dive.
I am hoping I can make a whole summer fall out of DRYSUIT diving day and night.
Night diving at Fort Wetherill in RI is a lot more interesting at night.
 
"Night diving at Fort Wetherill in RI is a lot more interesting at night."

I guess, since I image night diving at day is not that interesting ;-)
 
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