Calling them deep dives?

[Jersey]

As training has gotten shallower, shallow dives have come to be seen as deeper, its quite natural.

wiping coffee off...I guess it's an exercise in inverse proportions.

Is the real question are they difficult dives? A 30 foot, no viz, ripping current is more difficult then the loooong (sarcasm folks) surface swim, 99-feet-to-the-sand, second reef system that the Hooker lies on.

And as mentioned, if you want to get deep there are more and more places available for mixed gas and technical dives such as the Windjammer.

 

[under water]

Do you guys consider the Hooker to be a 'deep' dive?

The location I've dived the most is Cozumel and deep dives are considered approaching 130, such as Maricibo or Punta Sur, your 1st dive of the day in Cozumel is routinely going to be at 80ft -90ft followed by a surface interval and a 2nd 'shallower' dive in the 40-60ft range.

In Coz, we usually went down to 90 feet or so and them worked our way back up. I don't remember staying at 90+ for long. As I recall the "hooker", you pretty much stayed in the 90 foot range exploring the wreck for the whole dive. That makes a difference in air usage (at least for me).
I do recall that the dive ops put a pretty short time limit on it though as a lot of folks do their first "deep" dive on the "Hilma Hooker"

 

[reefduffer]

Just another take on "what's a deep dive":
I've been working my way through the UHMS 1997 workshop report on "Near Drowning" that was recommended by Jon Kranhouse in post #69 of this thread: http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/accidents-incidents/331412-diver-dies-islamorada-2.html Interesting reading, a little slow because I'm not medically trained so I'm looking up terms in Wikipedia almost every paragraph. But back on point for this thread:

From page 28, discussing "Depth of Incident" among contributing factors [Bolding is mine]:

... This demonstrates that it is not so much the environment that is the problem, but the diver's experience of that environment. The danger of "diving deeper" without extra prudence and supervision is apparent. Any dive deeper than that previously experienced should be classified and treated as a "deep dive", irrespective of the actual depth.

I think the Bonaire guidebook is referring to the PADI threshhold of 60 feet for OW certs that others mentioned above, but considering the distribution of experience of resort divers, the Hilma Hooker is likeliest the deepest dive attempted for many, if not most, that dive it. I know it's within a few feet of mine.

My point in posting here is that the advice of this quote from the near-drowning workshop emphasizes that any scorn expressed at calling that "deep" in a guidebook leads, at least somewhat, to the sort of peer pressure that gets divers in trouble. Not helpful.

So all you guys that do 200 ft on air, great. Enjoy it. You aren't the guidebook's primary target audience, and there's nothing wrong with that.