Houston People!

[philmayer]

I'm thinking about relocating to Houston for a job.

Tell me about diving in Houston.

Your favorite PADI shops, is there a PADI CD, where do you go diving, etc.....

I'm a PADI DM, we do our local OW training in a quarry, and I take trips to the Caribbean a couple times a year.

 

[Mack Diver]

There are several dive shops in Houston. With a city that size, you probably want to find one fairly close to where you live. Gigglin Marlin is a good shop there and Sea Sports has several locations around town. Check the PADI.com site for a complete list of PADI shops in the Houston area.

The new big dive site is Mammoth Lake. It is a recently flooded quarry that they put allot of interesting items in.Good sources of information for the Houston area are: BAD (Bay Area Divers) and CHUM (City of Houston Underwater Mariners). Those are the two largest social groups in the Houston area.

 

[Jay_SMART_Diver]

Here's a couple of threads that have a lot of shop info with links...

http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/texas-swamp-divers/179964-houston-area-dive-shops.html
http://www.scubaboard.com/forums/introductions-greets/176827-howdy-houston.html

 

[donnad]

hi there. i'll chime in. i like Scuba Houston on Kimberly. also use Seasports Scuba on Westheimer to get my reg serviced (scuba houston is not a zeagle auth. shop). Scuba houston has a pool onsite which is nice for testing out gear. as far as diving.......well........uh.........as far as the ocean.........you have to get at least 20 something miles out there to get out of the opaque water we have in galveston (thanks to the good ole mississippi river).....so....you can go out to some of the oil rigs....not real cheap, but doable. Flower Gardens Marine Sanctuary.......coral reef .....is about 110 miles out there and there are charters that go out for trips.......not cheap these days of course. i went to mammoth lake a couple weeks ago. that is the newest, and in my opinion best local diving. it's pretty nice. very nice facilities they've built....pavillions, picnic tables, nice docks with ladders down into the water. onsite dive shop.....hydrosportsscuba.com that's about an hour drive from houston down south off 288. i live in sugar land and love it there. i'm a native houstonian, so.......i like houston

 

[Scubafast]

Like they said below...depends on the area you live in since Houston is VERY spread out but sometime it is worth the drive across town if you can save a couple of hundred bucks. I know the shop I do business with is in Clear Lake where I use to live but I know live across town in Katy. Divers Paradise in Webster, Tx. They discount the big stuff expensive stuff 20-40% off MSRP which adds up quick!
The owner can be an old grump sometimes if you are just there to mess around and not buy but they have the stuff in stock and at the right price. Their service tech has been doing repairs for over 17 yrs too. Visit around and compare there are quite a few shop in the area though a few have closed down in recent years. Between the shops and the clubs mentioned previously you should find out about our diving here. We are a gateway city to the Caribbean and it is sometimes as cheap to fly to Cozumel as it is to take a charter out the the Flower Gardens and the diving is not as tempermental (weather-wise.)