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Do your first (even 1st several) night dives in a familiar location with no special challenges of its own. Take one or two extra lights (hardware stores sell waterproof to 90ft flashlights for camping, hiking, hunting at just $20 or so) and have one strapped to your BCD so all you have to do is turn it on to have light restored. Knowing you have these backups should allow you to relax about the light issue. Know too that divers are vastly harder to loose and easy to find when everyone is carrying lights. Once you have relaxed about being in the night water, try shielding your light now and again to see how much ambient light there really is. With luck you will get to notice a beautiful starry sky above. Enjoy! Night dives are beautiful.
My 1st night dive was at a quarry. It was really fun because the fish sit much tighter and many creatures such as crayfish and bigger fish are up and about where you can see them. Structures also look so much more mysterious and intriguing in the limited light of a flashlight beam and buddy communication is in many ways hugely easier when you can use lights.
I also thought it was humorous how fish hide behind ridiculously small objects apparently convienced I can't see them (like a fat boy behind a skinny tree) and my buddy kept picking up little "wing man" perches that liked to swim with him in perfect formation.
My first warm water night dive was an absolute explosion of color and creatures at Small Giftun in the Red Sea. A screen saver aquarium has never featured to many creatures in such a small space: many morays in different colors, a Spanish dancer, a slipper lobster, hundreds of different and all equally brilliantly-colored reef fish, spider-web fine corals (?) that only open up at night and have lacy fan-like fingers that cringe in the light, morays foraging up and down and through the reef searching for prey and scared parrot fish hiding from them. Just amazing, a sight of a lifetime.
And put Stetson on your list for night (or day) dives. Just remember to put your reg back in *before* you depart the boat. ;-)
My first night dive was a 30 foot drop off a suspension bridge into a river in Montana. I can't say I reccomend that - it was so dark that we couldn't see the water so we had to trust the people we were with to tell us where to jump from. It was absolutely insane - it was jumping into a pitch black void. We could see absolutely NOTHING. (...)
I am a fan of the high-lumen lights but if you are going to carry one I strongly recommend a wimpy light as well. Depending on the time of year, a super-bright light can attract lots of little critters in the water. It's fun to feed the coral but they can be a bit annoying - this is why I carry both a DRIS 1000 lumen light and an Intova (sp?), which isn't nearly as bright.
I didn't get around to doing night dives until late, mostly because finding buddies for it an getting around to purchasing light etc. seemed like a lot of bother. The first one was an absolute revelation. Lobsters, eels and squid roaming about in the open and critters you never see during the day, like sand worms swimming in open water. Here was my first effort at video on a night dive from last fall.
[video=vimeo;108963008]https://vimeo.com/108963008[/video]
The dive site here is a RI state park and the there are houses or parking lot lights, just you and a star filled sky. Non diving friends always comment on how spooky it looks, but to me the dark and aloness of it is awesome. Sometimes it feels like you are going into the closet to seek out all your childhood monsters and vanquish them. I bought a proper video light for this season, can't wait to see how it comes out. I only wish I could capture the night stars and luminescence the camera can't pickup.