Lets make DIVE ATLAS - USA

[EFX]

Awesome! This is why we will need the services of good folks like you who have been diving these waters to sort out the above from personal experience and tell us which of these would be the best dives and why? Other information will also be useful such as conditions, temperature, duration of boat rides, where to stay, good place to eat etc.

Now you're up to 350-400 pages.

350-400 pages?!! That's only for the Great Lakes. I have a book on the Great Lakes wrecks which contains 1 or 2 pages per wreck that summarizes the history, location, dive particulars, that runs about 200+ pages. There isn't any info on the non-diving aspects for vacationers. I've dove the Straits of Mackinaw and the Bert Wells a couple of times off of Chicago. As previously mentioned the Great Lakes contain some of the oldest and well preserved wrecks in the country (world?). Hopefully, someone will find the wreck of the Le Griffon (1679) which was the first European boat to ply the waters of Lake Michigan.

You may want to create two books: one for warm water (year round diving) and one for cold (summer diving).

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

I have the Chris Kohl's book on Great Lakes which is in two volumes and covers 100 wrecks. A lot of wrecks that he talks about are in Canadian waters so that eliminates a few for our purposes (Whew!). Id love to get in touch with people in those areas who have done more diving there and eliminate a few more wrecks specially from Lake Michigan and Erie. Eberward and Cedarville are two amazing dives.

Anything besides those two please or I am not playing.

 

[kevindsingleton]

Sounds neat. I wouldn't buy it, though. I would expect it to be obsolete, even if purchased, new. Why not go with an online resource, like drrich2 said, featuring user contributions, sort of like Wikipedia, but for cool people?

 

[diversteve]

People dive off Lanai - more so from Maui but Trilogy has a shop there also.
Molokai also - there's at least two shops there.
Ni'ihau also except that's only by boat from Kauai.

There's also summer diving off South Carolina - both Myrtle Beach and Charleston. It's very similar to NC, wrecks, sharks etc.

There's also diving off Maryland - besides the National Aquarium dive. Any state that has water in it probably has diving. I live in Arizona (not on your list) yet we dive Lakes Mead, Mojave, Pleasant, Havasu, Powell and parts of the Colorado River. So do divers from Nevada and Colorado. Homestead Crater is really popular in Utah, the Blue Hole in New Mexico probably more so. Also Beaver Lake in Arkansas should make Section 7. There's several submerged towns/structures in it, an amphitheater, railroad bridge and small town were all submerged in the south end when they raised the water level.

There's also a ghost town in Mead but with the lake at historic lows you can walk out to it now. Another interesting dive for Section 7 might be the B29 in Mead. There's very limited access and although it's currently a rec dive, were the lake to fill to normal levels it's a tech dive. And pretty popular, all the slots are filled and people fly in from all over the country to dive it.

I'd realistically list all 50 states in your outline and let people fill in the details. And quantify "best". For someone living in Kansas, best might be a local lake. We have one like that in Phoenix. It's Pleasant listed above which is a very inappropriate name IMO for a cold water, muddy lake with a thermocline most of the year. Yet local divers are up there every weekend and tech divers often travel here to dive the old dam at 200'+. Even a couple working dive boats.

And when it's done put it on the Internet. Sell a few discreet banner ads to pay for the hosting/design costs. Books are so 90's...plus you can't update a book. One thing I really find useful on shorediving.com is they list GPS coordinates.

 

[marcushall]

The type of info you are wanting to collect sounds so much like climbing sites around the country to me.. Look at Mountain Project | Rock Climbing and see if the data collection and organization would be a decent fit for scuba dives.. They've been at it for 10 years and have 134,698 routes in the database..

 

[100days-a-year]

Florida Springs, Springs in Florida, Florida Cave Diving, Manatee Viewing - Florida's Springs: Protecting Nature's Gems - Florida DEP nice format for online guides

I've dove mostly from the Marquesas to NC on the East Coast.In excess of 7000 dives just there.Could not cover the more memorable dives in one book.
Gary Gentile's books cover only the barest minimum of wrecks alone and only cover 200 miles of coast max at 200+pages.
Mike Barnette's books cover Florida wrecks pretty well and give several pages of historic documentation to many but there are quite a few missing.
The earlier books by Stick,Marx,Singer etc...still just scratch the surface
Throw in springs,sinks,rivers,lakes ,quarries,caves in freshwater and the reefs,ledges,sinkholes and other natural bottom structure and the task is beyond any written work short of a very extensive/expensive encyclopedia.
Best of luck.

 

[drrich2]

One approach would be create a website project and solicit destination write ups with dive site reviews. Perhaps similar to Undercurrent's trip reports, for consistent, relevant and practical content. This lets you collaborate with many people and more quickly amass a large body of content without the quality control and editorial burden required to prepare a final draft for a limited series large color print book (if hardback even more expensive).

Give it a year. Maybe two. Compare what you've collected to your book objectives. If you see enough info., start writing a rough draft. Make an informal private version compatible with a self publisher's website, like Lulu.com. Get some people to help write sections if you wish.

Have a few printed. This isn't your final product, has no ISBN, and if you publish you might do it through somebody else. The point is to hold it in your hands. Read it. Loan copies to some other divers and ask if they'd buy this, would it be useful to them?

I'm thinking each chapter would discuss the main kinds of diving at a given destination, and profile a few 'brand name' sites representative of it, or special and worthwhile. Like in threads asking for Bonaire's top 10 dives. This book cannot be an encyclopedic reference, but it can be a solid intro. and set people on the path.

Richard.

 

[CAPTAIN SINBAD]

I think there is a lot of confusion about what we are trying to accomplish here. This is not an attempt to document every single site in every state. Such an attempt would need many lifetimes of many people and would be useless because it would need many lifetimes on part of the reader to read. I said it will be the biggest guide simply because if you try to be extremely selective about the dive sites you still have the 8th largest coast line to cover. Add the great lakes and it gets even bigger. I think it would be best to aim for 500 pages max.

Keep in mind that Dive the World (Footprint) covers "the whole world" in 350 pages.

Diving the World, 2nd: Full colour guide to diving (Footprint Diving the World: A Guide to the World's Coral Seas): Beth Tierney, Shaun Tierney: 9781906098766: Amazon.com: Books

One of the things that makes these guides worthwhile is that someone has already sorted out the sites and minimized them to what the author (or general consensus in the diving community) regards as "the best." Yes, I am fully aware that there are many, many sites but someone has to sort through them for the dive tourist right? I don't agree with the sorting out that was done in "Dive the World" but I am still glad that someone put a book like that together.

 

[RJP]

I think there is a lot of confusion about what we are trying to accomplish here.

We?

Do you have a mouse in your shirt pocket?

 

[rhwestfall]

there already is a "sub-module" completed:

Kohl's Great Lakes Diving Guide.... how many pages there? 608...... (1,000+/- wrecks listed according to the page on Amazon)

P.S. - You forgot the St. Lawrence River. It likely is a subset to the Great Lakes.... and in there...