Night Diving as primary diving

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AmorForTheOcean

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Messages
29
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17
Location
Philadelphia, US
# of dives
200 - 499
I really prefer night diving to day diving. Would like to know if there are any liveaboards or dive shops that do more than 1 night dive per day.

If a girl can dream, I'd love to a night dive-only trip / charter, or at least more night / blackwater dives than day.

I thank you all in advance for any suggestions!
 
I really prefer night diving to day diving. Would like to know if there are any liveaboards or dive shops that do more than 1 night dive per day.

If a girl can dream, I'd love to a night dive-only trip / charter, or at least more night / blackwater dives than day.

I thank you all in advance for any suggestions!
Bonaire? CocoView?

In our experience the LOBs we have used have only offered 1 night dive per day. Many (most, all) of the land based dive operators we have used have offered 1 night dive per week (but only if enough divers sign up).

If you want night dives, go some place where you do not have to depend upon the operator to make a dive happen.
 
I'm envisioning a liveaboard where the divers sleep all day, awake in the evening to dive, and go to sleep before the sun comes up. Dracula would love this.
 
My daughter and I love this idea for fluorescent photography. The brief stress-filled night dive in a current that we did was still AWESOME!
Plus no sunburn!
Here is my ideal; A place with lots of flourescent critters, location and timing low current, top visibility, plus one hired Divemaster per diver, each set going in their own direction so that photographers don't interfere with each other and Divemaster doesn't let obsessed photographer forget about safety and reef non-interference. Sunrise brunch, then sleep until late afternoon.
 
I really prefer night diving to day diving. Would like to know if there are any liveaboards or dive shops that do more than 1 night dive per day.
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. :)
 
It's common for dive ops to do a twilight + night dive.

Arrange your own group to fill up the boat, then ask to push the schedule back an hour to do two night dives.
 
Bonaire? CocoView?

.

I can see doing two night dives on Bonair per night if one wanted to do that. Not foreseeing a need, but curious: How would you do more night dive in one night on Bonaire? (How do you end up with a sufficient number of filled tanks for those dives with the fill stations closed and 2 tanks per person being the (official) limit)?

...

That vampire LOB might be quite interesting... All of a sudden due to market forces LOB boats double in size with night shift and day shift occupants ... sharing the dive deck / dinghy's in shifts ... hopefully not...
 
I can see doing two night dives on Bonair per night if one wanted to do that. Not foreseeing a need, but curious: How would you do more night dive in one night on Bonaire? (How do you end up with a sufficient number of filled tanks for those dives with the fill stations closed and 2 tanks per person being the (official) limit)?

...

That vampire LOB might be quite interesting... All of a sudden due to market forces LOB boats double in size with night shift and day shift occupants ... sharing the dive deck / dinghy's in shifts ... hopefully not...

Glad you enjoyed the vampire liveaboard humor. Bwahaha! As for Bonaire, it's easy to end up with a surplus of tanks. You take two before breakfast, then come back for two more, then after lunch you pick up two more, etc. Of course, you could simply flout the "rule" and pick up three or four. At least once, I saw someone in our group pick up tanks on behalf of a spouse back at the condo, which is almost certainly against the rules. We always had an extra tank around our condo in case we wanted to do a house reef dive on the spur of the moment.
 
That vampire LOB might be quite interesting... All of a sudden due to market forces LOB boats double in size with night shift and day shift occupants ... sharing the dive deck / dinghy's in shifts ... hopefully not...

That's an interesting concept.

Everything could be shared as long as there's no schedule overlap, including state rooms and even underwear. Just flip em inside out.
 
I can see doing two night dives on Bonair per night if one wanted to do that. Not foreseeing a need, but curious: How would you do more night dive in one night on Bonaire? (How do you end up with a sufficient number of filled tanks for those dives with the fill stations closed and 2 tanks per person being the (official) limit)?
..
I guess it all depends upon where you stay. At the Divi tanks are left out 24 hours a day out on the dock by the gear lockers. When we start our night dive there is generally 30 or 40ish full tanks available. I have never seen the full tank pile empty.

The Divi tank station in the parking lot is also accessible 24 hours a day.
 
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