This is a fun thread, Mike! Hope people continue to contribute to it. It's fun to hear what people see as the unique facets of their local diving.
Welcome to ScubaBoard, the world's largest scuba diving community. Registration is not required to read the forums, but we encourage you to join. Joining has its benefits and enables you to participate in the discussions.
Benefits of registering include
Here in Thailand we have the kind of conditions that make some cold water divers claim we are only half-trained because we don't have to deal with the psychological and other demands that cold water taxes divers with.
However, we do have coral, and lots of it. The thing I'd counsel a cold-water diver like yourself to be aware of is exactly where those fins are, regardless of the kick style you prefer. We also have swim-through boulder sites, so knowing where your tank is in relation to the space you're going through is important, especially since coral also grows in and around the swim throughs.
The other thing that's characteristic of our diving here is that virtually all of our dives are drifts, so it's important to know how to deploy an SMB. For drifts, good buddy skills are crucial since you can easily get way ahead of a buddy who stops to marvel at some critter in a hole in the wall.
In NJ we have some different types of diving. Inshore we have some jetties, long piles of rocks, that can be accessed either from the jetty itself or from a surf entry. There are generally a lot of fish there, with some tropicals like butterfly fish and trigger fish in the late summer. Currents and tides are important to pay attention to. Temperatures vary from low 80's in the summer (hey, it happened once or twice) to low 40's in winter.
Offshore some fantastic wreck diving is waiting. This is all boat diving, sometimes with very heavy current, but not drift diving. In other words you better be able to navigate the wreck or junk pile back to the anchor line. Some specialized gear include "uplines", where in you can tie off to the wreck, shoot a lift bag to the surface and there for not be too far away from the boat when you get there. "Jon" lines are also seen frequently here, these are lines that you tie to the anchor line while doing your stops, so you can hang easily even though the boat (and line) is heaving in the waves above. Also some way to get the attention of the boat crew should you lose or get blown off the line, whistle and sausage.
Water temps are pretty constant in the low 50's,at the bottom, viz can range from wholly crap I can see the entire wreck!, to wholly crap I can't see my hand on my mask, with the latter more common.
I plan to buy one soon. Can you tell me what type of SMB is preferred?
Here in South-Central Florida (Palm Beach-Jupiter-Stuart- Ft. Pierce), most of my diving consists of drifting reefs and wrecks. As we all should know, special safety equipment considerations for drift diving may include: sound producing devices, surface marker buoys+ reel (or spool), safety sausage and even portable VHF radios.
Water temps in Palm Beach fall between mid 60s during the winter to 85+ in the summer. Stuart and Ft. Pierce will see cooler temps as the Gulf Stream tends to be further offshore- temps down in the upper 50s are not unheard of.
If you get bored just looking as fish, recreational equipment for the area may include: a camera, lobster hunting gear or spearguns. The avid spearos will no doubt encounter sharks-hammerheads, bulls and reefies and for this reason most hunters will use liftbags to evacuate fish to the surface for the boat to retrieve.
Hope this helps for divers considering the South-central Florida area.
Steve Wood
Deep Six Jensen Beach, FL