Personally, I was underwhelmed with the diving in Hawai’i and the Keys. The viz was awful and I found out real fast I DO NOT like drift diving. I don’t like not being in control of where I want to go.
The Divemaster’s personal recommend is for Bonaire and my best diving was done in the Turks and Caicos Islands off Provo.
Really surprised nobody has mentioned Key Largo: a great mix of shallow and deep diving, lots of coral, it’s in a protected sanctuary (minus lobster season and the killing of invasive lionfish), and more often than not, the water is clear and fantastic. Lodging can be relatively inexpensive, and since it’s in the US, flights to Miami or Ft. Lauderdale reasonably priced.
Phuket is where I learned to dive. Warm water, beautiful reefs, and low prices. Plus nice beaches, great Thai seafood, and of course the ladyboys!
… if that’s what you’re into, I mean.
I hate to disappoint the ladyboys, but although the pics look spectacular (James Bond Island looks especially cool) I think airfare might be prohibitive. (I’m not at all wealthy and will likley have to pinch pennies to even manage.) I would love to see some Buddhist temples and visit a completely different culture, but at $1000 just to get there, I might have to put it on my: “When I win the lottery” list. Oh, and start playing the lottery.
Turks and Caicos looks a little more affordable. Staying in the country might make sense (theoretically, I could drive to FL.) but I would like to go to some really great dive locations and it sounds like the Keys are nice, but not spectacular.
I have heard several people mention Baja California as a good destination, although it sounds like the Pacific side might be a little treacherous. I’m also not as interested in “night life” so much as archeological sites, museums, architecture or hiking.
Calm and clear? Bahamas or Grand Cayman. Your travel agent can show you some nice dive packages for both.
I do love Belize, Bonaire, and T&C as well, but have spent the last 3 years going to St. Croix. Not as many wrecks as other places, but not the traffic and reef destruction you see other places. It’s a U.S. Virgin Island, so no passport is required, they use USD, not too expensive, and they only get the cruise ship crowds over in Fredericksted, so it’s pretty quiet all the time. Buck Island is a couple of miles off the coast, and is a National Park, both above and below the surface, and is just one of hundreds of great dive sites.
Mrs. Duc wants to retire there, and I’m not terribly opposed.
Depends on your perspective, I think. I have about 125 dives under my belt. I have out with three dive instructors and a dive master all time time - they have over 1000 dives each. 
But there is plenty of good stuff to see in shallow water. I don’t need to be 100’ down to enjoy a dive. I’ve seen turtles, stingrays, sharks, and more just snorkeling off the coast of Fort Lauderdale.
The place I went to in the lower keys offers a refresher course for something like $60 or $75. I’m not sure what my friends would charge. If you have the opportunity to do a refresher before you travel, I’d recommend it. You don’t want to spend time on your quick vacation with the refresher when you could be diving!
The diving we did down there was real easy - my roommate for the trip had been certified for all of two weeks, and he had no issues.
-D/a
I live in Key Largo, FL and work in the dive industry- it’s not expensive to travel here and the diving is spectacular! Very easy to get set up with a refresher course and be out on the reefs that day enjoying the life out there- turtles, sharks, eels, lobsters, grouper, tons of tropical fish. PM me if you have questions!
I will very likely take you up on that offer. The major benefit to FL.–as I see it–is travel cost. It’s so much less expensive to get there, and a short trip makes more sense. If I fly to Thailand, I’m not likely to go for a three-day trip!
I’d love to go somewhere exotic, but the most exotic place I’ve been so far is Square Lake MN., so just about anything will be a step up. Plus, I can make more long range plans to get to Belize or Mexico or the Caribbean with a smaller step in between.
The Florida Keys are great to get you blowing bubbles again. For your topside interests, try a day trip out to see Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas. And the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum in Key West is well worth checking out.
And the Keys are definitely more exotic than Square Lake, guaranteed!
And they make a really good lime pie out in the Keys, as well.
Key Largo is an easy drive for me. Let me know if it happens, and I’ll try to make it too.
We should make it a Dopefest!
-D/a
I’ve dived in Belize, Honduras and Cozumel (along with a small number of dives in S CA and Rocky Point, Mexico), and all three were great. Belize especially had a large amount of variety in dive types, great visibility, lots of wildlife and well run dive shops. The flight cost was moderate to high, but I was able to justify it by stating in-country for a month, and everything there is nice and cheap thanks to a fixed 2:1 currency exchange.
I did dive the Blue Hole, although it was fairly overrated IMO; far away from Caye Caulker, short down time, nothing but stalactites and rock to see at the dive bottom (which is obviously nowhere near the actual bottom), and a 10 minute stop on the way up. I enjoyed swimming with the 8-10 foot blacktip reef sharks that were there, getting a taste of nitrogen narcosis and I got a couple cool pics from 130 feet or so with about 8 sharks circling 60 feet overhead, but overall I could have done 4-6 dives that day for the same price as the Blue Hole and 1 bonus dive, which took all day. One thing I didn’t know much about but had a blast doing was night and evening dives, a lot like night hikes where you seen parts of the wilderness that don’t normally come out during the day. Whale sharks are also awesome, but you have to go at the right time of year, plus they tend to be farther south. I did a whale shark dive out of Placencia, and I think they do some out of Roatan as well.
I did a lot of traveling in SE Asia and met a fair number of dive enthusiasts. They would sit and talk about various spots around the globe they’d visited. They’d all compare notes, it was fun to see how excited they’d get. I wasn’t really following too closely, I’m more a snorkeler!
But I do remember this, the one place that would send them into actual reverie was the Philippines. Their well crafted and wonderfully described, stories of dives, would turn to a lot of, ‘There is no way to describe it -truly!’, and, ‘You must, you must, go dive there while you’re here!’, and nothing but superlatives and head shaking of the, ‘You have to see it!’, variety.
It was kind of entertaining because you could tell from across the bar that they’d reached the Philippines portion of the evening! Divers are a different breed. When you’re roaming the globe, they seem to be everywhere you go. And they’re fun too!
Wow. I found a few very reasonable packages for Donsol. The main restriction is airfare. Belize is about half the price.
I’m going to have to start whittling down based on cost and what I’d like to see. Animal life sounds pretty cool, but I’ve found that it’s hard to count on critters. It’s almost like they have minds of their own!
Geological features and wrecks don’t move around a lot, but it sounds like something like the blue hole could turn out to be uninspiring once the snapshot moment is over.
Coral reefs might be ultimate answer. Some animal life and some geological qualities. Belize has barrier reefs, but Bonaire comes up on a lot of lists of great reef diving.
I guess I shouldn’t complain that there are so many options to choose from.
They talked a lot about, million/billion dollar bay, I think it was called. I could be misremembering.
After the second world war, one of those islands had tons of airfield building equipment etc. Too expensive to ship back, too likely to negatively impact the island culture, if left. So they pushed it all into the bay.
Where it is now, a diver’s paradise/playground, in clear warm water. Y’know, if you like that kind of thing.
I don’t dive but I do collect shells, and the other thing I know about the Philippines is, they have truly awesome sea shells. (One day I’ll get myself there!)
Heck yes! Where are you located Digital- do you do any diving north of here? I’m branching out into some shore diving in West Palm and Lauderdale by the Sea.
Also ScubaQueen posted that she didn’t like the drift diving that went on here and the vis was bad- surely it doesn’t need to be pointed out that the majority of diving here is not drift diving and that vis is a combination of current and winds (and proximity to the gulfstream). We often enjoy unlimited visibility, particularly on the flat, calm days of the summer.
What’s the attraction of diving in deep quarries? Reef diving sounds neat-but nothing worth seeing in an old flooded quarry (IMHO).
Kinda depends on what’s been thrown down in it.
I’m in Plantation. You? How far out are you branching to get to Lauderdale by the Sea?
Most of my shore diving is off Commercial Pier. I’ve gone diving as far north as Seattle, but that’s probably not important right now.
-D/a
What kind of time frame would you be looking at? A Florida trip might be feasible for me late in the fall…