Candice LandauLast Updated on October 15, 2024 by Candice Landau
There are three primary things I suggest you consider before you book your dive trip: your dive skill level, the marine life you want to see and the type of diving you want to do. Of course, there’s a fourth one if you also want to spend some time exploring the topside to see what the town or country has to offer, but that I’ll leave to you to decide. I’m going to focus on diving.
1. Pick Your Location Based on: Skill Level
Recently, a newly-certified diving friend mentioned she was considering Galapagos for her next dive vacation. Since I had just returned from the Galapagos, I was a bit alarmed—I didn’t feel it was a destination for beginners, though I’m sure they’d be awestruck by the pelagic encounters.
Don’t get me wrong, there certainly are beginners that head that way, but in my opinion, you’re not going to find the trip enjoyable if you’re barely comfortable in your water and gear.
In this case, my friend had fewer than 30 dives under her belt and had never dived in anything more than a rashguard. While I was sure she’d “survive” it, I didn’t think she’d enjoy it as much as she would with a few more diving experiences. That way, the current (what makes Galapagos a more advanced destination) and the heavier exposure protection—a 7mm wetsuit (or drysuit) with hood and gloves—would pose less of a concern.
>> Related Reading: Why Dive Travel Is More Than Just a Vacation
I suggested she get a few more reps under her belt before doing it. Thankfully she took the advice. I’m sure that when she does finally go, she’ll be grateful for the experience and enjoy it more. She’ll have more confidence in her own diving ability and, even if she hasn’t by that point experienced much current or dived in thicker exposure protection, she’ll be more capable of handling it.
The truth is, you don’t just pick a destination appropriate to your skill level for safety reasons, you do it so you can enjoy it. How much will you really get out of a dive vacation if you’re anxious on every dive, or feel insecure about your ability to handle the dives?
So, how do you figure out which destinations are appropriate to your skill level? A bit of research goes a long way though I’d suggest you consider the exposure protection you need (and whether or not you’ll be comfortable using it), the type of diving that will occur—be that shore diving, wreck diving, boat diving, drift diving—and whether or not you’re a match for it.
For example, I wouldn’t suggest a beginner pick Chuuk Lagoon as a first dive destination. Though the water temperature is pleasant and the current minimal, many of the dives will be deep wreck penetration dives that require divers to carefully watch their NDL and if necessary understand how to safely do decompression.
By contrast, destinations like Bonaire are perfectly suited to all skill levels, from complete beginner through advanced diver. The fact that the island is literally kitted out to a diver’s needs doesn’t hurt either, with most dive spots marked out on the road. It’s literally a divers’ paradise.
The only way you’re going to figure this out is to do a little bit of online research. That said, here’s my pick for some great destinations for beginner and advanced divers:
Dive destinations beginners will enjoy
- Bonaire, Caribbean Netherlands: Easy shore diving and island caters well to divers
- Florida Keys, U.S.A.: A good mix of reef and wreck diving
- The Florida Panhandle, U.S.A.: Some really good wreck diving
- Cozumel, Mexico: If you want to cut your teeth on easy drift diving and cornflower blue visibility, this is the place to go. Great topside culture and lots of dive operators
- The Red Sea, Egypt: Some incredible wreck and reef diving in pretty easy conditions
- The Island of Hawaii, U.S.A.: Kona has some great diving, especially if you like geology
- The British Virgin Islands, Caribbean: A mix of reef and wreck and very easy boat diving
- The Maldives: Shallow lagoons, lots of marine life and minimal currents. Plus, sharks!
- Loreto and La Paz, Baja, Mexico: Some amazing animal encounters and fun topside
- Cayman Islands, Caribbean: Easy diving, walls, swim throughs, and the Kittiwake, an easy (and photogenic) wreck to cut your teeth on wreck diving.
Dive destinations more seasoned divers will enjoy
- Galapagos Islands, Ecuador: Strong currents but amazing marine life with schooling hammerhead sharks, whale sharks and marine iguanas.
- Chuuk (Truk) Lagoon, Micronesia: A world-renowned wreck diving destination with deeper, more technical dives and unbelievable historical wrecks
- Palau, Micronesia: Strong currents and drift diving with epic big animal encounters
- Scapa Flow, Scotland: Cold water diving on historic warship wrecks in the Orkney Islands
- Cocos Island, Costa Rica: Like Galapagos, strong currents, lots of pelagic species and shark encounters but wild, open ocean conditions.
- Raja Ampat, Indonesia: Incredible biodiversity and marine life but strong currents and complex dive sites with drift diving, deep walls and pinnacles.
- Malpelo Island, Colombia: Like Galapagos, strong currents with amazing topography and loads of shark encounters, including schools of hammerheads
- Poor Knights Islands, New Zealand: Beautiful underwater structures and vibrant marine life. Temperate to cold water hence the more seasoned label.
If you’re not sure about a destination, call the dive shop there or shoot them an email. Most places are happy to help.
2. Pick Your Location Based on: Marine Life
Are you on the hunt for colorful coral reefs or majestic swaying kelp forests? Is it whale sharks or multicolored nudibranchs you’re after? Do you want to dive with sea lions or do you want to dive with dugongs?
A simple Google search will help you pick a destination that has the type of marine life you’re looking for, because believe me, most locations are quite different.
For example, if you want to see schools of Hammerhead sharks, go to Galapagos or the Cocos Islands or Malpelo.
If you want to see whale sharks, head to Palau or the Maldives or yes, Galapagos.
If you want to dive in kelp forests, go to the Channel Islands, or Monterey in California, or Cape Town in South Africa.
If you want to experience a sardine run, head to the east coast of South Africa. If you want to be in the water with killer whales (maybe), British Columbia is your best bet. I hear not so great things about Baja for this experience with so many boats and tourists chasing the poor orcas down.
If it’s muck diving and cool macro life you’re after, you’ll want Indonesia, Raja Ampat and the Philippines.
As you can see there are dozens of options. I’d make an exhaustive list but it but would be just that, exhaustive. That’s an article for another time.
The benefit of planning for the marine life you want to see is it can help you figure out when to go too.
For example, you’re likely to see rays, dolphins and even whales in Baja at certain times of the year. The sardine run in South Africa also happens at a specific time of year—between May and July.
If you want to see the humpback migrations you’ll want Tonga, French Polynesia or the Dominican Republic. For Tonga you’ll be looking at July to October. For French Polynesia, August to October. For DR, Jan to March. Humpbacks migrate the warmer waters to mate and give birth, hence the timing.
The next one on my list is a trip to see the giant Australian cuttlefish mating aggregation. It’s in Whyalla in South Australia and I know I’ll need to go between May and August to see them gather to mate in the shallow waters there.
My point is, do your research. Pick the time you’d like to go, or the animals you want to see and then investigate whether it’s the right time for the right animals or vice versa.
3. Pick Your Location Based on: Type of Diving
Finally, what type of diving do you want to do? This might even be a consideration before marine life. For example, I love wreck diving. I don’t always even consider marine life encounters, depending on why I’m picking a place. I do know that most wrecks are teeming with marine life so I’m not always bothered about what marine life I can see if I’m going for the wrecks.
Chuuk Lagoon and the north Red Sea are amazing places to experience wreck diving, as I’m told, is Scapa Flow. Frankly, when I book one of these trips, I’m going for the wrecks and I’m likely packing wide angle photography gear. I know there will be macro life on the wrecks but it’s not my raison d’etre. That said, I remember finding it funny when a friend told me she wouldn’t head out that far just to see hunks of steel. These “hunks of steel” are anything but lifeless. They’re teeming with schooling fish, corals (hard and soft), and just so much color that they’re a photographer’s wet dream.
You might be going for something else too: kelp forests, pinnacles and walls, reef scapes. I can promise you that although I love wrecks, there’s also something incredibly beautiful about an endless underwater horizon of healthy corals—I see fewer and fewer of them these days. The Maldives still has some spectacular reef scapes like this.
There are also plenty of people who want to see and dive Mexico’s beautiful cenotes. In this case, they’re likely also not going for the animals (though they may be concerned about the best time of year to dive as turbidity in these systems can vary)
4. Choose the Best Time to Visit
As I mentioned above, the next thing you’ll want to do is pick the best time to visit. This could have to do with when the marine life you want to see will be there, or it could have to do with weather or water temperature. Many destinations to not enjoy the same water temperature year-round.
When I taught scuba diving in Oregon, our lake would heat up to 70 degrees Fahrenheit in summer, which frankly for us in the Pacific Northwest, felt balmy. But in winter, it could drop as low as 45, a vastly different experience. Even places that had water temperature that stayed the same year round—38F for Clear Lake in Oregon—were quite a different topside experience—hot in the summer and snowy in winter. Both were of course diveable, it just really depended on the topside experience you wanted.
Another thing to consider is hurricane or typhoon season. When is it? What will it mean for flights and indeed for water visibility? Storms tend to stir up sediment and limit visibility a little so perhaps picking a time when it’s more likely to be calm, perhaps outside of monsoon season, is a good idea.
For example, I had a trip planned to Chuuk Lagoon. Alas, it happened during typhoon season and as luck would have it, a typhoon did indeed blow through as I was heading out. I had to turn right back around once I hit Houston airport and reschedule for a month later.
Timing matters for more than marine life.
5. Decide Between Liveaboard or Land-Based Diving
I wrote an entire article on this topic because there are pros and cons to each. Usually this has more to do with budget than anything else, but sometimes it also has to do with being able to experience a wide variety of dive sites that you otherwise wouldn’t easily be able to get to.
While liveaboard trips are often a little more expensive, they do make the entire diving experience very easy. You set up your gear and the start and basically leave it. The crew usually handles fills. All you have to do is get in and out of it. Plus, you have your spot and it doesn’t usually change.
The drawback to this type of diving is of course you’re not in control of your schedule or the itinerary, and you don’t get to experience the topside attractions. Yes, they’ll sometimes include one or two, especially if it’s a 10-day-long liveaboard but you won’t be able to head into town each evening to partake in what the city or country has to offer.
On Grand Cayman, I was happy to do day boat diving (not least because there’s plenty of shore diving on the island too) because I wanted to see the iguanas, wanted to shore dive and wanted to experience some of the vegan eateries.
For me the question about whether to dive on a liveaboard or a day boat has more to do with whether or not I’m going to a place that is pretty remote/has more for me to see as a diver than it does on land. I don’t usually take non-divers with me, so what they’ll do is rarely a consideration for me. This could be true for you if you want to bring a partner or kids who don’t dive.
There are ways to get the best of both worlds, spend a week on a liveaboard and another week at a resort, but not everyone can afford this in terms of time or money. Yes, the world is still dated and we largely all get our pitiful 2 to 3 weeks vacation a year. Not enough time by half to actually experience the world.
But, I digress! If you’re on the fence about this, go and read my article dedicated to it. It will help you choose.
6. Consider Your Qualifications
This goes back to our discussion about choosing your dive site. Make sure you have the right qualifications.
For example, though you might have done a drysuit checkout in the U.S. and have twenty dives on a drysuit, if you never got the actual drysuit certification and then hopped over to Silfra Flow, Iceland, or New Zealand to dive, you’d be in trouble. Operators in these locations often want to see the cert card.
Chuuk Lagoon is another spot I’d say you want to consider your certification level. That and Scapa Flow in Scotland. Both destinations are likely to get you into deco (even if it’s just 10 minutes of deco), meaning you should know how to actually do the deco. And while you certainly can follow your dive watch, it does help to have some basic tech/deco training. It will make you a lot safer.
Some of the single tank divers I met in Chuuk Lagoon, had plenty of diving experience but no tech training. Seeing them dive and penetrate deep wrecks was in my opinion, occasionally terrifying. They did not know about gas management (no pony/deco bottles) and frankly did not have the chops to know how to get out of some of the dives on their own if something went pear-shaped.
The other great thing about considering your qualifications is it gives you the opportunity to go and take a class so that you can do the diving you want to do. Though I frankly don’t love the idea of going on vacation to take a class, plenty of people do it. For me, I’d rather take the class at home then go on the trip.
In the case of a destination like Chuuk Lagoon, go take an Intro to Tech class and a Decompression Procedures class (they’ll likely also have you learn Advanced Nitrox). Not only will it make you a better diver—whether or not you intend to go the tech route, but it will open up doors. Just because you’re a deco diver, doesn’t mean you have to plumb the depths.
In closing
The truth is, picking where you next want to dive is as much an emotional as a rational decision. I know, for me, there are locations I’d dive year round, whether or not I was likely to meet with a hurricane. In that case, I’m just hoping I won’t. Still, I hope this guide helps you make a more informed decision. If you have questions go ahead and leave a comment. I’d love to help if I can.
