Mike Bartick: Blackwater Beckons
My catering business in California was going well, but the more it grew, the more I was stressed and wanted to be underwater. Diving and photography were cathartic, and I kept coming back to Anilao in my mind.
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Decompression, Stage, and Bailout Cylinders
DIFFERENT TERMS CAN SOMETIMES DESCRIBE the same piece of equipment in the dive industry. What some divers call a dive light, for example, others call a dive torch. They are physically identical, so the names are interchangeable without causing more than minor confusion at worst.
Rewilding Mustique’s Reefs
IT’S NO SECRET THAT CARIBBEAN REEFS ARE IN CRISIS. Many stony coral species face an uncertain destiny, and some scientific predictors point toward extinction in the near future for some species.
The Peculiar Life of Pearlfish
TO FIND THE FIRST DESCRIPTION OF A LARVAL PEARLFISH in the wild, I had to search back to the early 1980s annals of blackwater diving and Christopher Newbert’s account of drifting 40 feet down a lighted downline tethered to a dinghy bobbing on a night sea somewhere off the Kona, Hawaiʻi, coast. The story appeared […]
Triton Bay
TRITON BAY, INDONESIA, was one of the last places I visited before the COVID-19 pandemic struck. Looking back, part of me wishes I would have been there instead of at home when the world turned upside down and international dive travel became almost impossible. An extended sabbatical in the middle of bustling hordes of fish […]
Fakfak
Just before sunrise I make a cup of strong Indonesian tea and feel the familiar rush of anticipation that always builds when I dive where no one else has. From the liveaboard’s top deck I squint at a string of islands— just green dots from here — that stretch offshore from the Fakfak Regency …
Cocos Island
“Pura vida!” our dive guide, Sergio, exclaimed with a relaxed smile. Eight dive buddies, Sergio, and I just had an incredible experience: A 35-foot-long whale shark swam a few feet over our heads at one of the better-known dive sites at Cocos Island, Costa Rica. It silently came and went, seemingly carefree, like a giant spotted apparition sliding out of sight into the deep blue.
The Ocean Less Traveled
TALK TO ANY HUMAN UNDER THE AGE OF 13, and they have probably been asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I was just 3 years old when I knew I wanted to be a veterinarian. Growing up on coasts — first Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and then Southeast Florida — I […]
Diving With My Dad
I WAS 13 YEARS OLD THE FIRST TIME I WENT SCUBA DIVING. My family was on a trip to Cancun, and my dad took me and my sister, Carrie, who was 11 at the time, for a scuba lesson. We did a low-risk resort-style dive, going no deeper than 25 feet. But we loved the […]