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BETWEEN NEW YORK AND BOSTON LIES HARTFORD, the heartbeat of Connecticut. Visitors there can tour the Mark Twain House, Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Beyond the city, trees and hills make way for fresh and coastal waters teeming with macro life.
ASK DIVERS IN THE PACIFIC NORTHWEST what makes for a great dive, and most will agree that a wolf-eel (Anarrhichthys ocellatus) is involved. There is something about the face of an adult wolf-eel staring at you from its den that turns an ordinary dive into a great one. The specific conditions don’t matter. Cold temperatures, terrible visibility, or strong currents are easy to forget when a wolfie — as we call them locally — appears.
AFTER I SPENT ALMOST 20 HOURS in a hyperbaric chamber over five days, life there had grown tedious. The last 15 minutes, however, were not only exciting but highly instructive. I learned that if you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t touch anything or do anything without first asking permission.
FOUR SCUBA DIVERS BECAME TRAPPED and died while working in an offshore pipeline in 2022. This incident was a harsh reminder that commercial diving is a “hazardous occupation that presents many dangers that far exceed the risks in sport diving,” as highlighted in The Simple Guide to Commercial Diving. The typical risks in recreational diving, such as decompression sickness and pressure-related injuries to the ears and lungs, are still present, but commercial divers regularly face additional hazards — such as zero visibility, contaminated water, and pressure differentials — all while simultaneously operating industrial tools.
FISHING AND BEING ON THE WATER with family while growing up influenced Michael Lombardi to study marine biology. He and a friend got certified to dive during his junior year of high school, thinking it would be a useful tool for his desired field. Lombardi had no idea what professional diving meant or where it would take him.
THE RAPID GROWTH OF FREEDIVING in the U.S. brings a positive light to a sport that is mentally healthy and physically inspiring but has little tolerance for error. Shallow-water blackout and respiratory barotrauma are the most feared consequences of freediving, but they can be minimized with training and good safety practices.
MY DIVE BUDDY AND I planned to do a longer than usual dive one Saturday morning at Madison Blue Spring State Park in Lee, Florida. For several years and more than 100 cave dives together, we had built up our experience as a team and our time spent in this specific underwater cave system in northern Florida. We had slowly extended the duration and distance of our dives in this labyrinth of underwater tunnels that weaved throughout the karst limestone of the park, increasing our familiarity with the system while also practicing the skills that we had learned and continued to build on to be safe cave divers.
AFTER THE INITAL SCARE AND LOCKDOWNS FROM COVID-19, divers soon started to explore ways to safely get back into the water. Disinfection has always been a consideration in diving, but we needed new standards to allay fears of uncontrolled transmission of infectious diseases.
BEFORE THE INTERNET WAS AVAILABLE, people read print magazines to learn about scuba diving — how to do it, what gear to buy, and where to go. For 51 years, from 1951 to 2002, the king of the genre was Skin Diver magazine. The undisputed queen of cover photography for Skin Diver was Geri Murphy.