these are the dives I know I know, these are the dives I know

198x: Muskoka, Canada, a couple of entirely unlicensed dives with my father.
198x: Dominican Republic, again an unlicensed dive with my dad.
2000: Krabi, Thailand, 5 dives (PADI Open Water course.) Great reefs, great beaches, an excellent place to learn.
2002: Byron Bay, Australia, 2 dives. Choppy but pretty good.
2002: Great Barrier Reef liveaboard, Australia, 11 dives (PADI Advanced course.) Just superb.
2003: Dahab, Egypt, 4 dives. Very good.
2003: Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, 2 dives. Pretty good.
2003: Caye Caulker, Belize, 2 dives. Not bad I guess.
2004: Galle, Sri Lanka, 2 dives. Nice wrecks with meh visibility.
2005: Catalina Island, California, 2 dives. Beautiful kelp forest, frigging freezing. (February.)
2005: Nungwi, Zanzibar, Tanzania, 2 dives. I still have the scars, but good diving.
2006: Muskoka, Canada, 2 dives. Freshwater but homey.
2010: Great Barrier Reef liveaboard, Australia, 11 dives. A little more dived-out than eight years earlier, but still truly excellent, esp. the shark/night dives.
2011: Djibouti City, Djibouti, 2 dives. Great reefs, not least because they're some distance along one of the most stark and forbidding coastlines on the planet, so relatively undisturbed.
2013: Moalbal, Philippines, 4 dives (and counting.) Lots of big turtles, and a gargantuan school of sardines, and today's reef was decent...but it's clear that the reefs around here are not what they once were. Dived out, fished out, bleached out, and in places dynamited.

...did I really not dive at all for four years? Wow. I came close in 2008 in Colombia -- in fact, I actually ventured out one day planning to dive -- but weather got in the way. Same with Turks & Caicos in 2011 come to think of it.

All told ~55 dives, not bad. I still go through air like a locomotive, though. I blame my size and years of yoga and running. Fortunately after 30 minutes of diving I hit diminished returns anyways, I rarely want to stay in the water more than 40 or 45, but I always feel bad for my dive buddies.

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