Below the Surface
The 8 Best Places to Dive With Manta Rays
Eight manta destinations with the real seasons and conditions. Reef or oceanic, dive or snorkel, and the month you should actually go.
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Divemaster · Freediver · Photographer
Diving the world,
one ocean at a time.
Destinations
One place at a time. The dive sites, conditions, and an honest read on what each destination actually delivers underwater.
Diving Ao Nang Thailand 🇹🇭 Macro in the murk, blacktips at Phi Phi, a ferry wreck at 30 metres. Krabi diving from the mainland, with the costs and the seasons.
Diving Cozumel Mexico 🇲🇽 Cozumel is drift diving over walls with 30m viz. Here's everything you need to know about this amazing diving destination
Diving Amed, Bali Indonesia 🇮🇩 Shore diving over black sand, no fight for a place on the boat. Nudibranchs, frogfish and ghost pipefish in 15 to 30 metres of viz.
Diving Playa del Carmen Mexico 🇲🇽 The cenotes are why serious divers come, underground rivers with infinite visibility. Bull sharks hold right through the winter.
Diving Puerto Galera Philippines 🇵🇭 The healthiest reefs I have ever dived, inside the Verde Island Passage. Mimic octopus, blue-ringed octopus, nudibranchs everywhere.
Diving Marsa Alam Egypt 🇪🇬 A dugong grazing at Marsa Mubarak, snorkellers above and divers below, carrying on regardless. Daedalus lies 80km offshore.
Diving Malpelo Colombia 🇨🇴 The first orcas ever recorded here surfaced beside the boat. Hammerheads school in their hundreds, 36 hours out from Buenaventura.
Diving Hurghada Egypt 🇪🇬 Eighty percent of the coral off the hotel coast is gone. What survives still delivers dolphins on more dives than any reef I know.
Diving Koh Tao Thailand 🇹🇭 Whale sharks have cruised past more times than I can pretend is normal. Granite pinnacles, schooling barracuda, 27 to 30 degrees.
Diving Santa Marta Colombia 🇨🇴 Octopus in the open, parrotfish asleep in mucous cocoons, and coral good by Caribbean standards, inside a park protected since 1969.
Divemaster · Freediver · Photographer · Creator
Below the Surface
Whatever the ocean has me thinking about. Day-to-day diving, underwater photography, the creatures I keep coming back to, and the in-between stories.
Below the Surface
Diving With Manta Rays: Giant, Curious, Harmless
Giant, curious and utterly harmless. What to know before you meet one underwater, and why restraint is what gets a manta close to you.
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Below the Surface
Best Ocean Documentaries on Disney+ / Nat Geo
Attenborough's Ocean, Cameron's OceanXplorers, and the films that made real marine reserves. Sixteen of them, ranked, on Disney+ and Nat Geo.
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"With knowing comes caring, and with caring there is hope."
Dr Sylvia Earle · Founder, Mission Blue & Hope SpotsConservation
Because the ocean is worth fighting for.
Conservation
World Dolphin Day 2026: The Massacre That Made the Date
12 September 2021. 1,428 dolphins killed in a single afternoon. That is why the day exists, and why it is not a celebration.
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Conservation
Coral Bleaching Awareness Month 2026: The Recovery Gap
September is Coral Bleaching Awareness Month. Reefs now get four years to recover, not ten. What that means underwater.
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Conservation
The Sachet Economy: The Plastic Crisis the West Doesn't See
The sachet economy puts 855 billion single-use packets a year into the world's poorest waste systems. How it started and why none of it can be recycled.
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Conservation
International Whale Shark Day 2026: The World's Largest Fish
Described in 1828, and still the most mysterious animal in the ocean. One pregnant female studied in two centuries, no birthing ground ever found.
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Conservation
World Krill Day 2026: The Animal Everything Depends On
86 species, in every ocean on earth. The animal that feeds whale sharks, whales and the biggest fishery on the planet, and almost nobody thinks about it.
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Conservation
World Oyster Day 2026: The Most Damaged Reef on Earth
Oyster reefs filter the water, raise the fish and slow the waves. We lost 85 percent of them before we thought to measure it, and they can come back.
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Conservation
International Mangrove Day 2026: Blue Carbon Turns Ten
Ten years of Blue Carbon: How mangroves store more carbon than rainforest, raise the reef's next generation, and where restoration works.
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Conservation
Coral Reef Awareness Week 2026: The El Niño Year
El Niño is back, 84% of reefs have bleached, and I know what that looks like on the descent. The honest version, without the sugar.
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Conservation
Hammerheads Just Won the Highest Protection There Is
Ecuador wrote the proposal. Panama backed it. Hammerheads just got Appendix I, the strongest protection this treaty offers.
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