Specialty · Dive
Liveaboards, remote atolls, big-animal seasons — matched to your logbook, not your wishlist.
Most dive-trip disappointment is a matching problem: the right reef in the wrong month, or a current-swept channel three trips beyond your comfort. We plan backwards from your logbook — certification, dives logged, the conditions you've actually been in — and then pick the boat, the season, and the routing to fit. Tell us you're AOW with 40 dives and we'll build you a trip that stretches you exactly one notch, not three.
Where we send divers
The richest reef system on Earth. Liveaboard season October–April; mantas at Magic Mountain roughly December–March. Currents are the price of admission.
Wreck history you can touch — the Thistlegorm — plus the Brothers' walls and sharks. Excellent value per dive; northern routes suit newer divers, offshore marine parks don't.
Big-animal water: giant oceanic mantas that seek out divers, schooling hammerheads, whale sharks in the Sea of Cortez. November–May, open-ocean conditions, earned not given.
Thresher sharks at dawn off Malapascua, the Moalboal sardine run, muck diving that rewires what you look for. The best value big-experience diving we book.
The Cannon dive scale
Every trip we propose carries one of these. They're prerequisites, not vibes — if you're not there yet, we'll tell you, and we'll route you somewhere that will get you there.
Level 1. Open Water, any logbook. Protected sites, guided groups, no meaningful current. Bonaire shore diving, Cozumel's easy drifts.
Level 2. Advanced Open Water, 20+ dives. Mild drift, 25–30 m sites, first liveaboard territory. Northern Red Sea, most of the Philippines.
Level 3. AOW, 30–50+ dives, genuinely comfortable in current: reef hooks, negative entries, blue-water safety stops. Raja Ampat's Dampier Strait, Palau's channels.
Level 4. 50–100+ dives with open-ocean or cold-water experience; Rescue cert strongly recommended. Socorro, Galápagos, drysuit destinations.
Level 5. 100+ dives plus specialty training to match the trip — tech, cave with cave certs, ice, serious expedition diving. We plan these with the operator on the call.
Operator standards
Straight answers
This is for you if you have a certification card and a number in your logbook — any number — and you want the next trip to be the one you talk about for years. New divers welcome: Level 1 and 2 trips are real trips.
It's not a dive trip if the diving is a maybe — that's a beach trip with a reef nearby, and we happily book those too, just tell us which one you're after. And if a trip needs 50 dives and you have 20, we'll say so and build the 30-dive bridge — we won't wave you through.
Sample expedition
12 days · from $6,400 pp + air · Effort ●●●○○ · Oct–Apr · AOW + 30 dives
Up to 27 dives across the Dampier Strait, the Fam Islands, and Misool — mantas, reef sharks, and coral density that doesn't exist anywhere else. Day-by-day outline, inclusions, and honest notes on the trip page.
See the full sample itinerary →We also regularly build: Socorro liveaboards (Nov–May), northern Red Sea wreck weeks, Palau channel itineraries, and cenote trips that pair Yucatán caverns with reef days. Every one starts from your logbook — tell us what's in yours.
Tell us your cert level, your dive count, and the animal you most want to see. We'll take it from there.
Plan your dive trip →