About
What this site is
This site was born out of love for the ocean, and honestly a fair amount of frustration too. Dive site information online is scattered all over the place, bits in old forum threads, bits in operator brochures, bits buried in trip reports from a decade ago, and a lot of it is either out of date or just plain wrong. When you’re trying to plan a trip around what you actually want to see underwater, that is a really hard place to start from.
I’ve been bamboozled one too many times. I’ve booked trips chasing species that hadn’t been spotted in years, I have shown up in the wrong season for the thing I came for, and I have paid good money for dives that weren’t close to what was advertised on the website. Every time it happens it’s a small heartbreak, and after enough of them I started to think other divers probably feel the same way, and that maybe this doesn’t have to keep happening.
So this is a public search and citizen science site. The goal is pretty simple, keep dive site information as fresh and honest as possible, in one place, so the next person planning a trip doesn’t end up bamboozled the way I did.
It is very much ongoing work, and right now it is being built by one person, me, with a lot of help from Squish, my OpenClaw, and a handful of other AI tools picking up the slack wherever they can.
Roadmap — where this is going
The bigger arc is to make scubaSeason a public atlas of reef condition that’s also genuinely useful for booking a trip. Honest about what’s live, what’s a snapshot, and what we can’t see yet. The split below is the current plan — nothing in “later” is a promise.
Now
- Live NOAA Coral Reef Watch thermal stress on every reef, refreshed nightly.
- Honest labels everywhere distinguishing live data from snapshot surveys vs. presence only sightings (/data).
- Trip planning the site already does — operators, lodging, gear, season windows — stays front and centre.
Next
- Real coral cover ingestion for US and Caribbean sites (NOAA NCRMP + AGRRA) so the snapshot half stops being scaffolding.
- Global Fishing Watch pressure layer per site.
- IUCN Red List species badges — pending non commercial licensing.
Later
The longer term vision — exploratory, not committed — has two halves:
- Targeted citizen missions in the regions where dive tourism is dense but reef monitoring is thin. The idea is to coordinate divers around specific reefs where standardised imagery would actually be useful, and fold the contributions back into the public atlas.
- Post event evidence infrastructure that gives conservation funders a clean, standardised picture of a reef after a hurricane or bleaching event. The interesting role here is plumbing — coordination, capture protocols, attribution — sitting alongside the satellite signals everyone already uses.
Quick note, there are some affiliate links scattered across the site, and anything they earn goes straight back into R&D for this thing. Would absolutely love to hear feedback, good, bad, weird, half formed, all of it, at hi@scubaseason.fun.
Editorial independence
Affiliate commissions do not influence what we recommend. Site rankings come from editorial scoring, not commission rates. Operator and lodging blocks include non-affiliate options where we know of them. The source/methodology drawer on every claim is the same whether a partner pays us or not. If you ever see something that looks like a sponsored recommendation disguised as editorial, that’s a bug — please tell us.