Dot and Dash Butterfly fish adorn a French Polynesian reef

A school of Blue-Striped Snapper off the coast of Moorea

Welcome to our Underwater section!  We spend so much time in the water both snorkeling and scuba diving, that we wanted to highlight more of that world on the website.  This section of the site will be growing as we continue cruising, so its shape may change along the way.  On these pages you'll find underwater photos of the fish and corals that we've seen, as well as several pages on how to get the most from underwater photography, written by our primary underwater photographer (Chris).

We've also got a section on diving that includes not only photos of the divers, wrecks and fish, but maps and information on the dive sites, depths, conditions, and other useful information for divers.  Our dive pages include 4 dive sites in the Maldives, 6 in Thailand, 6 in Indonesia and 4 dive sites in Fiji. We've also written up 11 dive sites in the Kingdom of Tonga, divided into dives we took with commercial dive companies and those we did on our own from our dinghy.  You'll also find pages on diving Bonaire and the 13 dive sites from the French Polynesian islands of Tahanea, Fakarava, Toau, Tahiti and Moorea.

For cruisers: we now have GPS locations for almost all of our dives so you can find the sites on your own!

Our invaluable onboard reference books to the Caribbean and Indo/Pacific include:

• Reef Fish Identification (Florida, Caribbean, Bahamas) by Paul Humann (396 pp)
• Reef Fish Identification (Tropical Pacific) by G. Allen, R. Steene, P. Humann, and N. Deloach (456 pp)
• Reef Fishes of the Maldives by Dr. R. Charles Anderson (130 pp)
• A Naturalist's Guide to the Tropics by M. Lambertini (312 pp)
• Underwater Guide to Tahiti by R. Bagnis and E. Christian (150 pp).
• Coral Reef Animals of the Indo-Pacific by T. Gosliner, D. Behrens, and G. Williams (313 pp.). Very informative on marine animals other than fish.

For diving guides we've used what we can find overseas:

• Globetrotter's Dive Guide Thailand by Paul Lees (176 pp)
• Lonely Planet's Diving and Snorkeling Tahiti and French Polynesia by Jean Bernard Carillet and Tony Wheeler
• Lonely Planet's Diving and Snorkeling Fiji

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