Local Diving

Local Diving:
Ponquogue Bridge
Long Island DivingAs far as Long Island diving is concerned the Ponquogue Bridge is one of the coolest dives you can do from shore. It can be a little tricky (because of the strong tidal flow) if you are not carful and get in the water at the wrong time or, stay in too long! The best time to dive here is at Slack High Tide. It’s best to enter the water a few minutes prior to slack tide and catch the tail end of the incoming tide when the current is not at it’s strongest. You can usually get anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes of bottom time where the tide is still and not moving. Pay close attention to your time, you don’t want to get caught too far from your exit point when the tide starts going out. If you have never made a dive here we reccomend you dive it during the day first or make arrangements for one of our divemasters or instructors to guide you.  A permit is needed to park in the parking lot during the Summer months. For these dives you can either meet us at the bridge or at the shop an hour and a half before the time listed. The times listed are slack water time, arrive at the site 30 minutes before the times listed.

 

Wreck Diving
Long Island Wreck diving

Diving the shipwrecks off the South Shore of Long Island and Block Island can be very rewarding. It is on these dives where you will often have the best visibility and see the greatest variety of marine life. We do a a few wreck dives every year with two of the local charter boats. Each boat is geared to transport a maximum of six divers to the destination of the day. Many times we will not pick the destination ahead of time because sea conditions (hard to predict month’s ahead of time) can sometimes influence where we will be diving. Most of the wrecks we do will be in the 60 to 110 foot deep range. We do require that you have an Advanced Open Water certification if you want to sign up for one of our wreck dives. You can also sign up for the dive if you are enrolled in either the Adventure Diver or AOW eLearning program and are doing the dive to meet certification requirements. No equipment is supplied for these dives but you can rent what you need. Certain items (lights, reels, lift bags) can not be rented and must be purchased.

Night Dives on Mt. Sinai Jetty

Night-Dive

The Mount Sinai is an excellent place to do your first night dive, or for a night dive in general. It’s an easy dive to navigate. We anchor up a short swim from the West side of the West jetty, a short swim and you are there. Most divers will swim north along the rocks and then wrap around and do the inside of the inlet. You must stay on the rocks though because there are typically many boats returning to the harbor. You do not want to pop up in the middle of the inlet!