Welcome to Issue #71 of Inside Scuba

In Issue #71 of Inside Scuba, we ask an uncomfortable question: is diving quietly becoming a rich person’s sport? Byron makes the case for the power of nothing, showing how negative space can turn a good underwater photo into a memorable one, while Alex Mustard heads to Lembeh for an unusually cold, nutrient-rich trip and a first look at Retra’s new Pure II strobe. Add the latest dive news and a Video of the Week that takes you inside a Mexican cave full of cauliflower-like formations, and there’s plenty to sink into.

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What’s happening in this edition?

Is Diving Becoming a Rich Person's Sport? The Rising Cost of Scuba Diving Trips

Add up the cost of a two-week dive trip to one of the world's headline destinations and you need a strong stomach. International flights. Domestic flights. Excess baggage for the camera. A liveaboard berth or luxury resort. Park fees. Fuel surcharges. Nitrox. Crew tips. Before you've even put your mask on, the bill can easily exceed what many people spend on a family holiday, a used car, or a few months' rent.

Diving has never been a cheap hobby. But something has shifted in the last few years. Prices aren't just creeping up with inflation. Whole new layers of cost have appeared, and many of them land hardest on the trips divers dream about most.

So it's worth asking the uncomfortable question: is diving quietly turning into a sport for people who can afford it, and only them?

A luxury resort in the Maldives can run into thousands of dollars

The Costs Are Stacking Up

Look at what's changed in just the last couple of years.

Park fees have jumped. In August 2024, Ecuador doubled the Galápagos National Park entry fee for most foreign visitors from $100 to $200, the first increase since 1998. In January 2026, Raja Ampat raised its tourism fee for international visitors from 300,000 rupiah to 1 million rupiah per visit, on top of the existing marine park permit.

In each issue of our newsletter, we will curate some top dive news from around the world. Links to each of the original articles are available.

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Safety & Incidents

Divernet: "Komodo dive-boat sinks with divemaster thought trapped inside. Twenty-nine of the 30 people aboard the pinisi-style dive boat Feronia were rescued after it went down near Tatawa Island on October 13, but 23-year-old Jakarta divemaster Veronica Beatrix Jessica was unaccounted for, and preliminary witness accounts suggest she may have been inside a locked toilet when it capsized."

DIVE Magazine: "Autopsies confirm Maldives tragedy divers ran out of air. Post-mortem results for the five Italian divers who died in Devana Kandu cave in Vaavu Atoll on May 14 give anoxia as the cause of death and rule out contaminated gas, drugs and injury, but it is still unclear why they entered a cave whose second chamber lies about 60 m (197 ft) deep."

The Scuba News: "18-year-old freediver dies after search-and-rescue operation in Hawaii. Joven Young, of Kailua-Kona, was diving with an acquaintance near Pebble Beach in Captain Cook on October 13 when the other diver lost sight of him; he was pronounced dead at Kona Community Hospital that evening and police are investigating."

The Scuba News: "Palau dive guides suspended as authorities investigate alleged underwater assault. Palau's Bureau of Tourism and Koror State Government say a confrontation between dive guides at Siaes Corner on October 9, after which a diver alleged he was struck underwater and another diver tried to remove his mask, is under investigation, with those directly involved suspended from diving and tourism duties in the meantime."

Freediving

Cyprus Mail: "Molchanov and Törőcsik set world records at World Apnea Depth Championships in Limassol. Alexey Molchanov dived to 137 m (449 ft) on the final day to set a new AIDA world record, while Hungary's Zsófia Törőcsik reached 108 m (354 ft) in free immersion to take the women's world record and title."

Wrecks & Underwater Archaeology

Divernet: "Turkish divers investigate potential 4,700-year-old shipwreck. Excavators off Kekova Island have recovered ceramic storage vessels believed to be 4,400 to 4,700 years old from a wreck about 30 m (98 ft) deep, making it a candidate for the world's oldest known shipwreck; no timbers survive from the roughly 10 m (33 ft) vessel, so the dating rests on its pottery."

Divernet: "Ancient shipwreck off Vis yields rare Greek pottery. Archaeologists working in Gnjilna Bay near Komiža between 2023 and 2025 have documented a 6 m (20 ft) section of keel and hull planking from a Hellenistic wreck dated to the 4th or 3rd century BC, along with fine Greek pottery and coins from ancient Pharos, in what the researchers describe as the first discovery of a shipwreck containing fine Greek pottery."

The Scuba News: "Earhart expedition update: underwater survey of Taraia Object begins. A 17-person team from the Archaeological Legacy Institute and Purdue University began surveying the Taraia Object in Nikumaroro's lagoon on October 14, after five days at sea from Tarawa, Kiribati, to investigate an anomaly that could be the remains of Amelia Earhart's Lockheed Electra."

Marine Science

Science: "Coral can heal rapidly from bleaching if it touches a clone. In a Stanford laboratory study published in Science Advances on October 14, bleached corals regained their color within about seven weeks after contact with a healthy genetic clone, with algae transfer starting in as few as three days; because it only works between identical clones, the team says it is not a reef-scale fix and is exploring ways to culture and reintroduce the beneficial algae without contact."

Dive Travel & Destinations

Divernet: "Sculpture park looms for St Lucia scuba divers. A new underwater sculpture park, 'Below Saint Lucia,' is due to open to divers at Anse La Verdure in November, with 31 sculptures celebrating people who shaped the nation placed about 11 m (36 ft) deep, as the island's 23rd designated dive site and the first phase of a planned three-part park."

The Philadelphia Inquirer: "SS United States set to be sunk in mid-November. Officials in Okaloosa County, Florida, expect to sink the 990-foot (302 m) former ocean liner in the second week of November, weather permitting, creating what is expected to be the world's largest artificial reef, with the sinking to be done without explosives."

Conservation & Community

Divernet: "Canadian divers tackle 'crab-trap graveyard'. Volunteer divers removed some 250 kg (551 lb) of abandoned crab traps, nets, rope, cable and line from beneath Sidney Pier on Vancouver Island on October 4, including about 110 kg (243 lb) of rope and line, in a follow-up to a March dive."

The Scuba News: "Kauaʻi divers race to save more than 2,000 corals after Hurricane Lowell. Hoʻomalu Ke Kai and partners, working under the Hawaiʻi Emergency Reef Response Network, have a 10-day permit to reattach more than 2,000 storm-damaged corals, which survive only about 45 days after being broken, after assessing nearly 20 miles (32 km) of reef along Kauaʻi's south and west shores."

DIVE Magazine: "Peter Benchley's Jaws memorabilia and dive gear to be auctioned for charity. Nearly 300 items from the Jaws author and ocean conservationist, including his scuba equipment and Henderson titanium wetsuit, go under the hammer at Willow Auction House in New Jersey on October 29, with proceeds going to WildAid and Beneath the Sea."

Photo Competitions

DIVE Magazine: "DIVE's Big Shot Man-Made: the winners. David Bostock's black-and-white 'Exhale', a diver and trail of bubbles against the Red Sea wreck of the Giannis D, won the competition for images of man-made objects and an Aggressor Adventures liveaboard trip to Komodo worth £3,325, with Dan Shipp's abandoned buggy in a lake near London second and Anastasia Shmuck's Isonzo wreck off Sardinia third."

The Power of Nothing: Using Negative Space in Underwater Photography

Underwater photographers are trained to fill the frame. Get close, then get closer. Fill the picture with color, texture and detail. It's good advice, and it has produced countless strong images.

But some of the most memorable underwater photographs do the opposite. A lone manta drifting through endless blue. A frogfish with his lure reaching into the open. A shark swimming across the frame with somewhere to go. These images work not because of what they show, but because of everything they leave out.

That emptiness has a name: negative space. Learning to use it is one of the fastest ways to make your images feel calmer, bolder and more deliberate. The negative space gives the viewer of the image their own creative interpretation: what do they think is on the other side of that negative space? This sense of mystery is of high appeal in your images.

Negative space gives your subject a sense of purpose and direction, somewhere to swim, and adds intrigue about where it is going.

What Negative Space Actually Is

Negative space is the area around and between your subject. The subject itself is the positive space. In underwater photography, negative space is usually open blue water, black background, a plain sandy bottom or a bright surface.

Negative space isn't wasted space. It gives the subject room to breathe, draws the eye straight to it, and sets the mood of the whole image. A small subject surrounded by a lot of empty blue feels very different from the same subject cropped tight. A tightly cropped image filling the frame leaves nothing to the viewer's imagination, while a negative space shot adds that intrigue.

The Lembeh Cheat Code

By Alex Mustard and Matthew Sullivan

In this article from The Underwater Photography Show, we'll be diving into an extraordinary "cold-water" workshop in the Lembeh Strait, how we track down the best photo subjects, the creative trade-offs of carrying every wet lens on every dive, and a first look at Retra's new Pure II strobe.

Why This Lembeh Trip Was Different

People often find that critter destinations get richer when conditions turn colder, and this trip proved it. And El Niño was probably behind it. Deeper water in tropical oceans carries more nutrients, and when it's upwelled toward the surface, that extra fertilizer supercharges the whole food chain. More plants grow, more little bugs grow, and so on up to the creatures we are interested in. There's also a feeling that many muck diving animals prefer cooler water, so they tend to hang out a little deeper — and when cold water pushes shallower, they follow it up into the shallows.

I (Alex) hadn't felt Lembeh this cold in a long time. On some of my trips in the 2000s and 2010s, a 5mm wetsuit was essential. But every trip I've done in the 2020s has been 3mm diving all day without ever getting chilly. My temperature tolerance is very much average — on every trip there are people happy in thinner suits than me and people who need thicker ones — yet this time I wanted more than a 5mm. It was properly cold for a trip that's almost right on the equator.

The current El Niño is still developing, so we don't have the full picture yet, but I suspect it's behind the cold. El Niño usually brings warmer surface water to the East Pacific, while the West Pacific tends to run a little cooler than normal. Probably related to El Niño was an unusual local weather pattern. North Sulawesi hadn't seen rain for about three months, there were wildfires, and the green jungle had turned brown in places. There were also persistent strong winds pushing coastal water offshore, and as a result sucking the nutrient-rich deep water up from below. The result was a Lembeh Strait full of cold, fertile water.

You could see it everywhere. Some of the muck sites weren't black mud at all but a carpet of seaweed — a bizarre environment, and one we really enjoyed photographically. And the blackwater diving was off the scale. I've never thought of Lembeh as being as good as Anilao or the other hot blackwater destinations — it is basically just a shallow strait — but on this trip it absolutely was.

Summary

That’s a wrap on Issue #71 — we hope it gets you thinking about how and where you dive, and about leaving a little more empty space in your next frame. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a dive buddy who’d love it too. Until next time, happy bubbles!

Andy & Byron

Inside Scuba | Issue #71