Dive Shops at the Threshold of Adventure
Photo Credit: Dive Alaska
Just below the view of Alaska’s amazing landscape is an entirely different world. The state’s seascape offers stunning sights—and local dive and scuba shops are thriving because of them.
“When people think of Alaska, they think of wolves and moose and caribou, but Alaska is not just limited to terrestrial animals,” says Kristopher Baumann, service manager and instructor at Dive Alaska in Anchorage. “You never know what you’re going to see underwater. There are interesting and plain weird creatures out there, and they give you a much greater appreciation for Alaska. You see things that most people rarely get to see.”
“We have tons of diverse marine life, including big critters like whales, sea lions, and seals, as well as small critters that you wouldn’t see in the tropics or anywhere else,” agrees Kate Sample of Test the Waters Dive Shop, six miles south of Fairbanks. “We had an instructor from Hawai’i take students out on a boat in Valdez, and he came back stunned, saying, ‘So this is why people dive in Alaska!’”
While diving the 49th state is a popular pastime, not everyone can picture themselves putting on a drysuit and spending time in the frigid water. Like any outdoor activity, diving takes preparation.
“People say it’s too cold to dive in our waters, but I was in Girdwood skiing this winter when it was -10°F, and it was cold,” says Baumann. “When I went diving this winter, it was a balmy 38°F in the water. You can go diving to warm up!”
“You don’t go snowmachining in shorts and a t-shirt; you dress for it,” agrees Mitch Osborne at Test the Waters. “People think it must be miserably cold, but we sell gear that keeps divers comfortable, safe, and warm.”
Adventurous Experience
According to Emily Craver of Last Frontier Diving in Anchorage, people have any number of reasons to explore Alaska’s underwater world. While tourists want the majestic Alaska experience, those who live in the state tend to love new challenges.
“Alaskans are adventurous people, and I think diving is a natural continuation of that,” Craver explains. “Also, we’re kind of captive here, so we’d rather dive here than not at all.”
Despite the attraction, diving is a niche sport in Alaska. “When you look at the world’s population and how many people are certified to dive, then look at how many dive in Alaska, it’s a really small number,” Craver says. “A few years ago in Whittier, I was holding an open water class. It was the last dive of the day, it was snowing, and I told people to lie on their backs as we were kicking in to enjoy the moment. Because who else gets to do this?”
Craver adds that climate change also drives the need to dive. “Not to get political, but personally and professionally I feel like it’s important to dive more of the world while the diving is still good,” she says, noting that the condition of coral and other sea life is not improving as time goes on. “I want to see what I can, while I can. I encourage people who are interested in the natural world, animals, plants, and coral, to get out there and see this exciting environment now. I love sharing the underwater world with them.”
Divers who have never experienced Alaska waters may find adjusting to a drysuit a little difficult, but Baumann says many people find the challenge quite rewarding. While cold-water diving takes more time, effort, and patience than diving in other parts of the world, the experience is well worth it.
Current Issue
September 2024
“Somewhere else, you may be able to dive after a two-minute walk from the marina; here, you can’t look at it as if you’ll get in the water quickly. It’s not that simple,” he explains. “You have to look at it like it’s a ski trip and enjoy the trip planning process. If you’re not used to diving in Alaska, it may come as a little bit of a shock. But Alaskans are adventurous people and understand the challenges of doing things outdoors in the winter.”
Plenty of room to explore under the ice of Big Lake, with a mean depth of 29 feet and a maximum depth of almost 90 feet.
Photo Credit: Last Frontier Diving
Emily Craver, the owner of Last Frontier Diving in Anchorage, enjoying the waters offshore of Whittier during the winter.
Photo Credit: Marcy McDannell
Breathing Lessons
While most divers who frequent local shops are Alaska residents, some tourists—who are drysuit certified—choose to explore the underwater world as well. Test the Waters also caters to Fairbanks-area military personnel and university researchers, among other clients, from its location as the northernmost dive shop on the continent.
“When the military first started rotating troops back in from Desert Shield, they wanted to give them an activity to help them decompress,” explains Osborne. “They did skeet shooting, mountain climbing, and scuba diving, and we rated really highly as an activity that they loved.”
During that time, the shop taught 872 military troops through its Discover Scuba program, training 20 people in the pool in the morning and another 20 people in the afternoon for three months straight.
Test the Waters also trains military personnel to become professional divers after they leave the service, and the shop co-teaches a college-level scientific diving course with a UAF professor. Divers take the class in the spring and finish with dives at the federal ocean lab on Kasitsna Bay, near Seldovia. The company also teaches a survival course for various organizations.
Bruce, the shop dog at Dive Alaska, joins an excursion in Whittier.
Photo Credit: Dive Alaska
Emily Craver floats among a smack of moon jellies in Port Fidalgo, a bay on the east side of Prince William Sound.
Photo Credit: Mark Enarson
“When you’re diving at Summit Lake, the response time for medical professionals to get to you is very different than if you’re diving on the shore in Hawai’i,” says Sample. “You’re in a really remote spot, and cell phones don’t work everywhere in Alaska, so you have to have a plan if something goes wrong.”
“In Interior and coastal areas, you’re also dealing with low visibility, so we train divers to become comfortable in those conditions,” adds Osborne. “You can dive in the Caribbean and see 100 feet ahead; here, visibility may be limited to 15 or 30 feet.”
Test the Waters also offers courses for ice divers and has worked with TV shows that need camera work done under the ice. Osborne is credited with shooting underwater scenery for the opening sequence of Ice Road Truckers, for example.
“We’ve literally had people call us to take them diving in the Arctic Ocean,” says Osborne. “We’ve chartered a plane, loaded up shop gear, and joined them so that they were able to check off that bucket list item.”
In addition to scuba diving, Dive Alaska teaches free diving, which is diving without tanks, using only air held in the lungs. “It’s a different way of enjoying the water,” says Baumann. “Free diving is almost meditative; you have to relax your body and mind and think about what each part of the body is doing. Some people have compared it to yoga.”
End-to-End Service
In addition to classes, dive shops sell and rent gear, as well as service that equipment.
“It’s not as easy as saying something is broken and calling up a person in the Lower 48 to fix it; that’s not always an option,” says Baumann. “Two or three years ago, before we did zipper installs, a diver had to send their drysuit outside, either to California or overseas, and the process took months. Now if someone walks in, depending on how quickly they need it, we can get it back to them in the same day, though it usually takes about two weeks.”
The shop can repair drysuit zippers, fix regulators of all different brands, and even tinker with some electronics. Baumann says these services were added during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the shop looked at how it was supporting the dive community.
Freediving spearfishers doing their part to cull invasive Northern pike in Southcentral waters.
Photo Credit: Dive Alaska
“The pandemic drove us to provide services that we had otherwise looked outside for before,” he says.
For divers who want to experience the underwater world beyond Alaska, all three dive shops provide those opportunities as well. Last Frontier Diving not only puts together trips in-state—such as opportunities to dive in Valdez when salmon sharks come through—but has also hosted trips to Papua New Guinea, Egypt, Scotland, the Caribbean, Central America, and Australia.
“If there’s water, we’ll go,” says Craver.
Test the Waters’ divers recently returned from the Red Sea and a tour of the Nile, and another group just got back from Cuba. Prior to the pandemic, the dive shop offered two to three low-end to high-end dive trips a year.
“Low-end is ‘We’ll meet you on the beach in Kona,’” says Osborne. “High-end is a guided dive tour of Fiji or Antarctica.”
Osborne retired last year from the US Fish and Wildlife Service as one of the agency’s only registered research divers. Enabling others to encounter underwater organisms is an extension of his lifelong interest in the aquatic environment.
Creating Community
Considering that the diving community is fairly small—especially in Alaska—dive shops make a concentrated effort to bring together those who love the underwater world. On the last Thursday of every month, Dive Alaska holds a shop mixer where divers can hang out for a couple of hours to talk about diving and upcoming vacations, among other things. The company also hosts trash cleanups, including a large harbor cleanup in Seward last year and Whittier this year.
“We had 100 divers underwater, as well as people working topside with the fire department and EMS,” says Baumann. “We brought up a ridiculous amount of trash.” These types of efforts, he adds, strengthen the Alaska community more broadly, divers and landlubbers alike.
Social media platforms help divers meet each other, too, including an Alaska Scuba Divers Facebook page and The Alaska “Just Go Diving” Facebook page.
“One of the things we realized when we started was that we didn’t know a lot of people and that these different social media platforms could provide access to dive buddies and local information to help out new divers,” says Baumann. “It’s really exciting to be able to just roll up to Smitty’s Cove any weekend of the year and find dive friends there.”
This same sense of community extends among the dive shop owners themselves.
“There are two dive shops in Anchorage, but just one absolutely awesome community,” says Baumann. “It’s different in Alaska compared to other parts of the world. In other places, there’s a lot of one-upism and competition, but here we keep it simple. Like our shop motto says—just go diving.”
