Your Scuba Vacation, What is the Water Temp?
It is always a good thing to know the approximate temperatures of the water for your scuba vacation, that you are planning on visiting. In your scuba Open water certification course, the instructor will usually tell you to contact a dive store before you go. What the instructor usually forgets to tell you is that you need to contact a dive store located near at or at least near the locations where you scuba vacation is taking you.
We usually get a few calls a day from people who ask what the water temperature is, in Grand Cayman or some other tropical destination that is not even remotely located near Visibility Unlimited which we are located in Illinois. While we can venture an educated guess from our traveling experience, it is still a guess.
We came across a really neat website while diving the Internet and would like to share it with you. The site, Weather Underground, actually gives you water temperatures in color graphics and in real time which are all displayed on a worldwide map. It also gives you wave heights and the temperature from various marine buoys worldwide. I did put the site to a quick test as it had a box that allowed you to put in a zip code for coastal regions. I wanted to see what would happen if I put in our dive store zip code. Since we are not located on a coast (we are smack dab somewhere in the middle of the United States which is about as land-locked as you can get). I wanted to see what the result or the error code would be. Here is the very impressive result.
There are also sites on the Internet that will give you weather conditions for just about any location world wide by simply typing in your scuba vacation destination along with the word weather. Whether you are using Google, Bing, Yahoo or any one of the thousands of internet search engines out there, you are sure to get a more real time answer and in real time.
All I gotta say is “How cool is that?” – yes pun, intended!
Tags: scuba vacation, water temperature