Ranking My 2024 SCUBA DIVING Adventures

Hello guys and welcome back to another episode on the Dive Saga channel. 2024 is over and I want to thank all of you for the amazing support, the interaction, the ideas, the comments. The channel grew a lot this year and I'm super appreciative of that. I did go out of my way to go on a ton of amazing diving adventures and so I want to make an official 2024 top 10 of the most amazing dives. I would recommend that you stay tuned till the end because there is actually my number one dive that I did this year. It has not yet aired on the Dive Saga channel so that way you can actually get a little preview of it, so spoiler alert, but my favorite dive is a very recent one. As always guys, if you're not yet subscribed, consider subscribing to the Dive Saga channel, leave a comment. Maybe you've done some of these dives or maybe you didn't like some of these dives and then I definitely want to know why and we can exchange ideas. On number 10 for me is Isla del Caño in Costa Rica. So if you go all the way back to the beginning of the year you will find an episode about Isla del Caño. There's nothing wrong with it, it's a perfectly serviceable dive, it's just that I did so many amazing dives this year and that one being an ocean dive with a few sharks and to be honest, in that moment, not the best visibility, simply doesn't rank super high. Still a super cool dive if you're ever in the area and you're in Costa Rica, it is definitely worth checking it out. My number 9 favorite dive of 2024 is a bit of a weird one and again, as much as I hesitated making the episode, I also hesitate kind of putting it in my top 10 favorite dives of the year. But I guess favorite dives can also just mean dives that left an impression and so it is the rescue dive that we did on April 1st of this year when a freediver got stuck in a freshwater cave and we went on a search. It was not my favorite dive in the sense that I want to do it again, but it is a dive that I think about it a lot. I'm proud of how we executed it. It actually got featured on an episode of Dive Talk not so long ago, so maybe you want to check that out. I'll put a link in the description below and I would love to know what you guys think about that. Let me take a little moment here to also thank the sponsor of this episode, which is Ratio Watches. Ratio makes really, really nice watches and for me personally, when I'm not wearing a dive computer, I do like to wear a really nice watch. Ideally, one that I can actually scuba dive with. Ratio makes such watches and they're very high quality. I wear them pretty much every day. So if you want to pick up a Ratio watch for yourself, I'm going to put a link below. You can use the coupon code DIVESAGA. There's actually a few different watches that you can get a nice discount on for yourself. Ratio also sponsored an episode earlier, which is certainly also in my top 10 of 2024. My number eight on the top 10 dives of 2024 is the Hafeistus Wreck in Malta. It's a relatively recent wreck. It's definitely Malta's most recent wreck and that makes it super cool. It's a little deeper. It only sort of begins at 40 meters, 130 feet. So it is a technical dive, but it being a fresh wreck and having some of those newer recognizable elements on it definitely makes that I think about it frequently. Number seven on my top 10 favorite dives that I did in 2024 is the Black Marble Mine in Belgium. It is probably the darkest environment I've ever dived in because Black Marble Noir Belge is just all black. So all the rocks are black, black, black. And it is of course a mine overhead and the entrance is pretty cloudy. So it is just a super impressive dive. Also the entrance is very, very deterring almost. We needed special permission to dive there, which we did have. And I think if you know the DiveSaga channel a bit, I always say the more impressive the entrance or the more special the entrance, the more that adds to the dive. And for the Black Marble Mine in Anne in Belgium, that was definitely the case. On number six of my top 10 favorite dives I did in 2024, I put Cueva del Agua. Cueva del Agua in Spain is, as the name says, a cave, cave of water literally. But a super cool cave, especially for being in the middle of a town, unsuspecting just in Spain by the coast. And what's special about Cueva del Agua is that it has also been the scene of several accidents in the past. So when I make episodes, I always like to have something to educate people about or to have sort of a talking point and an objective for the dive. It is a very sinister one, being that there is still equipment left in Cueva del Agua, but I think it's a well worth episode to watch, also to just discuss and recognize the dangers of cave diving and also the fact that we do stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to everything we know now about cave diving. On number five of my top 10 dives that I did in 2024, I put the MV Carvela, another wreck in Malta and one that is sort of iconic. I had actually been looking forward to diving that in my life for a long, long time because I knew the pictures of the diver coming down the staircase and I could not wait to sort of recreate that moment. It's a really nice wreck. I think a lot of people who live or work and dive in Malta probably have sort of special warm feelings towards that wreck because it is very pretty, sort of wooden floors and again that staircase that just makes it so iconic. On number four of my top 10 favorite dives that I did in 2024, I put a nameless mine in the north of France, south of Belgium, a little bit on the border there, and it's nameless. It's not really meant to be dived per se, but it is a super cool little mine. Not per se super easy to do. You do need to, like with all mine and cave dives, be properly trained for it, but I really liked it. It was actually very colorful and I did not expect that. It did hide a bit of a nasty sting at the end because it is sort of a blind out. You inevitably have to backtrack through the sediment that gets very easily stirred up even if you dive perfectly neutrally buoyant, but nevertheless a very pretty dive and we found even a little bullet from World War II there at the end which I did throw back. A lot of people asked about that. I never take things from dive sites, but very interesting nonetheless and for me my number four. On number three of my top 10 dives that I did in 2024 is another mine actually and it's Felicitas in Germany. It's amazing. I mean, I had again seen pictures of it just like with the staircase of the Carvela. There were photos that I had seen that I sort of wanted to try and recreate in a film version, notably the big saw blade, right? And wow, just it was 30 meters, 100 feet for the whole dive and very cold water, so technically that was not so easy to do. We had to do several dives. We had a whole team, but we had really good team synchronicity and there's the old machinery which has been discarded there when the mine closed in the late 90s, but a little further there is this giant saw blade and so there's a photo and I can say that now I think it's not in the episode. There's a photo by Alex Dawson that is just really well lit and I think the photo is obviously better than the shots in the episode, but I kind of wanted to recapture that feeling, that angle more or less in the episode which I think we did succeed in and just in general, yeah, for me, top, top, top, well, top three. My number two of my top 10 favorite dives that I did in 2024 is the HMS Stubborn World War II submarine wreck. I'm probably a little bit biased because I think one of the reasons I rank it so high is because I've been looking forward to that dive for so long and in 2024 I was finally able to do it. I had actually been to Malta before with the intention of doing it, but because it's in the middle of the ocean, there's not really any reef there, unless the weather is good, it's just not so easy to find it and land there. It is also ideally a tri-mix dive because it does sit at 56 meters, so for work of breathing and just generally being a bit safe, better a tri-mix dive, so an expensive-ish dive if you then do it and don't land exactly on it, but yeah, we landed perfectly on it, spent a nice half hour there shooting it and I love history and I do love wrecks. I think everything to do with World War II is also very interesting and the Stubborn is just a beautifully intact submarine, so if you have not even seen that episode, definitely go check it out because it's also one that I look back at very fondly. And then on number one of my top 10 dives that I did in 2024, it's a dive that has not yet aired as an episode on the Dive Saga channel, but it's coming very soon and it's in a location that is again one that's off the beaten track. We had the distinct honor of teaming up with exploration diver Robby Schmidtner where he showed us one of his personal discoveries. It's just mind-blowing. First of all, we had to really trek through the jungle with his car which then broke down, part of it was by foot, and when we finally did the dive, it was a very long dive, about a bit over two hours, but at the end of the trajectory lies a ginormous underwater chamber. It is so large that you cannot see the other side, even if you go in the middle of it, there is just not enough light that you can put up to see the sides. It's also about 60 meters deep, maybe a little more than that, so around 200 feet almost, which just gives it such a crazy large scope and I don't know if I will ever do a dive that is going to leave such an impression of the gigantic magnitude of what Mother Earth can create. I'm editing the episode as we speak, it's gonna go live soon, but for me that is 100% my favorite dive of the year, so I'm actually happy that I can kind of tease the episode right now. Last year, if you go look and you look at my top 10, I ended the top 10 on number one with Baia, so that's an actual sunken Roman city near Napoli, and so I spent actually the whole way back from this dive with Robby in the car thinking, is this beating the actual sunken Roman city, and the answer is yes. So in fact, when it comes to my favorite dive of all time, this year's number one is also my number one favorite dive of all time. Actually, I'm very grateful that I was able to do my literally most favorite dive of all time this year. So next year, I'm going to have to do a couple things that are even more special, so I'm working on some ideas right now, but if you have ideas, please put them in the comments. I always reply, and actually many of the best dives that I've done do come from suggestions from from you guys, from the people who support the Dive Staga channel. I want to thank each and every one of you for everything you've done throughout the year in regards to, well, just your viewership, but also liking and commenting, and I know you all do that also to actually support the channel, which is amazing, that does help. I also want to thank Ratio Watches for sponsoring this episode and the Felicitas Mind Dive episode. I know sometimes the sponsorship segments cut the flow of the videos, but it's brands like Ratio who are willing to invest in the scuba diving audience, who actually enable us to make content like this. So I do also want to thank all the brand partners who worked with us this year, as well as everybody who supported making the videos. I had the honor of working with some super amazing divers. I try to make a point of surrounding myself with people who are better than I am, so that I can grow, and so that I can be safe, and so that I can bring top notch content. So, what a year! But anyway, we gotta get started on 2025. Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and I wish you all the best. See you next time.