Blackwater Diving

Aqua Divers offers extreme open-ocean Blackwater diving in Cozumel, taking place at night over deep waters beyond recreational limits. This specialized scuba diving tour allows experienced divers to witness the world’s largest pelagic vertical migration of bioluminescent marine life under strict safety supervision.

Blackwater dives take place at night in open ocean over water that deeper than recreational limits.

Blackwater diving is conducted at night, usually far from shore in deep ocean waters, from a boat equipped with the required lights and lines. Bright lights are suspended in the water for a short time before divers enter to attract marine life to the area. Lines are typically fixed to the boat for divers to hold or clip onto underwater to keep everyone close together, oriented, and at a consistent depth. Once you enter the water, youll be shrouded in darkness, only seeing whatever mysterious and bioluminescent creatures emerge from the oceans depths to enter the beam of your torch. Often conducted at shallow depths, blackwater dives may exceed one hour in bottom time, giving you plenty of time to adjust to the unusual conditions and look for unique critters.

As a result weather is very important for safe diving conditions
The dive will start with the bottom over 800ft away. However we stay really shallow and dive within recreational limits.

We meet up at 5.30pm at marina Asipona.

There we do Paperwork and assemble our equipment . If you are unable to assemble your own equipment this is not a dive for you .
We have the dive Briefing as we motor out to the drop zone which is approximately 1 mile out from the reef

We aim to be in the water as the sun sets

We then cast a free floating lighting array. We are not tethered to the boat. So you must be able to float and hold you depth without touching the bottom

The lights are spaced down the line to give us a visual depth reference and attract in the crazy critters that we only find well out open water.

Then we spend 90min drifting with the buoy.

It’s a very ethereal experience.

The animal’s we see vary in size from tiny up to super massive.

We ask everyone :
Be experienced with night diving,
wear full wetsuits, as we do get stingers out there,
Dive with a computer
Have no known heart conditions.
Have a good strong torch. we have some rentals. They are 10usd a light

80cf air – complimentary
80cf Nitrox. – 200 mxn
100cf air. – 200 mxn
100cf Nitrox – 300 mxn

We can take up to 24 diversJust before and after Full moon and new moon are the very active times

We never know what we will see

We run a free guid dive Divers are responsible for monitoring their own air and and diving within their own limits. Each diver ends the dive when they wish with a max bottom time of 90mins

We get back to the marina at around 8.45pm

The dives are in open ocean and require safe weather conditions . We try to pick the best night of each week to run the dive. So I ask everyone to be flexible with the night and the short notice.

We need 4 divers to operate the trip.

Over night accommodation on cozumel is required as we get back too late for the passenger ferries back to playa.