A dive instructor’s first liveaboard, solo, in the Red Sea, is the latest story in New Wave, BookDiveBoat’s series built to get a younger generation of divers underwater.
Scuba diving has an age problem. The average diver in the United States is 42.9 years old, according to DEMA’s 2024 Diving Fast Facts, drawn from the 2023 DEMA U.S. Diver Study.
Certification is not where it goes wrong. Thousands of people in their twenties finish an Open Water course every summer. Far fewer are still diving ten years later. Most never take a liveaboard at all.
BookDiveBoat, a Paris dive travel agency registered with Atout France and covered by APST financial protection, thinks it knows why. From the outside, a liveaboard looks like a closed club. A week at sea. A boat you have never seen. Fifteen strangers. Dives nobody has described to you. For a diver with thirty logged dives, that is a lot to say yes to.
Introducing New Wave
New Wave is the agency’s answer to the gap between getting certified and actually diving. Partner operators hand over places on their boats. BookDiveBoat fills them with young divers who film the week and write it up, the schedule, the cabins, the briefings, the first dive with people met the day before.
The questions they take on are the ones that never appear in a brochure. How many dives you really need. Whether turning up alone is strange. What happens if you are seasick on day one. How to tell whether a boat is run safely.
The work runs on the agency’s website and social channels alongside the creators’ own, and feeds the destination guides BookDiveBoat writes. All of it is free, and open to anyone. The agency calls it a standing commitment rather than a campaign.
“The scuba diving industry needs young divers. We must make room for them.”
Sofia Graudin, PADI OWSI, independent comment for BookDiveBoat
Zaina Fadel’s First Red Sea Liveaboard
Zaina Fadel is a scuba instructor based in Qatar. She has taught diving for years. In August, she did her first liveaboard, eight days on a Red Sea boat with BookDiveBoat. Solo, with no dive buddy arranged in advance.
Zaina’s report is the series’ latest. It follows her first week living on a boat, diving several times a day, and the hammerheads she had been hoping to see since before she booked.
“I felt like part of one big family of divers, all living in the same place, diving together, eating together, sharing the same days built around the same thing we all loved.”
Zaina Fadel, Dive Instructor, New Wave trip report, BookDiveBoat
Her full Red Sea liveaboard trip report is available on the BookDiveBoat website.
About BookDiveBoat
BookDiveBoat is an online reservation agency for liveaboards and dive resorts, based in Paris and Besançon. It is a registered French travel agency (Atout France IM025230002, SIRET 94829922700017) with APST financial protection, and operates in the United States through BDB Travel Group Inc., Delaware. The agency works across Egypt, the Maldives, Mexico, Indonesia and the Galápagos, and does not own or operate vessels.
