AQUANAUT

Welcome to Aquanaut, the internet's first and (not-exactly) largest online magazine dedicated to the recreational and technical SCUBA diving community. Aquanaut has been online since February 1993. Prior to use of WWW technology, Aquanaut used a Gopher server for several months to bring you a simple text and graphic magazine. We added WWW in late 1993 and dropped the Gopher service in mid-1994.

Aquanaut contained sections that included Dive Gear Reviews, Environment, Fish & Marine Life, Image Gallery, Marketplace, Medical & Physiology, Miscellaneous Info, Site Reviews, Temperatures & Weather, Wreck Database and links to Other Web Resources. We ran several popular mailing list forums, including TechDiver. The Wreck Database, WreckDB. was a growing database of shipwreck information, including locations, details of the ship and what you might expect to see on a dive there. In July 1996, we created AquaCrawler: our own Web Crawler tool. At its peak AquaCrawler maintained a database of links to thousands of other Web sites containg SCUBA information.

In March 2004, we decided to end Aquanaut due to the increasing time and network resources needed to maintain it, not to mention the continual abuse of the mailing lists. By popular request, the Club Directory, the list of Training Agencies and the TechDiver and other mailing list archives remain available; use the links below to access them.

Latest News

New activity!

October 2021
As regular visitors here will know, this site has been largely unmaintained since March 2004. Even at its peak, Aquanaut was always a personal project where the entire site, its content, scripts and databases were maintained by one person on a single web server. Back in 2004, due to the time contstaints of work and real life, the costs of operating the site and the endless abuse of the mailing lists which required a lot of time to keep sorting out, I was obliged to close the site down. By popular request, I kept the Club Directory, the list of Training Agencies and the mailing list archives going. For the last sixteen years, I did have a notice here offering the domain for sale, but I received only a handful of requests for info, and none offering anything worthwhile. So I have kept the domain and I have kept the scripts working through various system upgrades and technology changes. I hope it is continues to be useful. Having more time again now, I may re-add some of the old sections that have long been removed, with new and updated content.

A request to folk with entries in the Club Directory. Please check your entries and keep them up-to-date. Some entries are more than two decades old. If you do not remember your club's tag and password, please send me email and I will do my best to help. In due course, I shall write a script that emails club admins to remind them about their entry in the database and I shall start removing entries for which the admin's email bounces. Thanks.

The first recent updates involve making the whole site mobile-friendly. This is mostly done now. It has involved adding new HTML metadata to all pages and adding scaling information to images and to preformatted text. On top of that, I was amazed to discover that many of the pages from this site were still using very early HTML standards from the 1990s - but, even so, they still looked fine on modern browsers! Wow! Of course, these have all been updated to send HTML5 pages now.

Anyway... I am not sure quite how far I will take this site again now. There are, of course, many excellent diving web sites out there now, and global-scale search engines that are way more expansive than our own AquaSearcher ever was. It seems rather pointless to redo all that again now. So, we'll see. Please get in touch and let me know what you'd like to see here.

You can contact me by email at: webmaster@aquanaut.com.

Your web- and divemaster:
-jr

Aquanaut's Index

Banner Ads (now Free!)

Club Directory

Mailing List Archives

Training Agencies

Aquanaut's Sponsors

Aquanaut is hosted at Opal, or Open Advisors Limited. Opal provides training and consulting services in networking and open systems technologies.

The Aquanaut logo image was created by Tyler C. Durrett.