Also nestled in a corner of the South Pacific is fabled Truk Lagoon. Aggressor has placed one of its excellent liveaboard dive boats in this hauntingly beautiful location. It is haunting because Truk Lagoon was the site of two major air to sea battles during World War II, battles which spelled death for over 60 merchant ships and 250 airplanes. Wrecks of Japanese zeroes litter the shallow floor of the lagoon, interspersed with the huge hulks of steel. There's even a sunken submarine. But while diving on wrecks may strike a chord in some divers, what will attract every diver is the profusion of hard and soft corals that cover every inch of the decks and walls of these once-mighty ships. Lionfish nestle in the bow; schools of fusiliers dart through the wheelhouse; glassfish move endlessly through fuselages. There are also abundant reminders that these ships were home to hundreds of Japanese sailors who left behind saki bottles, chopsticks, china dolls, bicycles and even plates and teacups from the galley. This magnificent trip is only $2295, plus airfare, but if you sign up for both Palau and Truk, you get a $200 discount.

The 106-foot Palau Aggressor was named ìBest Liveaboard Dive Boatî by Rodale's magazine, and it is easy to see why. The spacious salon is situated next to an indoor/outdoor bar near the hot tub. The beautifully decorated staterooms offer queen and twin beds, feature individual climate control and, of course, include en-suite bathrooms. The comfortable dive deck with its generous camera table offers easy access to the Palau Aggressor's crowning feature, its jet-driven high speed skiff with a hydraulic lift that lowers you effortlessly into the water on the way to your next dive. Speaking about diving, Palau features an abundance of famous dive sites - among them Blue Corner, German Channel, and Big Drop Off. Also included in this charter is a trip to legendary Jellyfish Lake, where you can snorkel with millions of stingless jellyfish. The Tridacna clams at Velvia; the cruising sharks at Blue Corner, the manta rays and sharks being cleaned at Cleaner Rock make this for an unbelievable vacation. $2295, plus airfare.

Peter Hughes' latest addition to their fleet is the Antares Dancer, an 85-foot steel construction vessel that accommodates 12 passengers in six double-occupancy staterooms. Los Roques is the oldest and largest national marine park in the Caribbean. For years, its protected status made access to divers difficult, if not impossible. The result is a proliferation of flora and fauna that are undamaged by excess human interference. The fish, having lost their fear of man as a predator, are extraordinarily friendly. Pinnacles rising from the ocean floor attract numerous large fish such as snapper, grouper, barracuda and an abundance of pelagics such as big eyed jacks, tuna and tarpon. One dive site, Dos Mosquises, is covered with thick bushes of black coral and is home to no less than four varieties of turtle. All of the diving to these fantastic dive sites is from two support boats. Each stateroom has en-suite bathroom facilities and individual climate control. There is even a phone and a fax aboard! This isolated archipelago located just 100 miles north of Caracas, Venezuela has 350 islands, only three of which are inhabited. Diving here will renew even the most jaded divers' appreciation of the Caribbean. $1495, plus air.

There's now a great new way to dive Monterey Bay! The Monterey Express takes divers to excellent dive spots in and around Monterey and Carmel Bays. The spacious, comfortable ship is 42 feet long and an amazing 16 feet wide. Her wide beam allows for greater stability that minimizes rocking on the way to and from the dive sites. Winter traditionally provides the best visibility on the California coast. Don't miss this chance for a morning of spectacular diving. The boat departs from the Monterey Pier at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday and Sunday. Return to dock around 12:30 so you can spend the rest of the day in the Monterey area or begin a leisurely drive home. The Monterey Express is equipped with twin 310 hp engines which quickly get her divers to the day's dive sites. The Monterey Express even provides the tanks for your dives. Snacks are provided during the trip. $65 plus airfare.

We has scheduled dive charters with the Cypress Sea for a few years now, and there are many good reasons for that. Captain Phil Sammet and his crew can practically find the best dive sites blindfolded, they've been there so many times. Meet the boat at Monterey Pier early Sunday morning, eat a quick Continental breakfast while Captain Phil motors out to the first dive site, then get suited up and ready to go. Winter always brings the best diving to the California coast. With El Niño a distant memory, the seas have calmed down and diving is a joy again. What better way to spend a winter day than to get in a couple of dives in Monterey's kelp forest? The brilliant sun streams through 60 feet of crystal-clear water! Snack is provided with this excellent dive package. Dive half day and be back at the pier by 2:00 p.m. to get an early start on your return home. Experience what Northern California has to offer for only $75 plus airfare.

Experience the Egyptian Red Sea aboard a Peter Hughes luxury liveaboard! Egypt's Red Sea, aptly called one of the seven wonders of the underwater world, offers some unparalleled diving and photo opportunities. A truly magnificent array of coral formation, a prolific marine life of which approximately 25% is endemic to the Red Sea, including sharks and other pelagic species. Many of the dives will be organized as drift dives due to the currents in the area. Two Zodiacs will accommodate all guests for drift diving. Reservations are now being taken for the new Moon Dancer, the newest vessel of Peter Hughesí Dancer Fleet. Mysterious and historic, Egypt offers some of the most exotic adventures above and below the waterís surface. The eight-night itineraries will depart from Hurghada with a complement of 20 guests and 8 crew. The brand new custom-designed vessel is 105 feet in length with a 25-foot beam. All double occupancy staterooms have a private head and shower, individual air conditioning, music controls and a picture window or porthole views. The Moon Dancer will deliver the high level of service and quality diving you have come to expect from a Peter Hughes liveaboard experience. Nitrox and Atlantis I Rebreather certifications are offered as well as PADI specialties. Daily E-6 film processing and a 36 screen for video play-back are available. $2395 plus airfare.

In addition to this spectacular Red Sea vacation, We will be offering a photo land safari during the week of September 14. We will leave Cairo and fly to Nairobi, Kenya to be met by our guides who will take us to the incomparable Masai Mara in Nairobi. Moving by day with the herds that roam this vast African plain will give us endless opportunities to photograph the massive wildebeest migration, view zebra, elephants, lions and hyenas as they rove the arid land in a never-ending search for food. The life-and-death drama that is commonplace on the African veldt will be played around us as we view for ourselves the scenes that we have seen for years on television. The combination of Red Sea diving and African safari is one too spectacular to miss. If you are signed up for the Red Sea and wish to be part of the Masai Mara adventure, please call and we will reserve your space.

This exciting new land-based package just recently became available to us here at Omni Divers when we were able to take advantage of some competitive pricing! The Coco View Resort has an intimate feeling with only 25 rooms, every one of them on the ocean front. The Coco View Wall, a world-class dive site, is advertised as ìonly a snorkel awayî from their bar! This terrific package includes not five, but six days of diving, your room, all meals two tank boat dives a day, plus unlimited beach diving. Surface interval distractions such as ocean kayaking, a library or playing pool in the game room are all available free of cost! There are even two dining rooms from which to choose! Their dive boats offer a unique moon hatch, an opening midships that allows for stable, easy access to the water. Between dives, we are returned to the hotel for some leisure time, or you can be dropped off at the wall or on the wreck of the Prince Albert for a great wall dive before you snorkel back to the beach! Roatan is renowned for its excellent diving conditions, and the Coco View has cornered an exclusive on some of the best of them when they situated their hotel on Picnic Cay. This level of diving is usually only available on liveaboard dive boats at substantially greater cost; however, here is a chance for liveaboard-quality dive sites at land-based prices. Don't miss the boat. $1499, plus airfare.

"This exciting new land-based package just recently became available to us here at Omni Divers when we were able to take advantage of some competitive pricing! The Coco View Resort has an intimate feeling with only 25 rooms, every one of them on the ocean front. The Coco View Wall, a world-class dive site, is advertised as ìonly a snorkel awayî from their bar! This terrific package includes not five, but six days of diving, your room, all meals two tank boat dives a day, plus unlimited beach diving. Surface interval distractions such as ocean kayaking, a library or playing pool in the game room are all available free of cost! There are even two dining rooms from which to choose! Their dive boats offer a unique ìmoon hatchî, an opening midships that allows for stable, easy access to the water. Between dives, we are returned to the hotel for some leisure time, or you can be dropped off at the wall or on the wreck of the Prince Albert for a great wall dive before you snorkel back to the beach! Roatan is renowned for its excellent diving conditions, and the Coco View has cornered an exclusive on some of the best of them when they situated their hotel on Picnic Cay. This level of diving is usually only available on liveaboard dive boats at substantially greater cost; however, here is a chance for liveaboard-quality dive sites at land-based prices. Don't miss the boat. $1499, plus airfare.

Everybody needs a super vacation. How about a week's stay at an oceanside resort in the Caribbean? We will stay at the Galapago Inn, now aptly renamed Scuba Club Cozumel. This fabulous all-inclusive package would be too good to believe - except we offer it three times a year! One week's stay at Scuba Club Cozumel comes with all three meals a day included, two tank boat dives a day, all the shore diving you can handle for the week, and roundtrip airfare. The ever-present currents gently clear out anything that would inhibit visibility; therefore, 100-plus foot visibility is a constant! After the day's diving, you can catch some rays by the pool, lay in the hammocks while you read your paperback, or stroll into town to buy T-shirts for those less fortunate friends and family members who aren't glorying in a Caribbean vacation! We will also have a barbecue lunch on the beach and a fiesta one night. You will have so much fun that you will find yourself promising to come back again and again! This great trip goes for only $1199, plus airfare!

Hunting trips have been so popular that this year we are offering two different trips in October to take double advantage of the prime part of lobster season. This earlier trip is a three-day hunting trip aboard the Conception. As part of the Truth Aquatics fleet, the ship leaves from Santa Barbara harbor and motors out to the Northern Channel Islands to some great lobster spots. This three-day trip is only $393 plus airfare. However, if you have an extra day to spare in your pursuit of those wily ìbugsî, you can do that on our second trip in October, the four-day hunting trip. Once again we will trek out to some little known spots to take home some newly-caught lobster. The four-day trip is only $524 plus airfare. The ship is equipped with cold storage for not only your lobsters, but sheepshead or scallops, too. If you are an experienced hunter or if you are just learning the sport, either one of these trips will be your best bet to bring home some fresh food from the ocean. Call us and sign up for whichever trip suits your fancy. $393 for three days plus airfare; $524 for four days plus airfare.

There is some spectacular diving off the coast of Victoria, British Columbia. You can dive with the giant Pacific octopus, gaze upon the old-man faces of wolf eels, search for exotic invertebrates while you are entertained by seals and sea lions endlessly cavorting both on the surface and below the water line. The Sunshine Coast and Hornby Island will be two of the locations that we will dive during our three-day trip. The 85-foot liveaboard Nautilus VII was completely rebuilt in 1995 specifically for cold water diving. Almost all of the diving is done from an aluminum skiff. There is a heated wet room for your scuba gear. Each day there are three day dives and one night dive offered. This trip we will concentrate on diving all of the artificial reefs made from ships that the citizens of B.C. sank in the shallow waters off the coast. These decommissioned ships are super diver friendly, with all doors and windows removed and even spray-painted signs on the walls pointing to the nearest exit. Getting to Vancouver is just a hop, skip and a jump from Sacramento. You can be aboard the Nautilus in just a few short hours! That's a deal that you can't beat. Tanks and weights are provided. Nitrox is available, and they even rent drysuits! If you have always wanted to dive the magnificent Gulf Islands of the Pacific Northwest, this is your best chance. Only $629 plus airfare.

Once upon a time, Cocos Island was a rest stop for pirates of the Pacific. Used as a place to hide stolen treasure and restock on fresh water, this island paradise soon became home to hundreds of millions of dollars of buried treasure that was never recovered. It still lies there to this day, keeping its secrets, hoarding its wealth. But we don't go to search for gold and jewels. No, what interests the diver at Cocos is a wealth of sharks schooling hammerheads, thousands of white-tip reef sharks, silky sharks and even an occasional Galapagos shark. For anyone who wants the adrenaline of sharing the ocean with the great pelagics, this is the place to be. Drop in the water into the middle of a school of hammerheads in numbers too high to count. The only sound will be your regulator sighing with each breath. Itís an experience that makes memories of a lifetime. $2495 plus airfare.

The Paradise Sport is Mike Ball's venture into the lushest area of the South Pacific - Papua/New Guinea. Since there are very few dive boats there, the reef system is virtually untouched. When we lead a trip to Papua/New Guinea, we dive on dive sites that had never been dived before! The Paradise Sport has three types of cabins. They range from the economy cabin with two twin berths and a window, to the standard cabin which features a queen-sized bed and a single; and finally the largest suites that offer a king-sized bed and a single bed with all of the plush luxuries of a cruise ship! The 100-foot catamaran design combines stability and spaciousness for its 20 passengers. There is a dedicated dining room or alfresco dining for your meals. But all this pales when compared with the unspoiled beauty underwater. Colorful soft corals prosper next to enormous anemones that are home to different varieties of clown fish. Huge schools of tuna will circle over your head as you stare entranced at a tiny decorator crab that is hidden in one of the many crinoids that grab hold of the coral bed. You can see all these breathtaking underwater sites while diving safely with Nitrox which is available on the boat. This is going to be a spectacular trip! Sign up now, and you will enjoy a trip of a lifetime! Paradise suites, $2585 for the week plus airfare; standard suites are $2294 plus airfare, and economy suites are $1840 plus airfare.

Coming this February is our 1st Annual Channel Islands Photographic Contest. This trip is so much fun that people sign up year after year for three days of great diving in the island chain located just off the coast at Santa Barbara. Each year we offer tons of prizes to photographers both experienced and novice who spend three days searching for that perfect shot that will take home the grand prize! We offer prizes in two categories, Macro and Wide Angle. There have been many years where first-time photographers have won. The winning photo will be featured on the March issue of the newsletter. Maybe next year, your shot can be on the cover! $369 plus airfare.

The Northern Channel Islands of Anacapa, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz offer dramatic views of towering cliffs climbing to jagged peaks where sheep and goats are the only denizens. But below the surf are some of Southern California's best kelp forests. The kelp shelters many small crustaceans and shellfish such as pink abalone and scallops. If you are dabbling in photography or are interested in a little hunting, but aren't ready to dive with the big guys yet, this boat is for you. Or you might still be content diving with nothing to distract you from the awesome beauty around you. Your three-day mini vacation will be hassle free, filled with great food, good diving and wonderful friends. $369 plus airfare.

The Fijians are a friendly, easygoing people who welcome visitors to their country with open arms and a pleasant smile. Palm trees line the shores while crystal-clear waters endlessly groom the beaches day and night. But what is even more enticing in Fiji is what you can see underwater. Fiji's tropical waters are perfect for impressive gardens of hard corals and soft corals alike. The scene unfolding beneath you reaches to the horizon in an unbelievable blaze of color. Long-tentacled anemones shelter brightly-colored clown fish in exchange for live-in maid service. Fierce-looking moray eels emerge from their burrows; elegant lobsters wave their antenna by way of greeting and the giant Tridacna clams swiftly close their shells as you swim by, enveloped in the tropical warm waters of the South Pacific. The newly-commissioned Fiji Aggressor offers a friendly crew, great food and superb diving all in one package. Once you get there, you won't ever want to leave. $2195, plus airfare.

The newly commissioned Belize Aggressor has all of the amenities that you would want for a liveaboard dive boat. Spacious two-man cabins with en-suite bathrooms with individually climate-controlled rooms lure you to your room; however, the call of the reefs is too strong to ignore! Belize is ranked one of the seven underwater wonders of the world, and it well deserves its ranking. Nassau groupers compete with French angelfish to see who can get their picture taken more often. The glorious fans and sponge decorate the plunging walls, each magnificent creature vying for the diver's attention. And of course, no trip to Belize is complete without visiting the Blue Hole, the sinkhole that Jacques Cousteau made famous with his expedition into its depths. On the descent into the Blue Hole, you can stop and admire a plaque that he and his team left after their history-making dives. Aggressor ships make sure that you dive in comfort, all the while feeding you before and after every dive. They claim that Aggressors are the ultimate in liveaboards. Come aboard with us and find out why. $1695, plus airfare.

After decades of being off limits to all civilians, Bikini Atoll has recently been opened to adventurous scuba divers. In the summer of 1946, the United States detonated two atomic bombs, ìAbleî and ìBakerî, as a test to determine what sort of damage warships would sustain from a nearby nuclear blast. Anchored in the lagoon surrounding the tiny island were 95 American and captured Axis ships. Fifty years have gone by, and this remote island now hosts divers who want to go the next step in diving. After obtaining your Wreck certification, followed by the Technical Nitrox, Extended Range and Tri-Mix classes, Tim Williams will lead a group to do technical deep diving which will allow you to take a look at three Helldiver aircraft with folded wings that are sitting on the hangar deck of the Saratoga. At 165 feet sits the battleship Nagato which was considered the flagship of the Imperial Japanese Navy. Admiral Yamamoto launched the attack of Pearl Harbor from the bridge of the Nagato. Another dive available is the 312-foot Balao-class submarine, the Pilotfish. Bikini Atoll promises to be a trip of a life time. Our agent has been working for over two years trying to put this diving expedition together. We are excited to be able to offer this trip to those trained and prepared to dive into history. Only a handful of divers will ever be able to dive these once proud vessels. These ships were in some of the most traumatic maritime battles ever fought in history. The sheer immensity and grandeur of these ships in contrast to the power of the bombs that sent them to the bottom like some small bathtub toys should be enough to inspire any great adventurer. We are only taking divers who are qualified in Technical diving and wreck diving. There is plenty of time to receive the training required to be a part of this expedition. If you have any questions, please call Tim Williams, our Technical Diving instructor, and get ready for a trip that the vast majority of divers only read about or watch in awe on television.

November in Hawaii? When everyone else is huddling in front of their fireplace, you could be exploring one of the many lava tubes that distinguish diving off the Kona Coast. Look for the elusive, gaily-spotted harlequin shrimp which can be found hitching a ride on a starfish as they consume their transportation one leg at a time. Hard corals and crinoids compete for attention with the gaudy butterfly fish who delicately dance their way through the underwater forest. But warm water, colorful fish and bright sunny days are not what bring us to Kona in November, when compelled by an ancient instinct, humpback whales, too, come to Hawaii for a winter vacation. Dive listening to a whale symphony, then turn and find one of those impressive giants swimming your way. The Kona Aggressor knows where the best dive sites are to see these aquatic mammoths. What a spectacular way to start off the winter! $1895, plus airfare.

Some of the best diving in the South Pacific is to be found in the Solomon Islands. Situated just south of the Equator due east of Papua/New Guinea, the emerald-hued islands were an important stepping stone in the Pacific during World War II. Guadalcanal was the site of an no-holds barred effort to recapture the island from the deeply entrenched Japanese who were committed to die to the last man. The islands themselves are so full of history that the images grab you, and you imagine what it would be like to hack your way through thick virgin jungle carrying all of your rations and your ammunition on your back in sweltering heat. But history and World War II are only part of the story in the Solomons. Beneath the aquamarine waves is a landscape decorated with the heavy hand of Mother Nature at her wildest. Giant fans can conceal your dive buddy as he chases after an octopus. Abundant soft corals in a stunning array of colors offer shelter to tiny crabs and shrimp. Giant razor clams hang suspended from the plunging walls, with their shells agape to show gaudy mantles studded with a string of eyes. Anemone fish work endlessly to keep their host homes free of debris while huge schools of barracuda and tuna spiral endlessly around as the sun dapples their sinuous backs. It is a breathtaking sight that will bring you to the surface with a smile on your face. What more could you ask for a vacation? $2086, plus airfare.