Tags: family vacations, best family travel, travel with kids, Caribbean family vacations, diving trips, diving in Jamaica, scuba diving resorts, scuba resorts, scuba vacations, scuba trips
By Michael Kundu
Pffssssst! The regulator bubbles off, as I drop 40-feet down into a cerulean blue sea. My wife Nola and our teenage sons, Erik and Lars, hover below me, waiting over a colorful, sun-dappled coral head.
My gauge reads 81-degree Fahrenheit; no kidding! Twenty minutes earlier, I was wading to the dive boat, eager to get out of the 90-degree+ Caribbean sun. But now, captivating ledges, arches and coral cave openings quickly take my mind off the surface heat.
With our boys turning 15 and 16 this year, Nola and I calculated that we only have about three more years left, before impending University careers permanently crimp our established tradition of family skiing, kayaking and canyoneering adventures. Certainly, with a history of swimming with sharks in the Florida Keys, stalking grizzlies close-up in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, or kayaking with orcas off the British Columbia coast, the boys had become pretty hard to please – that’s why the prospect of a Jamaican scuba vacation (something we hadn’t done yet) piqued everyone’s interest.
Digging around the Internet, the boys researched Caribbean dive sites: one that particularly fascinated them was a 70-foot underwater coral cavern called ‘the Throne Room’, located near Negril, off Jamaica’s famed Seven Mile Beach. Combined with Nola’s requirements for a posh, all-inclusive resort, and my demands for a professional, and on-site dive operation, Beaches Sandy Bay emerged as our target destination.
On this particular dive, Nola is the first to spot the entry to the Throne Room; a small, dark, keyhole-shaped crevasse in the top of the coral. A surge of fatherly pride runs through me, as my boys, without hesitation, drop head- first 20-feet downward, under a dark coral ledge. Following them into a murky, sponge and fish-filled cavern, we all hover suspended, mesmerized, in a submarine space only a few feet high, enclosed inside a 500-ton coral reef.
Later on, after visiting a sunken Cessna airplane and stirring up a stingray the size of the plane’s fuselage, my air gauge reads 800 p.s.i. – time to surface. The boys break the surface first, and float on the gentle waves.
From the looks of their million-dollar smiles, this has been precisely the kind of memory I hoped they would have, one they would carry with them to university and beyond.
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