About

Miles Nurse

Underwater photographer for thirty years, three of them professionally. PADI Master Instructor. Seven thousand dives across twenty-odd countries, and a strong opinion about most of them.

Miles Nurse with underwater camera housing

Why everything here carries a number

Dive travel writing is almost entirely promotional. Every destination is world-class. Every reef is pristine. Every operator is the best there is. None of it helps someone deciding where to spend a year's dive budget and the annual leave to go with it, because none of it distinguishes between places.

So I started scoring them. Every destination on this site has a number, arrived at the same way, published whether or not it flatters the place. Cozumel scores in the sixties. Jamaica scores in the sixties. One liveaboard operator I paid to be on scores a for Operation, which drops the Galápagos below a muck strait in North Sulawesi.

Those numbers are the point. A recommendation is only worth something from somebody willing to publish a bad review, and I've published several.

The part that qualifies the scoring

I've been the person running the operation

Before any of this, I worked in the industry. Divemaster and instructor in Fiji, Australia, Canada and Grand Cayman between 1997 and 2003 — briefing guests, running boats, sorting kit, managing conditions, and being responsible for people in water that didn't always cooperate.

I went on to PADI Master Instructor and IDC Staff Instructor — which meant I wasn't only teaching divers, I was helping train the instructors, working alongside Course Directors on instructor development. If you want to know what good practice looks like on a dive boat, teaching it to the people who'll go and run those boats is a reasonable way to find out.

I stopped teaching professionally in 2003 and my membership isn't current. Trips here are led, not instructed — I'm the photographer and the person who chose the destination, and the diving is supervised by the operator's own active staff.

That's why Operation is one of the five things scored on every trip here. Most reviews treat the boat as background to the reef. Having stood on the other side of the tank rack — and having taught the standards — I know how much of a trip is decided by whether the operation is any good, and I know the difference between a bad day and a badly run one.

It's also why a 3 gets published when a 3 is what happened.

1997
Fiji
Beachcomber Island
1998
Australia
Deep Sea Divers Den, Taka II, De Ja Vu Charters
1999–2001
Alberta
The Dive Shop Calgary, Liquid Adventures
2002
British Columbia
Poets Cove, Emerald Tide
2003
Cayman Islands
Ocean Frontiers
The record

Twenty-six years, one mark per visit

Every destination scored on this site, and every visit to it. 8 of the 16 have been dived more than once, which is the only way to say anything honest about whether a place is changing.

200020052010201520202025 CozumelCozumel — 2000Cozumel — 2001×2 BonaireBonaire — 2009 GalápagosGalápagos — 2010 NegrilNegril — 2010 Lembeh StraitLembeh Strait — 2013Lembeh Strait — 2015Lembeh Strait — 2019×3 Turneffe AtollTurneffe Atoll — 2013 WakatobiWakatobi — 2014 Bangka ArchipelagoBangka Archipelago — 2015Bangka Archipelago — 2025×2 BunakenBunaken — 2015Bunaken — 2019Bunaken — 2025×3 Dampier StraitDampier Strait — 2016Dampier Strait — 2018×2 TulambenTulamben — 2016Tulamben — 2026×2 Apo IslandApo Island — 2017 DauinDauin — 2017 Browning PassBrowning Pass — 2018Browning Pass — 2020×2 MisoolMisool — 2018Misool — 2026×2 Central AtollsCentral Atolls — 2025
A visit    Years between first and last
7,000+dives logged
26years of record, 2000 to 2026
16destinations scored
19operators scored
1,000+dives in a drysuit
30years shooting, three professionally
PADI Master Instructor and IDC Staff Instructor. Qualified to train instructors, and did, alongside Course Directors. Membership is no longer current — I stopped teaching professionally in 2003.
Based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, which is also where some of the best cold-water diving in the world happens to be.
Canon R5 Mark II in a Nauticam housing. Retra Maxi strobes, two Keldan 4X video lights at 11,000 lumens, WACP-1 and WWL-1 water-contact optics. Before that a 5D Mark II in Aquatica from 2009, and a Nikonos back when nobody needed a camera room.
How I got here

Thirty years, abbreviated

The nineties
Cold water first
British Columbia. Hornby, Pender, the Gulf Islands aboard a wooden-hulled liveaboard that no longer exists. Learning to dive somewhere difficult turns out to be the best thing that can happen to you.
1997–2003
Working the boats
Fiji first, at Beachcomber Island in 1997. Then Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef in 1998 — Deep Sea Divers Den, the Taka II, De Ja Vu Charters. Then altitude diving and drysuit training out of The Dive Shop Calgary and Liquid Adventures, running Waterton and Minnewanka. Then home water — Poets Cove and Emerald Tide on Pender Island. Then Grand Cayman's East End with Ocean Frontiers. Five years of being responsible for other people's dives, which is a different education entirely.
2000s
Warm water, and a camera
Cozumel, Belize, Bonaire, the Galápagos. The trips that taught me what a badly-run operation looks like from the guest's side, having just spent four years on the other one.
2013 onward
Indonesia, repeatedly
Lembeh, Bunaken, Bangka, Wakatobi, Bali, and eventually Raja Ampat three times. The region that rearranged my sense of what a reef can look like.
2026
Misool, and an A+
The highest score on this site — , and . Going back in November — this time with a camera pointed at the things I missed.
Bangka Archipelago, 2025. Twin strobes lit, working a reef crest. This is the job the scoring exists to serve — and the only frame in the library where the equipment is the subject.
Disclosure

Who has paid me, and when

Most dive-travel writing is funded by the operators it reviews. Comped cabins, hosted weeks, affiliate links, tourism-board trips. None of it is usually declared, which is why every destination in the genre is world-class and every boat is the best.

So here is the whole paper trail. I spent seven years inside the commercial industry, and I score operators partly because I used to be one.

Where I worked
1997
Fiji — Beachcomber Island.
1998
Australia — Cairns and the Great Barrier Reef. Deep Sea Divers Den, the Taka II, De Ja Vu Charters.
1999–2001
Alberta — The Dive Shop Calgary and Liquid Adventures. Altitude diving and drysuit training, running Waterton and Lake Minnewanka.
2002
British Columbia — Poets Cove and Emerald Tide, Pender Island.
2003
Grand Cayman — Ocean Frontiers, East End.

PADI Master Instructor and IDC Staff Instructor, MI112461. I trained instructors alongside Course Directors — some of them run fleet decks now. That is where the standards on this site came from. When a page docks an operator for how its crew handled a camera, it is not a guest being difficult. It is somebody who used to be responsible for that deck.

I trained the people who run fleet decks now. That is where the standards on this site came from.

Four rules I hold myself to

The employment ended in 2003. My teaching membership is no longer current. I take no salary, commission, retainer or referral fee from any resort, liveaboard, lodge or dive operation anywhere. Every relationship above is a quarter of a century old.

Anywhere I worked says so. If a guide or an operator card touches a business or a coastline I was once employed on, that page links straight back to this section.

I pay for the trips. Every scouting trip on this site came out of my own pocket. No comped stays, no hosted weeks, no tourism-board junkets. That is why a liveaboard operator can score a for Operation and the number stays on the page.

Print sales fund the research, and cannot buy a score. Fine art and licensing revenue pays for the travel. If an operator reviewed here later licenses one of my images, that transaction is declared on that destination’s page. It does not move a number.

The prints

What the scoring is actually for

Every frame sold here came off a dive described on this site, on a trip I paid for, in the conditions that turned up. Nothing is licensed in, nothing is bought from an agency, and nothing was shot on a hosted week.

That is the point of scoring destinations honestly: you can read exactly what the water was doing on the day a picture was made, and then decide whether you want it on your wall.

Browse the prints Licensing enquiries
Hurst Island, British Columbia. Half a metre of water separates the two halves of this picture. There is no compressor on the island — the whole operation runs off the boat.
Above the surface

There's a second half to this

Miles Below covers the diving, and the underwater prints and licensing are sold here. The land wildlife work and the overlanding live at milesoverland.ca — same photographer, different subject, and a Rivian instead of a boat.

If you're here for a trip or a destination guide, you're in the right place. If you're here for a print or an image licence, that's the other one.

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Prototype — not live