Diving Needs a New Generation. We Are Opening the Door.

💬 Ask us anything about your first liveaboard — message us on WhatsApp →

New Wave · Our mission

Diving Needs a New Generation. We Are Opening the Door.

New Wave is our answer to a simple problem: people get certified, then never take the trip. Nobody tells them what a week at sea is really like. So we are telling them.

See the boats →Talk to a diver

Photo: @scubadaan

Why this exists

The sport keeps certifying people it then loses

The average diver in the United States is 42.9 years old. That number comes from DEMA’s 2024 Diving Fast Facts, based on the 2023 DEMA U.S. Diver Study, and it climbs a little every year.

Certifications keep going to people in their twenties. Every summer thousands finish an Open Water course on holiday and come home with a card in their wallet. Most of them never take the next step.

Usually it is not money and it is not interest. A week at sea, on a boat you have never seen, with people you have never met, doing dives nobody has described to you properly — faced with that, another week at a resort feels like the safer choice. The sport loses a diver, quietly, and nobody notices.

What a new diver gets told

Photographs of sharks and coral

A price and a departure date

A list of dive sites they cannot picture

A booking form

What they actually want to know

Whether they are experienced enough

Who they will be sharing a cabin with

What happens if they are seasick

Whether going alone is strange

Divers checking equipment and preparing to enter the water from the deck of a Red Sea liveaboard

Photo: @malgosja.zmi

From the founder

“This sport keeps talking to the divers it already has, and those divers are getting older every year. If you are twenty-eight with thirty dives, almost nothing out there was built for you. And walking onto a boat where everyone has two hundred dives and already knows each other is intimidating — nobody says that out loud, but it is true, and it is why people stop. Diving needs young divers. Somebody has to make room for them.”

Sofia Graudin · Founder, BookDiveBoat

What we do about it

We put divers on boats and let them tell the truth

Partner operators give us places. We fill them with divers who film, and we ask for the ordinary parts of the week — not the highlight reel that already fills the internet.

🎯 We answer, not advertise

Nobody is asked to sell a trip. They are asked to answer the questions they had before their own first one.

🎬 They keep the edit

The work goes out on their channels, in their voice. Every piece is credited to the person who made it.

🔓 It stays free

All of it is public, on their platforms and ours. No sign-up, no funnel, no gate in front of it.

Film: @malgosja.zmi

Every certified diver who never takes the trip is a person the ocean loses an advocate in. That is the part that matters to us. People protect what they have seen.

The answers

Nine questions nobody answers properly

Open any of them.

What does a week on board actually involve?

You wake around six, sit through a briefing, and are in the water before breakfast. Three to four dives across the day, with a long surface interval and a meal between each one. The boat moves to the next site while you eat or sleep. Most people are in bed by ten.

How many dives do you need before you are allowed on?

Most Red Sea itineraries ask for Advanced Open Water and roughly 20 to 30 logged dives. The offshore routes want 50 or more because of the currents and the depth — see our Brothers Islands and Daedalus Reef guides. The northern reef and wreck routes suit a first trip.

Can you go alone?

Most people on board are travelling solo or in a pair. Buddy teams get sorted at the first briefing, and by the second day you have eaten six meals with the same fifteen people. Going alone is the normal case, not the awkward one.

Do you have to share a cabin with a stranger?

The standard fare is a shared twin, matched by gender. Single occupancy is usually available for a supplement, and on quieter departures you sometimes get a twin to yourself anyway. Ask us before you book rather than after.

Do you need your own equipment?

Rental is available on every boat we work with. Bring your own mask and your own dive computer if you bring nothing else — a mask that fits and a computer you can read are the two things that make a week comfortable.

What happens if you get seasick?

The crossings are the worst of it, and most people settle by the second day. Take medication before you leave the harbour rather than once you feel it, sleep low and central in the boat, and stay out on deck in the open air when it is rough.

What if you are the least experienced diver on board?

Groups get split by experience and the guides take the newer divers. Say where you are at during the first briefing — that is what it is for. Nobody is impressed by a diver who overstates their level, and every guide has seen it go wrong.

How do you check a boat is run safely before you book?

Ask what oxygen is carried, whether a tender follows the divers, and how many divers each guide takes. For Egypt, check the operator against the CDWS blacklist before you pay anything. An operator who answers these questions easily is telling you something.

What is there to do between dives?

Eat, sleep, sit on the deck. Surface intervals run long enough for a proper nap, and that is most of what people do with them. Bring a book. There is no signal.

From the water