Once the Cressi team has received footage from dive shops, they consolidate the clips into one video for release not only on YouTube, but also on their other social media channels like Instagram and Facebook. The videos feature a wide variety of underwater attractions, from wrecks to animal life.
Chelsey Richardson, the lead dive instructor at Express Watersports in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, sent footage in to the Cressi team, and couldn’t be more pleased with the resulting video. She hopes that encouraging people to dive locally will also help encourage them to patronize local dive retailers.
“Supporting local shops is important so that you can learn about the environment that you live around,” she says. “People will only protect what they love and understand, so diving locally will inspire them to better care for the environment around them because they have experienced it firsthand.”
Although we all love to travel to dive, just because we’ll spend the summer closer to home doesn’t mean we can’t make remarkable discoveries. No matter if you’re on the Eastern Seaboard, the West Coast or somewhere in between, there’s something to see when it comes to diving locally.
“Here in South Carolina you can have a great day of diving no matter the conditions,” says Richardson. “We have had crystal-clear visibility where we are awed by the beauty of mantas and sharks. If the visibility is a bit lower, the diver can appreciate the smaller beauty of the wrecks that they may normally overlook, such as a camouflaged deer cowrie or a shy arrow crab. You aren’t missing out by not traveling to far-away places because our coast has everything you are looking for.”