Our Story
It all started with a simple comment, with a cheeky glass of wine in hand, before we caught the ferry back to the ‘mainland’ at the end of a weekend on Waiheke Island.
“The only thing that could have made the weekend better would have been going for a dive”.
That single sentence from Pippa (one half of Waiheke Dive & Snorkel) to Adam (the other half) set off a chain reaction that ended up with Adam quitting his management job at what was NZ's biggest dive company, them both moving to Waiheke Island and starting up a unique little dive shop in a place that everyone said they shouldn’t!
This crazy idea has lead to us creating an award winning business, offering awesome experiences to divers & snorkelers at all levels!
We decided from day 1 that we wanted to do things differently. For us, that evolved into our ethos of “The 3 C’s” - Community, Conservation & Customer Service.
We are proud to work with our local community here on Waiheke and throughout the wider Tīkapa Moana / Hauraki Gulf. We sponsor local events, give prizes for community fundraisers, design experiential learning projects with Auckland Council & funded by the Waiheke local Board for local schools and give presentations for community groups and students.
We provide Divemaster internships for selected graduating high school students. We stock locally made products and support local business, from sunscreen through to jewellery!
Click here to lean more about how we support our community.
Our commitment to conservation sits right at the core of who we are - we are the first and only ‘full service’ 100% no take & conservation focused dive shop in the country. This means that we focus all of our energies on education, conservation and the restoration of our oceans. We run regular ‘clean up’ dives to extract as much ocean pollution as we can, and co-design programs with Iwi and scientific institutions to enable conservation activities to take place.
We carefully choose our products and run our activities to have as low an impact as we can. We’re a “100% AWARE” store, so a portion of every single course fee goes straight to PADI AWARE to help with ocean conservation efforts. We support grassroots and citizen science projects here on the Island, and provide 'Technical Expert' services to other organisations.
Click here to learn more about our conservation work.
For customer service, well… We love diving and snorkelling just as much as you do, and we know just how precious your leisure time is!
So we have a “no worries’ return & exchange policy, small groups for all our activities, cheap (or free!) postage for online orders, NZ diving’s most epic price match policy plus a friendly smile in person or at the end of a phone / email / messenger or instagram chat 7 days a week!
Click here to read our customer reviews on Facebook!
We’re stoked that we get referred to as “NZ’s most fun little dive shop”!
