SIGHTLINE.

About Sightline

A dive reference that shows its work.

What you need to plan a dive trip is scattered across operator pages, forums, trip reports and research papers, each with its own agenda. Sightline puts the useful parts into one comparable reference: what you'll see, when to go, and what the diving demands, with every claim tied to its source.

Independent and free. No destination, operator or booking platform pays for inclusion or ranking.

36 destinations77 species tracked by month80 cited sources

What Sightline does with your trip, and where the answers come from.

How it works

Rules decide, and the record speaks

Sightline is built to catch the expensive mistakes before you book: the right place in the wrong month, a day boat that can't reach the famous site, diving beyond your experience, an encounter that turns out to be baited, snorkel-only, or heard rather than seen.

  1. You

    Say it how you'd say it

    “Mantas in September. I'm Advanced, and I get seasick.”

    Claude reads the sentence where it's switched on, keyword rules where it isn't, and the page says which. Nothing you type is kept.

  2. Rules

    Rules judge the fit

    SeptemberManta rayAdvancedSeasickness
    • Good fit
    • Fits, with a catch
    • Misses by one thing

    A catch can move a place down, never up. Places that miss by one thing show you the months they'd fit.

  3. The record

    The record answers

    “Roughly 10-12 hours crossing from Puerto Princesa, Palawan, which is a 90-minute flight from Manila.”

    Answers are sentences from the research notes, word for word. No model writes them or decides the order.

Nobody writing up a dive site says “seasick”; they describe the crossing. So for each of 13 worries, Sightline looks for the words the notes actually use.
Seasickness
“a 10-12 hour crossing”“swell”“open-ocean passage”
Cold water
“thermocline”“5 mm wetsuit”“drysuit”
Strong currents
“strong current”“drift dive”“reef hook”

You say it your way. The record is searched for its way. A question you type is matched against one destination's sentences the same way, or by Claude where it's switched on.

How it's checked

Every claim keeps its sources

Every claim keeps the sources it came from, and key claims are checked against the exact passage. A claim that held up says nothing: the section's source links are there if you want to look. A claim the check found only partly supported, corrected, or missing from its source says so on the spot, with the passage and the date. Where sources disagree, both sides stay visible. When a source changes, the checks that rest on it come up for review.

The logic is tested too, against cases written before the code. for the numbers and what they don't cover.

Limits

What it can't tell you yet

  • 78 of 495 claims have been checked against their sources so far. The rest are labelled “Not yet checked”.
  • Seasickness is the hardest worry to find evidence for (75%): boat time is usually implied, not stated. Water temperatures are yearly ranges.
  • No prices, hotels, visas or operator ratings. There's no evidence here for them.
  • One diver researched and wrote all of it. Nobody else has reviewed it yet.

Who's behind it

Built by a diver, for better dive trips

I started Sightline because planning my own dive trips meant piecing together operator sites, research papers, forums and word of mouth. I've logged 115+ dives across several regions, PADI Advanced with Nitrox, including plenty of deep, drift, wreck and night diving. This is the reference I wanted for myself.

Been somewhere listed here, spotted something out of date, or want a destination added? Tell me. New information is checked against reliable sources before anything changes.

Explore destinations