South Beach Divers is a PADI Five Star facility, conveniently located in the heart of Miami Beaches' trendy and vibrant South Beach and within walking distance to all the hotels, restaurants, and tourism enclaves.

Tarpoon Lagoon is the PADI 5-Star Dive Center at the Miami Beach Marina. It's located right next door to Monty's (great seafood and happy hour) and uses their pool for lessons (try to schedule your lessens/dive trips close to happy hour ). It's Miami Beach's only waterfront dive center with a 2004 Newton 46' custom built dive boat departing just feet from the store.

The strange part is that this boat carries divers which booked from either dive shop. For example, South Beach Divers is located about a half mile away from the boat. So you'd need to book and pay there, then somehow get yourself and all your gear to the boat a half mile away .

But let's compare prices since we already know that they share the same dive boat...therefore most of the same dives. This can be a bit tricky depending on what type of equipment you already have. If you own your own dive gear, including tanks and weights, Tarpoon Lagoon is definitely cheaper (they count on most people requiring these things) at $59 in store ($53 online) for a 2 tank dive. But once you add the tank and weights, you add $19 which makes it about $78 ($72 online). And if adding dive gear, add another $11, which makes it $89 total ($83 online).

Compare this to South Beach Divers which charges $80 for a 2 tank dive, but includes tanks and weights. If you have your own tanks and weights, there is no discount available (at least none that I know of or have seen advertised), so you'd pay about an extra $25 at this dive shop and have to travel the extra distance. But if you need tanks and weights, South Beach Divers will only cost you $2 to $8 extra (depending on whether or not you got the online discount via Tarpoon Lagoon). And if you need all the scuba gear too, South Beach Divers will cost you $11 to $17 more than Tarpoon Lagoon (again, depending if you book online or not)....plus the extra distance....and for the same exact dive using the same exact dive boat .

As far as locations, I think South Beach Divers has a better location if you happen to be staying at one of the hotels in the area. Otherwise, Tarpoon Lagoon much better parking options, and is right next to the boat, as mentioned.

All that aside, I think it was the friendliness of the people at Tarpoon Lagoon that really won me over. Sacha at South Beach Divers has a bit of a car salesman approach vs the laid back approach of Valerie at Tarpoon Lagoon.

One downside of Tarpoon Lagood is that they send their repairs over to their main store in another part of Miami for servicing, so it takes an extra day or so than if it was on-site. I'm not sure about South Beach Divers and their repair policies, so you'd need to ask them about it. However, both seem to provide tank fills on site.

Will, that's my comparison of the two PADI 5-star dive centers in Miami Beach that I know of. I'll try to post some of my actual dive experiences another time.

Although I love using Tarpoon Lagoon, I've found another downside (other than their repair center being located off site requiring more time to complete). Unfortunately, they don't put much effort into their website. The main problem with this is that you're unable to get up-to-date info on the dive schedule.

For example, the last dive schedule entry on their website right now (Aug 27) is June 29.....which was 2 months ago . I tried to plan a trip in advance for mid Aug, so called in July asking about the dive schedule and they said they'd email me a copy after Aug 1. This is fine for those who live in Miami, but since my dive buddy was booking the trip from out of town, we didn't know when to book the flight since we didn't know what days we'd be diving .

The good news is that they honored the "online discount" when we booked our dive in person since the site hadn't been updated .

By the way, they were also kind enough to squeeze us into an already booked dive since we couldn't book in advance online and already had the airline tickets booked .