Better Than Most Watersports was born out of Hurricane Irma that struck the Florida Keys in September of 2017. We had been teaching scuba diving for many years and Irma destroyed the old dive shop. We decided that “not all storms come to disrupt your life, some come to clear your path” and began the creation of Better Than Most Watersports.
We are so happy that we made the choice to push all our chips to the middle of the table and go all in on this. It was a long and tedious process starting a dive shop from scratch, but in June 2018, Better Than Most Watersports opened for business providing a variety of activities and getting us back to work doing what we love most. Our goal is to make sure that everyone who visits us leaves better than they were before. We incorporate education into everything that we do. There have been bumps along the way but Better Than Most has always and will always prevail. That’s also why our logo is the resilient pufferfish!
In July 2020 (a rough year for everyone!) We experienced a real challenge when the DIANE MARIE caught fire while at the dock. Thanks to the efforts of our community, we made it through and despite the set back, we came out even more determined! As everyone who knows us knows, failure is not an option.
Moving on to 2022!
What a year! Jeanie and Schwenke finally got married and big changes happened at Better Than Most too! Though the year we’ve grown and developed to become Better Than Most SCUBA. We are happy to focus on the diving side of things and continue our journey! We moved the business to Hawk’s Cay Resort and it feels like we are home again. We are excited to have our old reefs and locations back and are thrilled to share them with our diving guest. We’re still a “mom and pop shop” but the family is definitely growing!
What with the name?
We named Better Than Most after going through a long list of possible names. We were actually on the way to the airport, brainstorming as usual, and our dear friend, Captain Jorge, laughed and said to Schwenke “why not Better Than Most? You say it all the time!” He was totally right. Ask Schwenke how he is doing on any given day and he’ll pause, evaluate his life and say something like “Well, I live here and do what I love, so I must be doing Better Than Most!” Obviously the name stuck so here we are! We lost our Captain Jorge before the business could open. We miss him every day but we will always have him at the helm and in our hearts. We’ll always remember the part he had in how our name came to be.
Now we do understand that the name might come off differently to people but that’s ok. We’re gonna do our best to make sure we live up to the name in every way! We have been in this business a very long time so we’ve seen a lot of ways to do it. We are confident that with our experience and know-how, we can be the best but at the very least we’ll be Better Than Most. For the record though, we’re just livin’ and loving our life, thankful that it isn’t snowing.