Captain Hook’s Dive Key West

Captain Hook’s Dive Key West runs a full-service dive operation out of North Roosevelt Boulevard, the main commercial corridor on the island’s north side, a short distance from most of the hotels and vacation rentals in the New Town area. The shop is open daily from eight in the morning to five in the evening, a schedule geared toward divers who want to walk in, sort out a trip or a gear rental, and be back out the door with a plan for the day.

The business is currently owned by Bob Holston and Cece Roycraft, who took over what has been a fixture of the Key West dive scene for years. The shop’s core services span scuba diving trips, full certification courses for new divers, snorkeling tours for guests who are not diving, and sandbar trips for a more relaxed day on the water. On the retail and service side, it also handles dive gear rental and repair, a practical service for traveling divers who would rather not fly with a full kit or whose equipment needs attention mid-trip.

Reef and wreck diving are the specialty here, with trips out to sites including the USS Vandenberg, a decommissioned military ship sunk as an artificial reef off Key West and one of the larger and better known wreck dives in the Florida Keys. The shop’s designation as a Blue Star Operator, a program tied to coral reef education and conservation, reflects an operational commitment to reef-safe diving practices that matters in a marine environment already under pressure from heavy tourist traffic.

For visiting divers who did not bring a full home base of gear or a pre-arranged boat, a dive shop like this one functions as a one-stop resource, handling instruction, trip logistics, and equipment needs under one roof rather than requiring separate bookings across multiple vendors. The combination of certification courses, guided reef and wreck trips, and rental and repair services covers most of what a diver passing through Key West for a few days would need, and the shop’s long tenure on Roosevelt Boulevard has made it a familiar name among both local divers and the broader Florida Keys diving community that treats Key West as a jumping off point for reef and wreck exploration.

New certification students typically start with classroom and pool sessions before moving to open water dives on the surrounding reef, a standard multi-day process for divers earning their first certification. Experienced divers passing through Key West for a shorter stay can generally book single reef or wreck trips without committing to a full course, renting whatever gear they did not bring along. Given the shop’s location on the busier north side of the island, parking is typically easier here than at some of the smaller downtown dive operators, a small but real convenience for divers hauling their own gear bags to and from the shop.