THE SPECTRE DIFFERENCE
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For decades, we’ve focused on what we do best: safe, comfortable, single-day diving and snorkeling trips to the Channel Islands.
We’ve made significant investments in our vessel, engines, and onboard systems to ensure reliable operations today—and well into the future. Our focus remains unchanged: professional crews, thoughtfully run trips, and a dependable experience for divers, snorkelers, and families alike.
If you’re planning a Channel Islands adventure, you can book knowing we’re here, prepared, and continuing forward.
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Our goal is to make every aspect of booking a California dive or snorkel trip on the Spectre as easy as possible. The team at FareHarbor has made online bookinga breeze but for those who prefer the human touch, Captain Ted and his wife Shannon are still there to pick-up the phone and help make your dive experience the best it can be.
Call 866-225-3483. -
From hot breakfast to our famous brownie sundaes in the hot tub after the third dive, we bring small touches that make the adventure feel like a getaway. The boat is built for divers, by divers — wide swim steps, generous deck space, and thoughtful details everywhere.
OUR STORY
Spectre Dive Boat is a family-owned Channel Islands dive charter built on generations of experience and a lifelong relationship with the sea. For decades, she has been shaped not by trends, but by time—by miles run, seasons weathered, and lessons learned the hard way. In an industry where boats come and go, Spectre remains.
Captains Ted and Nathan Cumming, father and son, have spent their lives on these waters. Ted began running the Spectre in 1986, but his story started long before that. A Ventura County native, he grew up on the docks of Port Hueneme and took his first job on a sportfishing boat at just fourteen. By twenty-one, he held his captain’s license. Today, Ted brings more than five decades of experience to the wheel—experience earned one crossing, one decision, one weather call at a time.
Nathan grew up aboard the Spectre, learning the rhythms of the boat the way most people learn a hometown street. He became a certified diver at eleven, worked deck at fourteen, and earned his 100-ton captain’s license at twenty. By his early twenties, he was running trips on his own, and in 2022 he became a partner and co-owner—ensuring Spectre would remain a true family operation, grounded in continuity rather than turnover.
The Spectre herself has a history as solid as the people who run her. Built in Louisiana in 1970 as an offshore oil vessel and later renamed after the iconic James Bond organization, the 85-foot, all-aluminum Spectre was converted into a dive boat in 1986. Since then, nearly every inch of her has been reworked with divers in mind. Powerful modern engines, upgraded compressors, an on-deck shower room, sun deck, and hot tub—all added thoughtfully over decades, not rushed or cut short. What stands today is one of the largest and most comfortable dive boats operating in California, built to last and built to work.
Every trip aboard Spectre reflects that history. Experienced local divers share the deck with first-time Channel Islands explorers, all guided by a crew that knows these islands not from charts, but from memory. Dive sites are chosen with care. Conditions are read, not guessed. The goal is always the same: a well-run day, safe diving, and time spent where the islands show their best side.
People don’t come back to Spectre just for the diving. They come back because they’re treated like they belong. You step aboard as a customer, but by the end of the day, you’re part of the rhythm of the boat—welcomed, remembered, and expected to return.
That’s how Spectre has endured. And it’s how she’ll continue, for the next generation of divers and beyond.
