The Perfect Holiday Escape: Cage Diving with Sea Monsters
West Palm Beach, FL, Dec. 4, 2020—Looking for a safe, unique and affordable vacation the entire family will enjoy? How about a virtual trip to a remote island where you can visit the most advanced state-of-the-art aquarium complexes ever conceived, holding the most terrifying prehistoric sharks and sea monsters that ever lived!
Welcome to www.SeaMonsterCove.com, arguably one of the most original and ambitious entertainment venues ever imagined. The creative force that recruited an international team of 3D animators, 2D artists, engineers, actors, producers and an ancient shark museum curator is Steve Alten, author of the NY Times bestselling MEGseries, the source material for the 2018 summer blockbuster, The MEG, starring Jason Statham.
“The story that runs through every offering at Sea Monster Cove, from the virtual aquarium experiences to the TV series and video game came to me back in December of 2019,” Alten recalls. “I remember waking up at 4 a.m. and lying in bed enjoying a rare moment of peace and calm — no rigidity or tremors. (Alten was diagnosed 15 years ago with young onset Parkinson’s disease). It was as if my mind had found its way into the eye of the neurological storm. What happened next was totally unexpected — a wave of creativity came to me out of nowhere as beats in an entirely new giant shark story. It was so good and so detailed I knew I had to get it down on paper before I fell back asleep. So I dragged myself upstairs to my office and began searching for the key to the entire story — a remote island that somehow I knew was out there … and there it was — Maug.”
Enter SeaMonsterCove.com and you are guided through a quick history of Maug, a remote (and very real) island located in the Northern Marianas. Five million years ago Maug's volcano erupted so violently that it blew the island apart, leaving behind three islets that had been the rim of the volcano and a lagoon where the magma chamber had flooded. Why place a virtual island resort here? That's where Alten's storytelling takes over. Eight years ago, a French marine biologist, Dr. Maxime Rostand, discovered superheated mineral water rising up through Maug’s lagoon (all true). Returning from an exploratory dive, the scientist and his two colleagues realize they are not alone — a pirated fishing trawler has entered the lagoon and is listing badly beneath the weight of their catch — an enormous pregnant Basking shark. When the panicked creature drowns in the shallows, Rostand and his team perform an emergency C-section on the mother, releasing 15 pups — all female. Only two survive: Snowflake (an albino) and Layla (dark). Max and his team will discover the deceased mother to be a prehistoric Mako known as a Black Demon shark and the source of the lagoon’s hot mineral water to be a primordial aquifer located 2 miles beneath the sea floor — its inhabitants dating back 380 million years.
Flash ahead eight years and you are now ready to meet the critters. “There are two major complexes on Maug Island,” Alten explains. Sea Monster Cove holds six marine habitats that date back to different eras in our history, while the O-Quarium is home to our star attraction, Snowflake.” The albino pup saved by Dr. Rostand is now a 63-foot, 25-ton monster that is best viewed via one of the suites at the Black Demon Inn, a 5-star hotel with suites that back up to the main tank. Snowflake is waiting for you there, circling outside your bedroom window.
At SeaMonsterCove.com, the special effects are motion picture-worthy, and the wildlife doesn’t just swim around in benign circles; in fact, they seem quite aware that you are watching them, and some of them clearly do not like it, especially when you enter their domain to do a little “cage diving.” In each of these heart-pounding, 360-degree experiences, the user controls the viewing angle, attempting to track the attacks as they happen (there are day and night versions available). The action is nonstop and the creatures so real that it is easy to lose yourself in a two-hour reprieve from reality.
Dr. Rostand’s adventures are told in Alten’s episodic TV series, Where Sea Monsters Roam. Most unique: what happens in the series also happens during your aquarium visits. Also in development and expected to launch soon is the Sea Monsters Roam video game where members will be able to experience what it’s like to venture into the prehistoric aquifer to hunt and capture these monsters themselves. There’s also an education center, and a private library offering enhanced versions of Alten’s novels as well as teacher curriculum materials for distance learning. Perhaps the most surprising element is the cost to enter: less than $10 a month for the entire household.
And Alten isn’t quite done with movies yet. The MEG sequel, MEG-2: The TRENCH, is in pre-production, as is The LOCH (a thriller about the Loch Ness Monster) along with one other underwater feature, which cannot be announced just yet (but the enhanced version of the novel is available in the website’s private library). Steve Alten is also the founder and director of the nonprofit Adopt-an-Author teen reading program, considered by many educators to be the most effective tool to get reluctant readers to read.
Visit www.seamonstercove.com to begin your adventure!
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