Serenade - 12/11 Diving Reviews

[WISara]

Finally getting to sit down and write my reviews from our first cruise.

 

Bit of background on us as divers: BF had done a couple of resort courses in Bahamas and Cancun and convinced me that we HAD to get certified. Seemed like an interesting hobby so I agreed. We just go certified in October here in chilly Wisconsin. Water was about 65 degrees and we wore 6mm suits - vis was only a couple of inches. And it was still fun! That's when I knew we were both hooked on diving.

We started planning the cruise as a way to get to a bunch of different spots to dive - and our trip definitely did not disappoint!

 

St Thomas - Coki Beach Dive -- Laura (owner) picked us up at the dock and took us out the the beach. The island was beautiful. A large group was going first and we had scheduled for 11am so we snorkelled and laid out on the beach until then. Damien was our DM -- he was awesome and it was just the BF and I going. They put all of our gear together for us (made me feel a little guilty - our cert instructor had told us to make sure we were slacker divers and put our own gear together!) and off we went. For some reason I was SUPER nervous - but once we got in the water with Damien is was easy going. Lots of coral, tons of fish, trumpet fish, baby barricuda, an eel and a tiny octopus (which really I could only see a part of - and all the left over shells from his recent meals). It was over before I realized it but we were down for a good 50 minutes. They had huge buckets of fresh water to clean our personal gear off in and they just had you dump your bcs in a separate bin. All personal effects were stored under the counter in rubbermaid bins. Taxis waited to take us back to the boat when we were done. A super cheap way to start the cruise off with a great dive.

 

St Maarten - Scuba Fun

It was sort of cloudy and very windy this day. I had my reservations about diving (this would be my second official dive after all!) but we went anyway. The crew here was very french - which was strange since we were on the Dutch side of the island but very nice. The first dive was out of the harbor in the middle of 8 foot waves. We had to do a backward roll off the boat - which I had never done - but that was actually the easiest part! I got in the water and was supposed to swim to the front of the boat -- it was wiping around really bad and managed to hit me in the head once or twice before i could get underwater a bit -- got to the front and held on the the buoy rope while i waited for the DM and the rest of the party so we could descend - I got ripped around a lot, my mask got ripped off my face and I kind of freaked out a bit and started feeling seasick. So I ended up aborting the dive - which was disappointing - but I pushed through and managed to feel better by the time we went to the second dive site. There was a neat swim through and lots of fish - sea cucumber - coral - eels - etc. It was great to get a nice dive in after the crazy first try.

 

St Lucia- Dive Fair Helen

Grael (pronounced "grail" -- but not the HOLY one he told us! LOL!) picked us up at the cruise terminal (only one ship gets to dock here as the main dock is under repair so make sure you check on that!) and took us to the boat dock across the way -- the boat picked us up and we got our equipment ready. They had tea, coffee, lemonade and water readily available the whole trip.

Took an awesome boat ride to pick up another person and then off to Fairyland. We had about 12 people or so on the boat. 3 were discover scuba people who had 2 DMs to themselves - BF and I and one other buddy group went with Grael and the other group of friends went with another 2 DMs. We barely saw the other groups the whole time. Fairyland starts off as a really shallow sandy bottom and then drops off as the coral starts. We saw turtles, eels, tons of fish, shrimp, and lots of different coral. We were down for 50-60 minutes at about 75 feet. Took another boat trip over to the Pitons/Souffrie and had lunch, sunbathed on the boat and then got ready for the second dive. The other groups went one way and we went the other down the length of the reef. Saw more turtles, and octopus, fish, some jellyfish, a puffer fish and tons of other stuff. We were down for another 50-55 minutes. Can't believe the time went by so fast!! They dropped us back at the cruise dock with plenty of time to get back on the boat.

 

Barbados -- West Side Scuba - this is the same outfit that the cruises us, but we opted for a 1 tank dive in the afternoon so we had the DM almost all to ourselves! There was one other diver who was taking pictures that came along. Marlon was the DM - very nice - very helpful - the tank they gave me had a bit of a leak so he gave me his tank so that I wouldn't run low on air. There was a bit of a current so the end of the dive kind of turned into a drift dive - but the first part we looked at a bunch of wrecks - saw eels/trumpet fish/ that fish that lays on the bottom covered in sand? (don't know the name) -- it was an awesome dive - and the boat came over and picked us up when we were done since we had drifted a bit away. IT was our last dive so it was a little sad - but a great dive to be sure. They took us back over the the terminal with enough time to go shopping and get some rum cakes!

 

Overall - a GREAT first experience with "real" dives -- our air consumption wasn't that bad (we were never the first to get low - so we felt pretty good about ourselves!) -- I'm still learning how to no get my mask all foggy - but the defogger they all had worked pretty well.

 

Questions let me know - Thanks!

Sara

[GiniB]

Garden eels?

[bruce-r]

Garden eels?

 

You Bet

 

AISara, nice trip report. Thanks. You are an addicted diver if this statement is true

 

Water was about 65 degrees and we wore 6mm suits - vis was only a couple of inches. And it was still fun!

[WISara]

bruce- definitely addicted! We are already trying to plan the next trip - and may have convinced some friends that taking the cert class is a MUST! Can't Wait.

 

 

Most of our underwater pics didn't turn out very well - we were just using a cheapy camera from Walmart - so we might look into an underwater casing for our digital for the next trip!

[bruce-r]

The place to check to see if your camera even has a housing available is http://www.digideep.com/

[SandDollar Laura]

Sarah, I'm thinking full open water certification class, referral letter, and next trip here. You can even do the underwater photo speciality!!! I have a friend from your area, and she won't even set her big toe in water up there (although she says she's seen it done) She comes here a few times a year.

[WISara]

Where is "here" Laura?

 

I already have my regular open water cert - but we are looking to do Advanced Open Water this coming year and if we can convince the friends that they want to get certified then it'll be Cruise '05!! Yeah - the water is pretty chilly up here! I don't think you can ever go w/o at least a 3mm full suit (for the test dives our instructors had dry suits!! boy did we get screwed!LOL!)

 

I was looking at the underwater photo specialty!! Also the wreck diving and superior buyoncy control (that's the one skill that I would really like to improve!)

[Hilary]

Great review, thanks for sharing!

 

We also just got back from our cruise and although we had great diving, we decided that cruising and diving don't mesh well for us. The amount of luggage we had to take was really frustrating since we take our own dive gear, but the fact that we could only dive each place one day really bugged us. Although 2 dives in the Bahamas was enough, we would have liked to have done a little more diving in St. Thomas, but especially done a LOT more diving in Tortola, including another dive on the RMS Rhone.

 

Although we enjoyed our cruise, we both felt that it was our last mass-market cruise for quite awhile, and instead we're going to try the other extreme, a liveaboard dive boat in Belize (Nekton Pilot). We'll probably stick to land-based resorts mostly from now on so we can dive as much and whenever we want, instead of being bound by ports and port times.

 

One great thing about the cruise was that now we know we MUST go back to Tortola for a land-based vacation!!

[WISara]

Hilary - I agree with you for the most part!

 

We definitely want to get back to St Lucia and St Thomas -- I think since we were SO new to diving this cruise gave us a good overall look at diving in the Caribbean. We brought our fins/mask/snorkel but rented everything else so we didn't have as much of an issue with luggage.

 

You definitely need to post how the liveaboard goes! We were looking at that too - but decided we wanted to try the regular cruise instead.

 

I think that after another cruise w/diving we will be ready to take off for a land based vacation to dive some more. I just like to get a good base of experience before committing myself to something for a whole vacation -- with the cruises you can always choose to do something else if you aren't feeling up to diving -- and if the diving sucks in a certain location you are somewhere new the next day!

:)

[Hilary]

WISara, I absolutely agree with everything you said, and we decided on a regular cruise with diving for much the same reasons you did. We're totally thrilled we did the cruise and have ZERO regrets, that's for sure, we just learned something for the future.

 

I think it'll be very interesting to see how we feel about the other extreme...the liveaboard. We'll be interested to see if it's simply TOO focused on diving so we feel pressured to only dive instead of doing other things if we want (like read, sit in the sun, nap, or whatever). This is one reason we chose a larger liveaboard boat (Nekton) which has a huge sun deck (with a hot tub) and totally private cabins so we have more options. Of course we aren't going to let any subtle pressure to dive 4-5x a day to influence our decisions. We've already decided if we don't feel like diving, we won't.

 

If you haven't thought of planning a trip to Hawaii to dive, you should. We go to Maui every year and the diving there is very good. The Big Island has spectacular diving, and is definitely worth the trip, so add that to your list of places to take a land vacation one of these days.