Today we went on the dive trip we mentioned booking a couple of days back. We were really looking forward to the dives, especially because our cruising guide had made the diving sound so great here. It turned out that the diving was nice, but not anywhere near as good as we had expected. Unfortunately, we had a nightmarish experience with the dive company. We’ll start by telling you about the good stuff, the dive sites, first, then go into the saga about the dive company.

Visibility was fairly good, and we were told today is a bad day and it is usually clearer. It was gloomy and raining hard, so there wasn’t a lot of sunlight getting down into water, and there may have been runoff from the shore. The dive sites were similar in terms of the fish we saw and the types of coral. The sites in and of themselves are pleasant. Not spectacular, but nice. There are a lot of soft corals, including a lot of pretty sea fan coral that mostly comes in lavender and pale green, one that looks like cactus, one that looks like heather, and one that looks like a giant worm.

The hard corals had a lot of variety, with a lot of brain coral, great star coral (Christi thinks it looks like cells under a microscope with a nucleus), finger coral, and mustard hill coral (one particular mustard hill looked like Bart Simpson’s hair). There wasn’t a ton of color in the coral, but there were some yellows and oranges and a little bit of purple. Most of it was a light tan color.

There were several types of sponges, as well. The most dominant of the sponges is called a giant barrel sponge. The exterior got to be quite large on some of them, probably about 4 feet tall. The interior was hollow and fairly smooth, and exterior was bumpy and irregular. They look like fancy designer trash cans you’d see in an upscale city. There was also quite a bit of yellow tube sponge, which are long, skinny, yellow versions of the barrel sponge and some pillar coral, which looks like fat worms sticking up out of the ground.

There was a big variety of cool fish, but the amount and size of the fish was highly disappointing. This bay has been seriously over-fished. There were only a few adult fish, and no large fish at all. The most abundant are called bi-color damsel fish, which are dark brown in front and white in back, with a spot of yellow on their belly right where the black and white meet. In other places we see schools of hundreds of chromium (damsel is a type of chromium) fish, but here the schools are not even a dozen big.

There were some eye catching species. We saw a few dark fish with small iridescent blue polka dots and a yellow tail. We forget the name of the fish, but they are juveniles, and as they grow to adulthood they lose their spots. There were a few little spotted trunkfish, which are kind of triangularish in shape, are white with abundant amounts of small black spots, and were maybe three inches big. There were a couple parrotfish, but their colors weren’t as vivid as what we saw in the South Pacific. We saw a clown wrasse, which has similar coloring to a parrotfish. There were a few black and white wrasse fish with racing stripes that look like a skunk. Other people saw a turtle, but we missed it.

In the more common varieties, we did see a few grouper, a brown design variety. We saw some schools of yellowtail snapper, with a single yellow line down its side and a yellow tail. Usually we see snapper in big schools, but in this case the schools were made up of maybe four or five. We saw a few sand divers sitting on the bottom that were cool. They are multi-colored in neutrals and blend well with the sand. We saw many blennies, a couple trumpet fish, a couple goat fish, a cardinal fish, and lots more really small guys.

There were a few Christmas tree worms. There were a lot of worms that look like bird feathers. We saw several flamingo tongues, which is a shellfish about an inch big with an interesting circular pattern on the shell. We also saw a mystery thing that we think is a plant or coral with fur. We have no clue what it was. At one point, the guide picked up something called a basket starfish out of a hole between some coral and stuck it on Christi’s hand. It is a small, thorny bush-like thing and it latched on to her and wouldn’t let go.

OK, now we’ll tell you about the dive company. First of all, this company was really expensive at $108 USD per person for a two tank dive, and that is after the $14 USD discount for having all our own gear. It is by far the most expensive dive we have ever done. We have learned that usually, price is proportional to the service, so we had pretty high expectations for service going into it.

We were told to be there by 0800 and we’d leave at 0830. We left at 0915. The boat was moored about 100 feet behind the dive shop. We were told we had to swim to the boat because there was no dinghy to shuttle us. We were shocked. We have to swim to the boat with all our gear? You’re kidding, right? We put everything that couldn’t get wet into the car, including all of our snacks. But, at the last second, they decided they wouldn’t make us all swim after all and sent a dinghy to shuttle us to the boat, so we left our snacks in the car for nothing.

The dive boat is actually large, nice, catamaran. There were more snorkelers than divers on board, which we have learned is a bad omen. It usually means we go to a site that is better for snorkeling than diving. On board, we got our own diving equipment ready. We don’t mind doing it ourselves, but generally speaking, places that charge a lot of money for diving usually do it for you. The higher fee is justified by the service.

They took us to the very closest dive spot in the entire area, so the price certainly wasn’t justified by fuel consumption. There were 4 dive crew on board, 2 English speaking, 2 not. The divers were divided into groups of 4 and we were assigned a non-English speaking guide. Of course, it isn’t a problem under the water, but it is important to be able to communicate with the dive leader before and after. He did manage to make it abundantly clear that we were to stay with him and under no circumstances were we to go off and do our own thing, but didn’t offer us any more information or guidance beyond that, so we had no idea what to expect down there.

The first dive spot, Aure Thomas, was unusual. There were lots of big mounds of coral separated by swaths of sand a couple hundred feet apart. It looked promising to see so many potential coral mounds to check out and we expected a slow, leisurely dive as we meandered from mound to mound. But it turned out to be an endurance swim, not a recreational dive. The entire first half of the dive we would swim across the sand to the edge of a mound, then would shoot across the sand to another mound, and so forth. We never actually stopped to look at the life on any of the mounds. That was disappointing enough, but it gets worse.

We were swimming perpendicular to the current, meaning it was pushing us on our sides, rather than swimming into it. So, we were fighting the current both directions, instead of getting to relax as the current pushed us on the way back. And it was a strong current. And the guide was swimming really fast. The deepest we went was 40 feet, and that was only for a few minutes. We spent most of our time at 20 feet, and a fair amount of time at 10 feet. We kept hoping to go deeper where the current isn’t as strong, but he never took us to more sheltered water. When someone called half air, we turned around, and this time went through reefs on the way back. The guide was still swimming really fast, and we never slowed down enough to enjoy the reef. The current had gotten stronger and fighting it was tiring.

In our rest time between dives, they provided”¦ to be continued”¦