Travel was reasonably uneventful. On the way back, the plane landed early, all the guests were there, we loaded quickly, and were able to take off about 20 minutes ahead of schedule. That doesn't happen very often.
The Aqua Cat is the same type as boat as Nekton, Peter Hughes, and Aggressor. It's very comfortable and the service is great. It's 35 ft wide, which allows for a very spacious salon area. The cabins were also nice and roomy. There were showers on the dive deck and on the lower dive deck where you jumped in the water. The latter were handy because a crew member would spray warm water on you as you came out of the water from your dive. Felt good.
The daily itinerary was, breakfast at 8, dive at 9ish and 11ish, lunch at about 12:30, dive at 2ish and 4:30ish. Dinner was at 6ish with a night dive around 8ish. I think that's when the night dive was, I didn't actually make any.
The crew was competent and friendly. They were pretty relaxed about letting us do our own dives as well. Other than your diving is over for the day when you take your first drink, there were no real rules. At least one crew member went on each dive. If you wanted a guided dive, it was there, if not, you could do your own thing.
The charter started at 1800 hrs on Saturday and ended at 0900 hrs the following Saturday. Before and after that, you had access to the dive deck only. It had a washroom and showers. There was also drinking water available. The boat was moored on Paradise Island. The Atlantis Casino and Resort was a 5-10 minute walk away so it was easy to keep ourselves amused on the initial Saturday afternoon. On departure day, they organized airport shuttles 3 hours prior to your flight. Some boats kick everybody off at 8 or 9 in the morning, so this was a nice touch.
There was also a skiff which was available for runs ashore, fishing, or taking pictures of the big boat. We took a trip to a park instead of doing one dive. Other runs ashore did not cause people to miss their dives.
For passengers, there were more gals than guys. I've never seen that before. There was a group from San Diego that was predominately female. Most of the other guests were married couples.
I made 21 dives. The deepest was 72 feet and the shallowest was 25. Most dives involved going to and from the boat, but there were also three drift dives. For these, everybody went in at once, more or less, from a moving boat. We did negative entries and formed up underwater. There was a crew member at the front and another at the back. At the end of the dive, we all grabbed a rope which eventually got tied to the boat, and then we got back on board.
Some of the reefs were very nice, but most were covered with algae. There was some coral and sponges, plus a reasonable number of fish and crusteaceans, but there was an awful lot of green down there.
The nicest site by far was called Perriwinkle Reef. It was also the closest site to Nassau. It's close enough for the Nassau dive shops to visit. It's a beautiful shallow reef, much like the ones off Key Largo on a nice day. It's also a fish feeding site. The crew gave each buddy team a box of cereal and we had our own little feeding frenzies. It was mainly Sgt Majors, but I was surprised to see a blue headed wrasse in there as well.
There were a lot of lionfish. I've made two trips each to Palau and Fiji, and I saw more lionfish each day in the Bahamas than I saw in those 4 trips combined. On a couple dives the divemaster brought a speargun to kill some, but I don't know if he managed to get any.
We also did a shark feeding dive. They used a frozen chum ball which attracted about a dozen sharks, plus some black groupers, horse eyed jacks, and yellowtail snappers. The divers started off kneeling in the sand anound a coral head, but then the crew called us up to pose for pictures and video. Then we hung around, took pictures, or just watched. I left after about 50 minutes, and the chum ball looked like it had another 10 minutes worth of chum on it.
We did this on the first day. It's a drift dive where the water gets funnelled between two islands creating underwater turblence. The divemaster doing the briefing said that we could expect to drift in to the washing machine, get tumbled about, and then shoot out the other side. He also said that the deeper you go, the more you would get tumbled.
We were at the back of the group as we formed up underwater. The current was ripping. So far it was great. I decided to go for maximum effect so I stayed close to the bottom. Entering the washing machine is like drifting over an underwater cliff. The top of this cliff is about 40 ft deep, and you can descend about another 10. That's what I did. When the turbulence got me, it flipped me head down, feet up. That's ok. But then, it started to pull me to the surface. I knew this was bad and started exhaling to avoid embolizing. I looked at my gauge and saw that I was at 25 ft and rising, so I started kicking back down to the bottom. That was scary. Then, coming out of the washing machine, we lost the group. That was ok. The divemaster at the back was with us, as was one other buddy team. We the dm sent up his safety sausage and we went for a half hour drift.
Despite the algae, it was a fun trip.
| Trip Dates2009-06-06 to 2009-06-13 | Trip Report Index |