On my 1st trip with Sunnycove back in 2008, I had some trouble finding their dive centre and the DM who answered the phone sounded quite uninterested in giving me directions. When I reached there, I was given a rental BCD 2 sizes too big and was brushed off when I asked for a smaller one. Ended up hugging myself when diving to keep the BCD close to my body.
I joined the trip as part of a Singapore Institute of Management Diving Club trip, but I was put in a group where I was the only SIM student.
A few months before the trip, a diver had been hit by a boat and died during a night dive and the DMs were telling us constantly that we should be careful. But at the end of one dive, a DM went right under the boat ladder, started purging his regulator and surfaced with the ladder right in front of him.
On my 2nd trip with them in 2010 (
WTF was I thinking?), the instructor was teaching navigation to 4 AOW students while seated around a table and students were just rotating the compass to the required bearings.
Of course, they didnt really know how the compass actually worked from that session and were totally clueless underwater. Some of them even went so far as to remove the compass from their wrists and rotated it while still facing the same direction. While figuring out how to use the compass, one or two started floating towards the surface without realising.
During a night dive, a divemaster lost her mask while helping one of the AOW students whom I heard panicked (so it may not be her fault) and the instructor dropped his camera during the safety stop.
Here we see a Sunnycove divemaster getting entangled with her SMB line without realising until it was launched.
SMB Deployment (Entanglement) - YouTube
And here we see the instructor with a burst o-ring at the 1st stage bringing the group down to 30m while feathering his tank valve. IIRC, the entire dive was 16min and he surfaced with 30bar of air left.
o-ring burst - YouTube
Upon bringing these points up to the Singapore Institute of Management's Diving Club who runs trips through Sunnycove, I was subtly accused by the club president of trying to get the SIM Diving Club to switch to another dive operator of my liking. He also hinted that the points I brought up were too well thought out to be entirely mine and were probably from an instructor of the dive operator I wanted to promote.
The club president is now an instructor for Sunnycove while I am still just a leisure diver who has since gone on diving trips with 3 other dive operators. I did not have a vested interest to any specific operator back then and I still do not have a vested interest today. Cant say the same about him.
But of course, with their constant flow of students from SIM, they have a young, hip and happening crowd. Which I think is their biggest draw besides price.