Hello!
My wife and I dove with Aqua Cat in Aug 2006. It was awesome. We're going with another boat in their fleet next July, Blackbeard Cruises.
It was our first live aboard.
The food was great, the diving was awesome, the accommodations were fantastic and the staff were terrific.
It is a big boat with a lot of divers, but you never felt as if you were diving with a lot of folks.
A few people, people that I would describe as resort divers, who had both been on the Nekton Cruises and Aqua Cat pointed out one difference between the two services. A difference that would lean me towards Aqua Cat again vs. Nekton. They complained how the DM's did not dive much with the clients or guide them around. They did comment how the Aqua Cat was nicer.
The way the day would start was you would get a wake up call over the intercom for breakfast. You'd mosey your way up to breakfast. There would then be an announcement for the dive briefing in 30minutes. At the dive briefing, which was on the middle deck, not the dive deck, they gave a real solid dive briefing. They gave you suggested areas to check out. You'd then make your way down to the dive deck, put your tag 'in water', suit up and wait for the clear that the pool was open. At the end of your dive you'd climb up the ladder, they would take your fins off for you, give you a quick spray with fresh water, hand you your fins and you'd make your way to your dive locker. There you would undo your reg from the tank and let it hang. The DM's would then come around and fill your tank. Once filled you were responsible for hooking your reg back up and checking your air. They also did offer 32% EAN.
They did offer other things to do other than diving. Something on an SI they would take the Sea Dog (the big chase boat) out for some fishing. We did a couple hour trip to the Exumas National Sea Park. They took a group over to an island where they had iguanas that you could feed grapes to. In fact, we went to Stinson Cay and got to see swimming pigs and swim into the cave used in the James Bond movie, Thunderball.
We did some drift dives. The dive deck has 5 exit points. Two are down the back pontoons and two are off the sides and one is out of the back middle. The ones out the sides and back are 5-6' drops. At first, it was rather intimidating to do the big drops, but it was actually a lot of fun. For the drift dives everyone had to jump out of the boat moving under power at close to the same time. That was a blast.
There were wall dives.
We did a blue hole dive.
In all it was a blast. The only negative is the price tag. You did get your monies worth. I'd defiantly recommend it.
One thing that was nice about the boat being so big was you could actually find areas in which you could escape from the other divers if you wanted. Frankly you also had your room as well.
We made one mistake. We got there way, way to early. We could stash our gear on the boat, but we could not board the boat. They have to get it ready. We spent 6 hours milling around Atlantis. All we wanted to do was to take a nap. I'd plan it so that if you can board at 4:30pm that you get to the boat by 4:00-4:15pm. You are not going to miss anything.
Some of the guests took their Nitrox class while there!
Below are a couple of photos from our trip on the Aqua Cat.
