Any opinions on
South Florida Diving Headquarters? I have read to stay away on Google reviews. People say they cancel and ignore the divers.
I've been on something like a dozen trips with them over three years of diving (a weekend in January every year), but the last time I did this was 2010: we took a cruise last year instead.
Here's my opinion: like most larger operators, they're a cattle-car type of trip. They have customers, and they have a bottom line. They work to make customers happy, but not at the cost of the bottom line.
So, if there's only a few divers for that day, they won't go out. The minimum number of divers is four, IIRC. If you have a spouse that doesn't dive but wants to go out with you and you were promised the big glass-bottomed catamaran but there's only six or eight divers, then you're going on the small v-hull boat.
If there's anything nearing 2 foot seas, they seem to actively try to talk people from going out. At 3+ foot seas, they're not going out at all. For someone who lives there, that might make perfect sense: dive next week, when it's nice. For someone like me, who has 3 whole days to get in as many dives as possible, it drives me CRAZY...
Some of the captains are friendly. Some of the captains are neutral. A couple of the captains are surly. Sometimes the same captain can be more than one of the above!
Having said all of that, as cattle-car diving goes, they're better than average. Because they seem to be one of the bigger operators in that area, they tend to have boats going out when other places might not. I've never felt unsafe or anything like that (and I *have* walked off other dive boats because I was worried about my safety or because of extremely rude captains). The big boats are *plenty* roomy, they all have heads on-board, etc. But you cannot escape the fact that it's a cattle-car.
One strong highlight of SFDH: Robert. He's a member of the crew, and he is heads and shoulders above everyone there. He makes the trip much more enjoyable than it would be otherwise. Without him, I'm not sure I'd dive with them. There have been times when he was onboard not as crew (there were not enough divers on-board for him to be considered (paid?) as crew, so he was just going out to do a dive), yet he was still as kind and helpful as if he were on the clock. I still gave him a tip at the end of that trip: he earned it!
So, you could do much worse than SFDH. But I have the feeling that there has to be a company that offers a better total experience. Not exactly a ringing endorsement, it it?
One thing to note: diving in Ft. Lauderdale is about the cheapest I've seen it anywhere. I'm not surprised that the bottom line sometimes takes precedence ahead of customers: there's a razor-thin margin. So I try to take these things in stride. But from my perspective: I've spent literally thousands of dollars just to spend 3 whole days diving in Ft. Lauderdale. Even if I had to pay twice as much for the diving, but got a more enjoyable diving experience, the few hundred dollars that this would add to the cost would actually bring a tremendous value for the trip as a whole.
I'm tempted to sign up with Force-E this year, instead of directly with SFDH, and see what boats they put me on instead. My guess is that I'll just be going out with SFDH, but giving a cut of the money to Force-E instead (which is why I've avoided that in the past).
I'd *really* love it if a couple of people would tell me about a dive operator in the Pompano area they really loved diving with. While people have mentioned operators in the area, no one put any kind of recommendation behind it. Maybe I'm wrong: I'll re-read the thread. But here's a plea for anyone who has been diving in Pompano Beach or Ft. Lauderdale, FL and loved it to TELL US WHO YOU WENT WITH!