Wkndbum:
Mike, how about a trip report for Cozumel?
Hi Terry,
I've been trying to find time to do just that but I have been doing a lot of catcing up in the week I've been back, anyway, here goes.
We arrived at Scuba Club Cozumel around 3:30 or so Saturday, we grabbed a quick bite to eat, threw our stuff in our rooms, grabbed a couple of tanks and our gear and in the water we went for a checkout dive. It ended up getting dark on us while we were diving so we actually got a twilight/night dive in for our first dive. We did a total of 14 dives while we were there, 12 boat and 2 shore dives, 2 of those were night dives and 1 wreck dive, the C-53 Minesweeper. One of the night dives was a drift dive from the lighthouse to Scuba Club, the other was a shore dive in front of Scuba Club. The vis was the usual 100+, water was a consistent 78-80 degrees (depending on whose computer you looked at), and the air temp was a pretty consistent 80 degrees also. The weather turned out to be awesome, the seas got a little choppy for a couple of days but still good diving, I would say we got pretty lucky! We saw just about everything I could imagine wanting to see for my first ocean dive, we saw lots of baracuda, grouper, several octopus (large and small), several green moray eels, one of which was HUGE, it was at least the size of a football and 6-8 feet in length. When we first saw it it was actually swimming through the water, after several of us gathered around it took cover. We saw 3 nurse sharks, a couple of seahorses, 3 eagle rays, lots of large lobster, a few large crabs, 4 sea turtles, and of course the usual multitude of reef fish, the swim-throughs at the various dive sites were awesome too. Even though all the dive sites were really good, I would have to say Villa Blanca and Los Palmos were the best of the bunch, Villa Blanca was where we saw the HUGE moray. The Santa Rosa Wall was built up by our LDS dive guide as being something really special and while it was a pretty cool dive site with the 3,000 foot wall and all, I found the shortage of marine life (compared to the other dive sites) to be a little disappointing. The C-53 wreck dive was pretty cool, it wasn't included in our dive package so we had to pay an additional $40 which I felt it was worth it. The accomodations at Scuba Club Cozumel? Well, as I had heard the beds were extremely hard, but strangely enough, somewhat comfortable, for me anyway.
The rooms lacked televisions but then no one really wants to sit around on vacation in Cozumel and watch TV anyway, right? The service was good and the food was great! The dive boat crew was helpful but yet I felt lacking in equipment skills, every time they put my BC and reg on the tank for me I ended up having to redo it myself (although I guess I am a little anal when it comes to that), the divemasters (Alberto and Jose) were pretty good, especially Jose, he was really good and went out of his way to make each dive as good as possible. Manuel (another divemaster) took us down on the wreck dive and also was a very good divemaster. I was impressed with the fleet of dive boats, the operation was ran very professionally and yet they strived to accomodate everyone.
The main roadway through San Miguel is being completely redone so it is quite a mess right now but they appear to be making pretty good progress on it so I would say it won't be too long before they are finished with it.
Well, I have ran on for some time now but in a nutshell, I had a very good experience with Scuba Club Cozumel and will definitely go back again (I'm already looking forward to my next trip)!
Mike