any of y'all been to Jamaica?

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I lived in Jamaica for a long time. Ocho Rios is about the worst place on the island for anything. The best diving is in the Negril area. it's not what it was, but it's better than Ochi. Anything is.

Good to know. The first dive I did at Runaway Bay was The Canyon. I'd read that it was one of the top 5 dives in Jamaica. Didn't see a fish for the first 8-10 minutes of the dive. Not a little one. Not a big one. None. If I ever go back, it'll be to Negril.
 
I worked for Princess Cruises for a while back in the late 80's. We would port at Montego Bay, and my buddies and I would grab a cab and head out to this hotel. It was maybe 20 minutes and I remember lots of cane fields. The first time we went, the cab driver on the way back to the ship stopped off to the side of the road. He told us to wait, and went around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. He proceeded to come back by the side of the car with a HUGE machete. We all about **** our pants. Fortunately it was to chop and clean a huge hunk of sugar cane and give it to us as a treat!!! :) Talk about profiling - us white musicians from America thought for sure we were goners.

Anyway, about the diving - I can not for the life of me remember the name of the place, but they had a 'dive shop' sort of across the street that had a fill station, some tanks, and a big concrete pier. The shore dive there was to swim out over lots of dead coral until you came upon a pretty large hole on the ocean floor at about 30-40fsw. You would drop down this hole and I mean straight down to about 90 feet at the bottom which was littered with dead and broken bits of more coral. There was a small passage that headed straight out and was about 20' long. You would pop out the end into open ocean only to turn around and see that you'd come out the side of a huge wall about 30' down the face. We'd do a dive along the wall, then back up and over and swim back to shore. The hotel had a restaurant that served breakfast and some AMAZING blue mountain coffee. I'd love to know if that sounds familiar to anyone, if the hotel was still there, and is that still a dive?? The viz was never great, but it was a very nice dive in a place I didn't care much for the other options available at the time.
 

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