Anyone knows about Nekton Cruises?

[DWJ]

How are they set for the non-diver. My wife snorkels and stuff but does not dive. Any comments?

 

[Darnold9999]

Getting ready to do my second Nekton trip next week. I would take them over Aggressor any time. First trip was Mona Island, next will be Cayman Islands. Would love to do the Cay Sal Banks trip.

I will be on the Cayman trip starting tomorrow - is that the "next week" or are you the following week? Either way looking forward to the trip, may see you there.

 

[Desert_Diver]

Most people hung at 90-100'. There were people who went deeper for part of the dive - depending on their air consumption. It's a true drift dive, once you drop you're in the current doing no work, just flying along the wall. The wall at Elbow Cay started at 80' so above that you're just floating in blue water. I don't know about Nitrox as I don't use it but my buddy went to 129' on Nitrox at Silversides. For a short time.

When you say they hung at 90 to 100 feet does this mean you were drifting parallel to a wall or some kind of drop off? Or does it mean you drifting over the bottom roughly thirty feet above the bottom?

I'm trying to visualize the dive.

Thanks,

Art

 

[Desert_Diver]

30% nitrox has an MOD of 143' at 1.6 PPO, or 120' at 1.4 PPO.

That sounds about right to me. I try to keep on the conservative side of the tables so I use the 1.4 PPO as my limit. That way, if I screw up some how (and I am very inventive at screwing up), I still have some safety margin.

Art

 

[diversteve]

When you say they hung at 90 to 100 feet does this mean you were drifting parallel to a wall or some kind of drop off? Or does it mean you drifting over the bottom roughly thirty feet above the bottom?

I'm trying to visualize the dive.

Thanks,

Art

Everyone drifts parallel to one wall. You move so fast that it's practically impossible to stop unless you grab something. Which they don't recommend as they want the group to stay together. In fact part of the briefing is to drop immediately to be able to stay with the DM during the dive when you hit the water. And everybody completely gears up, including fins etc. on the divedeck so they all go at once when the captains says to. They do this with 1/2 the divers on the boat each time twice.

It's beyond rec limits to the bottom. So everyone drifts along with the DM who's got a reel with a ball at the surface. The captain moves the Pilot along behind at a safe distance behind the divers, there's an auxiliary control panel on the back deck that allows him to safely do this. When everybody is up, he pulls in close, shuts down the prop and motions for small groups to swim to and board the boat. You do this with your fins on as there's no time to remove them or your gear since the current is so strong that by the time the second group or so is back aboard, he has to move the boat again to catch up to the remaining divers in the water.

I didn't do this dive, but my buddy said it was quite a ride. If you need more specifics I'd have to ask him.

 

[diversteve]

How are they set for the non-diver. My wife snorkels and stuff but does not dive. Any comments?

It's really a diver's boat. The problem for snorkelers is that all the divesites are on Nekton placed moorings in water that typically exceeds 40-60'. So there's really no shallow/nearshore snorkeling spot, you're just out in the middle of the ocean somewhere, sometimes near a small cay, but usually not close enough to snorkel to it.

The best snorkeling is at Water Cay later in the week. It is only about 15-20' deep under the boat. She could easily swim to Water Cay from the mooring, go through the swimthrough - you can help her through as it's really wide and shallow with a sand bottom, maybe 20-30' long - and snorkel inside the cay, where the water is like 3-5' deep.
As you're swimming into the little cove towards the swimthrough, there's a couple big lobsters in crevices to the left in about 10' of water.

You can also climb out at multiple spots all over Water Cay and jump in off some low cliffs in places. As I remember there's a couple small beach areas there also. Several of the kids on our trip didn't even dive there, they just snorkeled over and walked around the Cay. It's uninhabited. It's so small that you can see almost all of it from the sundeck on the boat before you dive it.

There's also snorkeling at the Bahamas Banks site (can't remember the name) although there's a lot of current there since it's a tidal exchange. A lot of the site was 10-20' of water with a sandy bottom with just clumps of coral interspersed. There's a big turtle who lives in just 10-15' of water out towards the Banks.

She could snorkel around the boat at most of the sites. Actually it's pretty entertaining as the fish like the shade under the boat. We saw several Barracuda hovering between the pontoons(10' or less) on different dives, had an overly friendly Remora get too close during one safety stop(he liked my shiny silver video housing) and were caught in a school of silversides once as they sought shelter under the boat. Just about every dive there was something hovering under/near the boat.

About the only site she shouldn't snorkel is at the Big Hole site, since it's next to the shark feed site, the crew recommended getting off the surface as soon as possible, even the day before the feed - there's a dozen or more sharks milling around all the time.

Other than that, there's the sundeck with the Jacuzzi and plenty of lounge chairs. Not a lot of people used the Jacuzzi on our trip. There's videos and a big screen in the lounge that no one uses during the day except during meals. You won't be spending a lot of time in your room, it's pretty small and basic.

 

[ChrisA]

This one, http://www.nektoncruises.com/, looks interesting, but I wanted to know if any of y'all had done it. Can you really dive as much as you want from there?

Can you dive as much as you want??? Look at your dive tables and figure out how you can fit five dives a day in. It could be hard to do depending on the depth. The nitrogen loading begins to add up. So what you really want to do is take the Nitrox class before you go. The class is easy. All you do is study some tables and a little math. No new underwater skills involved.

 

[diversteve]

Can you dive as much as you want??? Look at your dive tables and figure out how you can fit five dives a day in. It could be hard to do depending on the depth. The nitrogen loading begins to add up. So what you really want to do is take the Nitrox class before you go. The class is easy. All you do is study some tables and a little math. No new underwater skills involved.

It's possible. The deepest dives are in the morning and the boat moves at lunch to a shallow nearby site. A lot of the dives are either blue holes or walls so if you stay on top of the wall it's only 60-80' at the deep sites. The best thing about the Cay Sal blue holes is that they're surrounded by fringing coral in most cases so there's a lot of interesting fish to see. The only reasons to go deep were swimthroughs, or at one site to see stalagtites in 120'. Frankly the viz inside the holes was much worse than the viz on top.

The night dive(fifth of the day) is at the same afternoon shallow site. There was only one day where the dive profiles were such that it was about 60-80' on the afternoon/night dive after shallower morning dives. I dove 4 dives/day for 5/6 days. My dive total for the week was 22 and I did no night dives. My buddy did 25 dives and would have done 26 except for ear problems one day. He dove Nitrox.

There was one day when it would have been possible to do 5 day dives, had you stayed shallow on the morning dives, the afternoon dives were less than 30' of water. The crew told us that we wouldn't be able to do 5 day dives that week since the Cay Sal itinerary has deeper dives and more frequent boat movements compared to the Belize trips.

I was at 22hrs. no fly by Friday though - on Air not Nitrox after doing a Friday 4PM dive. A lot of people quit diving Friday morning because of their flights the next day. The only people who did the Friday night dive drove home.

 

[DiveMaven]

In Belize, the crew said they would take anyone who wanted to snorkel to a shallower spot via their chase boat. Everyone on board was a diver, but on Friday afternoon Captain Ephy took us to a rather shallow site to dive and a few folks snorkeled there.

We also had the option of 6 dives most days. We were able to do both a dawn dive and a night dive everyday if there was enough interest. Computers are strongly encouraged, and frankly, I think for a liveaboard they are imperative. Sure, you can dive using the tables, but you're going to seriously short change yourself in bottom time and amount of diving you can do. If you don't own a computer, arrange to rent one from the Nekton folks, it's worth every penny.

We're definitely looking forward to our NW Bahamas trip next year and going back to Belize sometime in the future.

 

[Darnold9999]

I did notice a web page on the Nekton site that promotes snorkling - they say they will take you to a snorkle site. Makes sense as snorkling from the boat at most of the sites I have been to would be pretty boring. I would check, but if they are advertising it I would think they would need to provide the service if someone wanted it. In the Belize itinery it wouldn't take much of a boat trip to get to what looked like pretty good snorkling sites. Don't know about the others -- yet.