bluechub
Registered
Just came back from Bayahibe, Dominican Republic, from a week long dive vacation with the family. It was our first time in the DR and we had a great experience. We stayed at the Viva Dominicus Beach (good service and food for an AI) and we dove with Coral Point Diving. We had a great experience with Coral Point Diving: highly personalized service (the owner was shuttling us from/to the resort every day), groups are small (most of the times it was just the four of us plus the DM), and there is flexibility on selecting the dive sites.
In addition my son completed his JOW with Gianluca, the chief instructor and owner there: he did a superb job with my 11 years old, so that he ended up with 10 dives by the end of the trip. Really an excellent dive shop.
Reefs: We dove on Guaraguao, Atlantic Princess, Viva Shallows, Luca's Reef, Magallanes and Dominicus reef, and we did some of them more than once.
Conditions and visibility: We had two days of wind and sea from the SE, we were told this was unusual this time of the year, and the visibility suffered a little. On day 3 the wind shifted from the N, bringing flat seas and great visibility.
Highlights: Because of the JOW in my family we dove shallow reefs and I came away with a very good impression. Corals and sponges are plentiful and healthy, I did not see any sign of bleaching as I did in some other locations in the Caribbean. Perhaps because we dove shallow (40ft or less) we did not see large animals but a lot of small ones. We counted 5 different species of nudibranchs, many different crabs, shrimps, a sharp-tail eel (had to look in a book for that), squids, stingrays, octopus (during the day), and lots of boxfish, in addition to the usual reef inhabitants. DM Gloria was very good at spotting the macro life, including a seahorse. Trumpetfish is very common and, unfortunately, lionfish is common too (we saw some big ones). The Atlantic Princess is a fun wreck to dive and enter, it is shallow which is a bonus and a few schools of grunts congregate in the lower part.
Coral Point Diving also runs a coral restoration project, it was interesting to see all the staghorn corals on their supports and different from the other dives.
We will certainly go back to Bayahibe as there are more reefs, deeper, we could not explore this time.
In addition my son completed his JOW with Gianluca, the chief instructor and owner there: he did a superb job with my 11 years old, so that he ended up with 10 dives by the end of the trip. Really an excellent dive shop.
Reefs: We dove on Guaraguao, Atlantic Princess, Viva Shallows, Luca's Reef, Magallanes and Dominicus reef, and we did some of them more than once.
Conditions and visibility: We had two days of wind and sea from the SE, we were told this was unusual this time of the year, and the visibility suffered a little. On day 3 the wind shifted from the N, bringing flat seas and great visibility.
Highlights: Because of the JOW in my family we dove shallow reefs and I came away with a very good impression. Corals and sponges are plentiful and healthy, I did not see any sign of bleaching as I did in some other locations in the Caribbean. Perhaps because we dove shallow (40ft or less) we did not see large animals but a lot of small ones. We counted 5 different species of nudibranchs, many different crabs, shrimps, a sharp-tail eel (had to look in a book for that), squids, stingrays, octopus (during the day), and lots of boxfish, in addition to the usual reef inhabitants. DM Gloria was very good at spotting the macro life, including a seahorse. Trumpetfish is very common and, unfortunately, lionfish is common too (we saw some big ones). The Atlantic Princess is a fun wreck to dive and enter, it is shallow which is a bonus and a few schools of grunts congregate in the lower part.
Coral Point Diving also runs a coral restoration project, it was interesting to see all the staghorn corals on their supports and different from the other dives.
We will certainly go back to Bayahibe as there are more reefs, deeper, we could not explore this time.
