I just did a dive with Coastal Scuba last weekend and I was not too impressed.
1. The money was not handled professionally. We paid in cash on the boat which was apparently their preferred method. But no change was available until we docked again. Once we docked the captain just decided to pull his wallet out and give us change, which was a dollar short. In addition we needed to be refunded the tank rental fee since my wife only decided to use one tank instead of two and the captain said that they can “sometimes” refund this. I am not sure what the deciding factor was but the shop owner did refund the fee, but rounded my change down, so I was refunded $6 of my $6.50 rental fee, which again came from a wallet rather than a register.
2. Despite the fact that I made like 5 phone calls and started each one with who I was, when I was diving, and what site I wanted to dive, somehow when we got on the boat, the plan was to dive a different site. The captain was flexible about the matter, but either way, half the divers were told one site, the other half were told another site.
3. Our dive time was not limited by the amount of air in my tanks, but rather the amount of time that the dive master had to spend with us before he had to go pick up another group.
4. The crew could not resist doing a little fishing while we were there (no rods were in the water while we were in the water though). This actually would have been fine with me except that the cooler that kept their catch didn’t have a plug in it, so it leaked fish gut scented water into the boat which, of course, made home in my dive bag. Yes, I am having a great time getting that smell out.
In all, the dive master himself was friendly and flexible, but overall the operation lacked professionalism, which made me a bit frustrated.
This was my first salt water dive, so maybe this is normal. Oh well, this is just my 2 cents anyway.
