CDNDIVER604
New
i was able to get this excursion for upcoming trip for 103.99.
Trip Report Cozumel - Sand Dollar Sports
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Rob9876
Contributor
Did that include any gear (BCD, regulator, etc.)? And how did you like the dive operator?
CDNDIVER604
New
This is for my cruise in November. 25% off pre cruise sale.
I went with them back in June and paid around $139 on the ship. They picked up right off the cruise dock and took you to their shop to get gear. I brought my own stuff and only rented fins, weights. I believe they were charging people who wanted a wetsuit.
On the shore excursion page it says gear included except for wetsuit.
I felt they did a good job, which is why I am going with them again.
Wheeler925
Contributor
Great to hear, I booked for December 11th. It was $118. Did you get to the 'wall'? I wonder if they'll only go there if everyone is AOW.
It is far easier to book the ship's excursion early, and cancel if you find something better within the cancelation period, than try to grab a ship
slot at the last minute.
I have been to wall several times and I am a OW diver with @300 dives. However, the ship's excursion rarely goes down to the wall because of timing. Looking at my dive log, Sand Dollar tends to use Punta Tunich, Yucab, Chakkanab, San Clemente, and Paradise. Paradise was most frequently used as the second dive as it is very close to the cruise terminals.
zarlor
Registered
My experience with SDS (last month off of Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas) seems little different than that of the OP or some others. I was hoping for a nice small group experience since I was on a smaller cruise ship, but that was not to be since Harmony of the Seas was also in port at the same time so it was a combined group for us with around 20-25 on the dive boat. They had someone meet us all at the meet-up spot near the end of the pier, filling out paperwork, checking cert cards and the like, then walked us to a smaller side-pier where I guess cruise excursions have rights to pull up and dock for 10 minutes or so, so at least it was a close walk to get there, as the OP notes.
The operator is barely a 10 minute boat ride north from the International pier where folks would stop to pick up their rental gear and the like. The issue with using the cruise line is you never have a direct line to the operator so certain special requests (like, say, requesting Nitrox or DIN on your tanks) just doesn't seem possible and with that many people it's kind of a cattleboat operation anyway.
In any case once we finished up there we took another short trip (15 minutes, max) back south past the ships to Paradise Reef. It was a MUCH faster trip than I was expecting so the dive brief was almost non-existent and it felt like we were quickly broken up into groups of five (not buddied up at all) and just shoved into the water. I was the last of my group in and our guide instantly gestured to go down. The strap on my fin had popped off and I was trying to hook it back in, looking in the water and seeing him, about 15' down, looking up and gesturing for me to go down... once he realized the issue he came back up, helped me get the strap back in and put it on my foot and then it was a push to go down. I get it, though, as I assume he was trying to keep an eye on the rest of the group and better for us all to be together so the push to get me down would help if that was his intent. Not a great start but at least there was no real current here so the group wasn't immediately broken up by that.
Instead our guide dropped to the bottom (around 40' is all at Paradise Reef) and just started booking ahead. We never really got the group together and nobody else was watching any others or buddying up or anything. It was kind of chaotic, honestly. As the least experienced diver of the group (only 14 dives at that point, I'm a newbie but I do practice regularly despite that and the dives I have are fairly varied, FWIW, but obviously take all of this with the grain of salt of my inexperience) I decided to largely stick close to the guide but he was moving so quickly I was struggling to keep up. He showed us things and I took video but overall it was such a rush-fest I blew through my air faster than the others. When I rushed forward to tap him to let him know I was at 700psi (where he wanted us to notify him) he gave me a 3-minute safety stop signal, which I acknowledged, but then he popped a dSMB and kept swimming, so I followed along a bit more until after a few minutes he turned and gave me the signal again. I then realized he wanted me to go up to a safety stop even though he never gave me the thumb to go up. No worries, I did so and thankfully he stayed down with the others so they didn't have to end early because of me. I hovered in the blue for my 3 minute stop, popped up next to his dSMB and the boat came and picked me up without issue.
I want to add here that the group really was quite spread out and our guide really wasn't watching any of us. No real regard for safety in that sense.
I realized when back on the boat that in the rush I forgot to take off the shorts I had over my rashguard shorts so my phone got to enjoy 40 minutes at 40', too... so much for that phone!
We had about a 30 minute SI and moved further north (maybe another 15 minute boat ride, all really close to the piers, essentially). They had "purified" water in an orange drink cooler with plastic cups (I had no issues drinking it, FWIW) along with fruit slices of melons, some pineapple, apples and bananas for snacks, at least. Nothing fancy and the crew seemed absolutely obsessed with how many weights they had handed out to everyone (they seemed utterly confused when I told them they gave me 6 lbs and kept complaining that it was Cozumel and the water is very salty! I had to show 2 different crewmen the 5 lb. backplate on my BPW, but they seemed floored that even at 11 lbs. total that I had no buoyancy issues at all there... I've dove there before and know my weights in that water quite well... it's 11 lbs... never had to touch my inflator and never had a problem hovering without line in the blue on my safety stops... they must really overweight folks there a lot or something).
The next dive was a drift dive on the Villa Blanca Wall, which was nice. (We didn't really go near the edge where the drop-off for the wall is, just maybe 15 yards away from it checking out the reef) I was able to finally get my SAC rate back down to my usual level (except for some reason I kept drifting further in front of the group... well, I know the reason, it was mainly because other members of the group and even our guide would just reach out and grab the reef to stop themselves... at least our guide mostly shoved a finger into the sand to do that over grabbing the reef, but he still grabbed the reef at times... I just couldn't quite wrap my head around that) so I did have to do more kicking to slow down and make my way back to the group some. Still a miscommunication when he asked for my air had him sending me up early. I was having lots of issues with my mask flooding and just being blown away by these people grabbing the reef and not really caring about how far apart the whole group was from each other that I just wasn't really enjoying the dive anyway, so I went ahead and did my safety stop on my own by his dSMB (out the whole time this time because it was a drift dive) to get picked up when I surfaced.
Overall... not the best experience and not really the best reefs to get on in Cozumel anyway. Sure, we saw some stuff and as always you can just see forever there, but everything surrounding the dives just made the whole thing pretty "meh" this time for me. My recommendation for anyone going there on a cruise is if you possibly can see if you can find an operator that can work around the time your ship gets into port (most of them leave around the same time the ships get in so you can't make the morning dives!) and go with them instead. Even if you pay a bit more if for a "private tour" or you can possibly get into a small group for something like that then probably you really should. I'm sure it will be a much nicer set of less rushed dives than what we had. I don't think I'll ever do it as an excursion through the cruise line again. Just make sure your operator knows your schedule for being back on the ship and pad in travel time if you have to taxi back.
TL;DR: So, yeah, overall not that impressed, (again, in my limited diving experience) with SDS, at least not with them as a cruise ship excursion. Nice enough folks and all, but just not that enjoyable for me and I guess my dive preferences.
As for price you can play the discount game with any excursion with Royal (or most lines, really). Book it early and watch it regularly for discounts. If you see one just cancel and rebook! I believe I got this one down to around $95 that way (includes tanks and rental gear, although I only used the tanks and some weights, bringing my own gear). Not too different from what you can get booking on your own outside of the cruise lines, but as I noted that's for their regular times which often don't line up well with cruise ship arrival times for morning dives and could be problematic for afternoon dives depending on when your cruise ship's final boarding time is, so... yeah.
The operator is barely a 10 minute boat ride north from the International pier where folks would stop to pick up their rental gear and the like. The issue with using the cruise line is you never have a direct line to the operator so certain special requests (like, say, requesting Nitrox or DIN on your tanks) just doesn't seem possible and with that many people it's kind of a cattleboat operation anyway.
In any case once we finished up there we took another short trip (15 minutes, max) back south past the ships to Paradise Reef. It was a MUCH faster trip than I was expecting so the dive brief was almost non-existent and it felt like we were quickly broken up into groups of five (not buddied up at all) and just shoved into the water. I was the last of my group in and our guide instantly gestured to go down. The strap on my fin had popped off and I was trying to hook it back in, looking in the water and seeing him, about 15' down, looking up and gesturing for me to go down... once he realized the issue he came back up, helped me get the strap back in and put it on my foot and then it was a push to go down. I get it, though, as I assume he was trying to keep an eye on the rest of the group and better for us all to be together so the push to get me down would help if that was his intent. Not a great start but at least there was no real current here so the group wasn't immediately broken up by that.
Instead our guide dropped to the bottom (around 40' is all at Paradise Reef) and just started booking ahead. We never really got the group together and nobody else was watching any others or buddying up or anything. It was kind of chaotic, honestly. As the least experienced diver of the group (only 14 dives at that point, I'm a newbie but I do practice regularly despite that and the dives I have are fairly varied, FWIW, but obviously take all of this with the grain of salt of my inexperience) I decided to largely stick close to the guide but he was moving so quickly I was struggling to keep up. He showed us things and I took video but overall it was such a rush-fest I blew through my air faster than the others. When I rushed forward to tap him to let him know I was at 700psi (where he wanted us to notify him) he gave me a 3-minute safety stop signal, which I acknowledged, but then he popped a dSMB and kept swimming, so I followed along a bit more until after a few minutes he turned and gave me the signal again. I then realized he wanted me to go up to a safety stop even though he never gave me the thumb to go up. No worries, I did so and thankfully he stayed down with the others so they didn't have to end early because of me. I hovered in the blue for my 3 minute stop, popped up next to his dSMB and the boat came and picked me up without issue.
I want to add here that the group really was quite spread out and our guide really wasn't watching any of us. No real regard for safety in that sense.
I realized when back on the boat that in the rush I forgot to take off the shorts I had over my rashguard shorts so my phone got to enjoy 40 minutes at 40', too... so much for that phone!
We had about a 30 minute SI and moved further north (maybe another 15 minute boat ride, all really close to the piers, essentially). They had "purified" water in an orange drink cooler with plastic cups (I had no issues drinking it, FWIW) along with fruit slices of melons, some pineapple, apples and bananas for snacks, at least. Nothing fancy and the crew seemed absolutely obsessed with how many weights they had handed out to everyone (they seemed utterly confused when I told them they gave me 6 lbs and kept complaining that it was Cozumel and the water is very salty! I had to show 2 different crewmen the 5 lb. backplate on my BPW, but they seemed floored that even at 11 lbs. total that I had no buoyancy issues at all there... I've dove there before and know my weights in that water quite well... it's 11 lbs... never had to touch my inflator and never had a problem hovering without line in the blue on my safety stops... they must really overweight folks there a lot or something).
The next dive was a drift dive on the Villa Blanca Wall, which was nice. (We didn't really go near the edge where the drop-off for the wall is, just maybe 15 yards away from it checking out the reef) I was able to finally get my SAC rate back down to my usual level (except for some reason I kept drifting further in front of the group... well, I know the reason, it was mainly because other members of the group and even our guide would just reach out and grab the reef to stop themselves... at least our guide mostly shoved a finger into the sand to do that over grabbing the reef, but he still grabbed the reef at times... I just couldn't quite wrap my head around that) so I did have to do more kicking to slow down and make my way back to the group some. Still a miscommunication when he asked for my air had him sending me up early. I was having lots of issues with my mask flooding and just being blown away by these people grabbing the reef and not really caring about how far apart the whole group was from each other that I just wasn't really enjoying the dive anyway, so I went ahead and did my safety stop on my own by his dSMB (out the whole time this time because it was a drift dive) to get picked up when I surfaced.
Overall... not the best experience and not really the best reefs to get on in Cozumel anyway. Sure, we saw some stuff and as always you can just see forever there, but everything surrounding the dives just made the whole thing pretty "meh" this time for me. My recommendation for anyone going there on a cruise is if you possibly can see if you can find an operator that can work around the time your ship gets into port (most of them leave around the same time the ships get in so you can't make the morning dives!) and go with them instead. Even if you pay a bit more if for a "private tour" or you can possibly get into a small group for something like that then probably you really should. I'm sure it will be a much nicer set of less rushed dives than what we had. I don't think I'll ever do it as an excursion through the cruise line again. Just make sure your operator knows your schedule for being back on the ship and pad in travel time if you have to taxi back.
TL;DR: So, yeah, overall not that impressed, (again, in my limited diving experience) with SDS, at least not with them as a cruise ship excursion. Nice enough folks and all, but just not that enjoyable for me and I guess my dive preferences.
As for price you can play the discount game with any excursion with Royal (or most lines, really). Book it early and watch it regularly for discounts. If you see one just cancel and rebook! I believe I got this one down to around $95 that way (includes tanks and rental gear, although I only used the tanks and some weights, bringing my own gear). Not too different from what you can get booking on your own outside of the cruise lines, but as I noted that's for their regular times which often don't line up well with cruise ship arrival times for morning dives and could be problematic for afternoon dives depending on when your cruise ship's final boarding time is, so... yeah.
Wheeler925
Contributor
My experience with SDS (last month off of Royal Caribbean's Brilliance of the Seas) seems little different than that of the OP or some others. I was hoping for a nice small group experience since I was on a smaller cruise ship, but that was not to be since Harmony of the Seas was also in port at the same time so it was a combined group for us with around 20-25 on the dive boat. They had someone meet us all at the meet-up spot near the end of the pier, filling out paperwork, checking cert cards and the like, then walked us to a smaller side-pier where I guess cruise excursions have rights to pull up and dock for 10 minutes or so, so at least it was a close walk to get there, as the OP notes.
The operator is barely a 10 minute boat ride north from the International pier where folks would stop to pick up their rental gear and the like. The issue with using the cruise line is you never have a direct line to the operator so certain special requests (like, say, requesting Nitrox or DIN on your tanks) just doesn't seem possible and with that many people it's kind of a cattleboat operation anyway.
In any case once we finished up there we took another short trip (15 minutes, max) back south past the ships to Paradise Reef. It was a MUCH faster trip than I was expecting so the dive brief was almost non-existent and it felt like we were quickly broken up into groups of five (not buddied up at all) and just shoved into the water. I was the last of my group in and our guide instantly gestured to go down. The strap on my fin had popped off and I was trying to hook it back in, looking in the water and seeing him, about 15' down, looking up and gesturing for me to go down... once he realized the issue he came back up, helped me get the strap back in and put it on my foot and then it was a push to go down. I get it, though, as I assume he was trying to keep an eye on the rest of the group and better for us all to be together so the push to get me down would help if that was his intent. Not a great start but at least there was no real current here so the group wasn't immediately broken up by that.
Instead our guide dropped to the bottom (around 40' is all at Paradise Reef) and just started booking ahead. We never really got the group together and nobody else was watching any others or buddying up or anything. It was kind of chaotic, honestly. As the least experienced diver of the group (only 14 dives at that point, I'm a newbie but I do practice regularly despite that and the dives I have are fairly varied, FWIW, but obviously take all of this with the grain of salt of my inexperience) I decided to largely stick close to the guide but he was moving so quickly I was struggling to keep up. He showed us things and I took video but overall it was such a rush-fest I blew through my air faster than the others. When I rushed forward to tap him to let him know I was at 700psi (where he wanted us to notify him) he gave me a 3-minute safety stop signal, which I acknowledged, but then he popped a dSMB and kept swimming, so I followed along a bit more until after a few minutes he turned and gave me the signal again. I then realized he wanted me to go up to a safety stop even though he never gave me the thumb to go up. No worries, I did so and thankfully he stayed down with the others so they didn't have to end early because of me. I hovered in the blue for my 3 minute stop, popped up next to his dSMB and the boat came and picked me up without issue.
I want to add here that the group really was quite spread out and our guide really wasn't watching any of us. No real regard for safety in that sense.
I realized when back on the boat that in the rush I forgot to take off the shorts I had over my rashguard shorts so my phone got to enjoy 40 minutes at 40', too... so much for that phone!
We had about a 30 minute SI and moved further north (maybe another 15 minute boat ride, all really close to the piers, essentially). They had "purified" water in an orange drink cooler with plastic cups (I had no issues drinking it, FWIW) along with fruit slices of melons, some pineapple, apples and bananas for snacks, at least. Nothing fancy and the crew seemed absolutely obsessed with how many weights they had handed out to everyone (they seemed utterly confused when I told them they gave me 6 lbs and kept complaining that it was Cozumel and the water is very salty! I had to show 2 different crewmen the 5 lb. backplate on my BPW, but they seemed floored that even at 11 lbs. total that I had no buoyancy issues at all there... I've dove there before and know my weights in that water quite well... it's 11 lbs... never had to touch my inflator and never had a problem hovering without line in the blue on my safety stops... they must really overweight folks there a lot or something).
The next dive was a drift dive on the Villa Blanca Wall, which was nice. (We didn't really go near the edge where the drop-off for the wall is, just maybe 15 yards away from it checking out the reef) I was able to finally get my SAC rate back down to my usual level (except for some reason I kept drifting further in front of the group... well, I know the reason, it was mainly because other members of the group and even our guide would just reach out and grab the reef to stop themselves... at least our guide mostly shoved a finger into the sand to do that over grabbing the reef, but he still grabbed the reef at times... I just couldn't quite wrap my head around that) so I did have to do more kicking to slow down and make my way back to the group some. Still a miscommunication when he asked for my air had him sending me up early. I was having lots of issues with my mask flooding and just being blown away by these people grabbing the reef and not really caring about how far apart the whole group was from each other that I just wasn't really enjoying the dive anyway, so I went ahead and did my safety stop on my own by his dSMB (out the whole time this time because it was a drift dive) to get picked up when I surfaced.
Overall... not the best experience and not really the best reefs to get on in Cozumel anyway. Sure, we saw some stuff and as always you can just see forever there, but everything surrounding the dives just made the whole thing pretty "meh" this time for me. My recommendation for anyone going there on a cruise is if you possibly can see if you can find an operator that can work around the time your ship gets into port (most of them leave around the same time the ships get in so you can't make the morning dives!) and go with them instead. Even if you pay a bit more if for a "private tour" or you can possibly get into a small group for something like that then probably you really should. I'm sure it will be a much nicer set of less rushed dives than what we had. I don't think I'll ever do it as an excursion through the cruise line again. Just make sure your operator knows your schedule for being back on the ship and pad in travel time if you have to taxi back.
TL;DR: So, yeah, overall not that impressed, (again, in my limited diving experience) with SDS, at least not with them as a cruise ship excursion. Nice enough folks and all, but just not that enjoyable for me and I guess my dive preferences.
As for price you can play the discount game with any excursion with Royal (or most lines, really). Book it early and watch it regularly for discounts. If you see one just cancel and rebook! I believe I got this one down to around $95 that way (includes tanks and rental gear, although I only used the tanks and some weights, bringing my own gear). Not too different from what you can get booking on your own outside of the cruise lines, but as I noted that's for their regular times which often don't line up well with cruise ship arrival times for morning dives and could be problematic for afternoon dives depending on when your cruise ship's final boarding time is, so... yeah.
Dove with them December 11th and your experience is pretty much the same as mine. I was on Harmony of the Seas and it was a busy day in port - only 12 or so on the dive boat though. My guide seemed quite ok, but it was still sort of every man for himself as soon as in the water. I'd do it again, but would prefer a non-ship dive.
OP
Sorry to hear about your bad experience. I think I was lucky that there was only one cruise ship in port and were only about 5 divers on our boat. I can easily see how it could become a cattle boat operation with more people. I try and avoid the cruise ship excursions for diving for that reason and prefer to book on my own, but the timing of our arrival and departure in Cozumel was such that none of the other local operators would work.
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