Cozumel Vs. Belize?

[chillyinCanada]

Imagine that. "not well founded in the first place"

 

[Mike]

Mike, I'm just a diver. I neither have any vested interests in Belize nor do I have on blinders. But I'm at least relating personal experience whereas you are merely repeating what you've read. Frankly, I don't think you should go to Belize. Your negative perception will go with you and ruin your overall trip and likely that of anyone that ends up diving with you.

I know, it's crazy to weight your choice of who to dive with based on reputation instead of lowest price, I'm very negative like that.

 

[chillyinCanada]

What are you talking about?? That certainly has not been your only point.

In any event, you've not been diving with ANY op in Belize and you regurgitate any negative reports you have seen. There are many glowing reports too, but you don't seem to give them any credence. Starting to think you are troll.

 

[AWMIII]

Well. Pretty much only three operators in AC go to the Blue Hole on a regular basis. Amigos Del Mar, The cheap one next to Island Divers (not island divers) and Ecologic Divers. How often do divers ride the chamber in AC? I know of at least one person on this board who knows the answer. Most of the shops get their air from one place. When was the last analysis? Have you ever seen a hydro stamp on a tank there? Could you even find the stamp through the gouges in the aluminum? When were they VIPed? Was there any indication of a VIP(sticker). Ralph is always quick to defend his operation, and I have heard nothing but good reports about it. But, what percentage of the dives in the country originate in AC? What percentage of the dives are done through Amigos, Ramons, and Ambergris? Those operators are owned by families that have a lot of power. The fact of the matter is that I have my own experience with several operators in AC. I also have heard many verbal reports from customers of my LDS. I hear verbal reports from other professionals from my LDS that have dove there. The main inconsistancy relates to their own level of experience and their perception of what was going on. I am sure that the live aboards and the operators on the atolls are different. But Belize, like it or not, is getting or already has a reputation for being the wild west of diving. That much is not very debatable. Its time to stop arguing about it and do something to change the perception. If Belize really wants to be the premier scuba destination in the western hemisphere, this perception needs to be fixed. Maybe they do not really want any more tourists than they already get. The perception is what fills or doesn't fill resorts and dive boats. There must be a ministery of tourism that cares about more than the cruise ship passengers. Probably, AC is far too incestuous and corrupt to resolve the issues on its own. But, AC gets the most divers and that is the opinion from which people will gleen an opinion about the rest of the country.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Truly amazing isn't it . . . Getting all those divers many of which have traveled the world diving.. . When the dive situation there is so wild west.

 

[Mike]

What are you talking about?? That certainly has not been your only point.

In any event, you've not been diving with ANY op in Belize and you regurgitate any negative reports you have seen. There are many glowing reports too, but you don't seem to give them any credence. Starting to think you are troll.

You've tried to create some sort of pissing match over a simple warning to a newbie diver to choose carefully a dive operation based on quality and reputation over low price in a dive community with widely reported safety issues. There are 7 posters in agreement about these problems, two of whom are associated with dive shops in Belize.

You say you don't have a dog in the fight but you protest very loudly the facts of :

1) Seven posters.
2) An official State Department warning.
3) You're in denial of the dozens upon dozens of trip reports archived here on Scubaboard of divers telling the same story over and over again of what you say doesn't happen there.

Apparently everybody is a liar, myself, the other posters, the state dept and all the other divers who've reported the same safety issues. And the whole basis of your argument is that since there are some good operators in the dive community in Belize then there are no bad ones to be wary of. More power to you and good luck trying to censor everyone by bullying and calling them trolls.

Here are a bunch of other liars :

A few months after I learn to dive my (then) wife and I travelled to Ambergris Caye, Belize. We were diving with Amigos del Mar, who put us in a small boat with two other couples for our dives each day. One couple had just completed their certification the same day we arrived, and were doing their initial post OW dives that week. On the third day, the operation had a trip to the Blue Hole scheduled. We were all encouraged to go. Of the six of us, the only two who opted to go were the couple who had just been certified. The next day we heard all about it from the wife ... who had been taken to 150 feet and ran out of air. The DM put her on his tank and rushed her up to 20 feet, where he left her breathing on a hang tank until another DM escorted her to the surface ... meanwhile the first DM went back down to assist another diver. She thought it was the coolest thing she'd ever done. I thought it was probably the stupidest.

Greetings. I recently got back from a vacation in Belize. Things I have heard and read since then lead me to believe I may have done something perhaps dangerous and, well, completely insane. Namely, a friend and I went diving to 130ft in the Blue Hole as our first non-training dive. Yep. Very first dive.

Some background: In preparation for our trip, a friend, J, and I decide to get open water certified. We do our classroom and pool training here in Fairbanks, then get a referral to a shop in Belize.We get to Belize, J and I complete our certification dives and get certified. Yay. This is on Monday. Blue Hole trip is planned for Thursday. In the meantime, M starts going on about ooh, this dive is dangerous, it's really deep, he's nervous, are we scared?...etc. Frankly it had never occurred for us to be scared because we are complete and utter newbies.


After hearing this from M over and over, we call the shop taking us on the Blue Hole dive and let them know that we are newly-certified beginners and is this dive really appropriate for us? They tell us basically not to go if we are uncomfortable, but beginners go on this dive all the time and the dive is heavily chaperoned. So we shrug and decide to go for it.


Thursday rolls around and the diving is awesome! Blue Hole in the morning and two shallower dives after that. True to their word, the Blue Hold dive was very chaperoned. There were three divemasters for a group of about 10 - one in front, one in back, and one floating around as needed. At no time did we feel unsafe or scared but again - we are rank amateurs who aren't even sure what we ought to be afraid of!


Later on in the trip and upon returning home, we ran in to lots of people who were SHOCKED and APPALLED that we went on that dive as beginners. Even more so that it was literally our first dive after certification. Even A, who has been diving since she was a teenager (we are all mid-late 30s) said that dive was the deepest she had ever been and was a little apprehensive.


So, tell me....did we do something very stupid?

I went to the Blue Hole last year, just to see what all the hoopla was about. The end result was that I thought it was okay, but would have much preferred if the group had all been qualified to be there. As an instructor it is difficult to "turn off" your eyes and stop watching all of the new divers who are, at that site, an accident waiting to happen. Getting to 130 feet and watching the eyes of one DM widen as he checks the air of a new diver and frantically signals to another DM to take this person up, he's low on air is NOT how I wanted to spend my dive. We were about six minutes in at that point.

I worked as the safety officer on a live aboard, that just so happened to do that dive every trip. (blue hole)The owner got a lot of extra money to make that dive, and I got a lot of divers that should never have been down that deep, on an AL80.
I was convinced that one day, someone would die on that dive, and I walked away from it when my year was up.
Less than two years later they did have a death there....and shortly there after they were out of business.

The Blue Hole is a huge money making scheme for the local operators in San Pedro and most will take anyone with c-card. I had 2 divers on my boat with 1 logged dive (got certified on the island). I did the blue hole and spent more time watching them (as they kept going up and down) than enjoying the dive.

I loved the Blue hole loaded with sharks, hit 148' dive masters where watching the open water divers like the lady that just got her cert. the day before was on the same boat she was on, shot to the surface from 70' she was fine

When booking this trip, I'd strongly advise that you ask some questions of the dive op. I thought, a few too many divers in our group, and a few who should NOT have been doing this dive. And a number of these divers were inexperienced, and didn't seem to have the ability to avoid bumping into others. Further, there were a few divers who evidently got spooked by the depth, or the gloom, or claustrophobia or whatever. Both DM's ended up taking certain divers by the hand and hanging on to them to make sure they didn't freak out and bolt to the surface. This made me somewhat uncomfortable, as I didn't want to have to be exposed to some emergency caused by inexperienced divers going beyond their abilities. My personal opinion is that this is a dive that should only be undertaken by those with deep diving experience -- it should not be the first time that someone goes below 60 ft. But apparently many dive ops in the area have NO minimum experience requirements at all.

There is a shelf at 150ft with columns/stalagmites standing on it, and most people swim behind these just above the shelf. So most people go to somewhere around 140ft. I have been on a boat where most people were using rental gear not equipped with depth gauges (or of course computers) and the divemasters told people on the boat afterwards that they had been to 130ft and it was a recreational dive. I was with the group all the time and I recorded 145ft, and my computer showed several minutes of deco. In fact, one of my two computers was still in deco when I surfaced with the other divers and I was heavily criticised by the boat captain for setting a bad example by going into deco. The truth was of course that everyone was in deco but no-one else was wearing a computer (no, not even the dive leader) but didn't know it!

I'd brought my own gear, and had my computer, whereas everyone else in the group had rental gear with no computer (although they DID have depth gauges), and was doing their dive based on the DM's computer. When we ascended, my computer gave me 8 minutes of deco time...which the DM was REALLY pissed about! He wanted me to abandon my deco time and surface after 3 minutes, but I refused (hey, it's MY body...and this would have put my computer into tilt, and we still had several days of diving ahead of us). When I boarded, he started yelling at me - but I told him to stuff it, because I'd done the exact same profile as everyone else, so clearly everyone else had a deco obligation as well. I wasn't surprised that I went into deco - due to a couple of inexperienced divers in the group panicking at depth, we ended up staying down there for a couple minutes longer than the plan.


It's just another reason why I question the overall safety of all of these operators who do the Blue Hole - they all apparently take inexperienced divers, in too-large groups, with questionable profiles. I guess it's just the nature of the business there.

A quick search and 5 minutes provided just these few examples of the many posts and threads describing the safety concerns voiced many times in this thread.



Is Belize a place to be avoided? No
Are there good dive operators there? Yes
Are there safety issues to be aware of? Yes

Enough beating a dead horse.

 

[chillyinCanada]

Don't go Mike. It's too dangerous for you. You'll be unhappy and you'll have a bad experience.

Oh by the way, have you heard of the pot calling the kettle black or alternately, perception is everything. I''ve been defending because you've been so overbearing about these matters.

As for newbies not knowing what they don't know, they most certainly should know what they'd just read in their manual. Belize diving is not a nanny state for the most part and for myself, I'm grateful for that. Be that as it may, I've never encouraged new divers to go to the Blue Hole. I actually actively discourage it. And just because some new diver says they were tAken to 150 does not mean they were TAKEN to 150. Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the dive bribriefing will hear the max depth of 130, the timing, the plan, what the DM s will be watching for and how they will be taken back to the surface should that become necessary.

 

[peterbj7]

AWMIII references tank inspections. He has very sound reasons for doing so.

 

[chillyinCanada]

I'm well aware of that Peter. But mike should also do a search in near misses and lessons learned using cozumel as a search term vs Belize. As for you mentioning the one decompression chamber in san Pedro, I'll point out that there are 3 decompression chamber in san Miguel. My gosh Peter why ever do you continue to live and dive in such wild and wooly dive environment? That's a rhetorical question, by the way.

 

[Mike]

Anyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to the dive bribriefing will hear the max depth of 130, the timing, the plan, what the DM s will be watching for and how they will be taken back to the surface should that become necessary.

LOL, Are you out of your gourd? That statement is so ridiculous, it borders on absurd.

Divers aren't supposed to be "taken back to the surface should that become necessary". That's not a dive plan. Divers dive in dive pairs with a buddy who carries their emergency air supply, or they dive like yourself as a solo diver carrying their own emergency air supply, divers don't dive virtuallybungie-corded to a dive master and taken along for a ride like a set of 12 back packs to 130-150 ft, watched over like a hawk to see who is going to go OOA or show signs of panic because on the dive before this one they were doing mask removal skils and to earn their certification. You're funny, please continue with the rationalizations and absurdities that you're trying to paint as normal, safe dive protocols. I remind you, you aren't at a cocktail party filled with wide eyed amateurs who will ooh and ahh at tales of diver daring-do. Are you a lawyer Chilly? I'd bet money on it that you are.

Now ask Peter why he said this :

AWMIII references tank inspections. He has very sound reasons for doing so.

I double dog dare you.