Spent a week at Beaches Resort with extended family. My wife and I took the opportunity to participate in the included scuba diving. Past diving experience has mostly been with smaller operations, with very interactive crews. Most of those trips included relatively early departures and thus early returns.
Beaches was a different experience. First, you have to attend an orientation at 3pm or sometime in the morning(8:30???). We attended the day we arrived. We are certified as rescue divers and the orientation group was very large. I suspect those two factors contributed to their decision to let us bypass the in-pool evaluation.
The boats are large and full. Everything takes a long time. As the waters of of Grace Bay were quite rough, they taxied us to the south side and launched from there. That probably added 45 minutes to the front side of the trip and another 30 to the return side. While I appreciate adapting things to local conditions, their process is already a long one that starts kinda late. Check in is at 8:15 and with the taxi ride(including a substantial wait for the taxi), boats didn't depart until 9:30 or so. I hope they can find some ways to shave time off of that process. Our returns to the resort were around 3-3:30pm.
We dove two days on the west side of Provo. The first day we had my wife and I, and another very experienced gentleman with one DM. So a ratio of 3:1 was very good. The second day we were with a group of 10 divers to the one DM. Dive briefings were adequate, though not the best and once underwater we were pretty much left to find things on our own. All our dives were around 30 minutes and once one person was low on air, we all went up. On one dive, my wife returned to the boat with 1700psi left in her tank.
The resort itself was quite nice. Being there with extended family was wonderful and we really enjoyed most aspects of our stay. For another family trip we would readily stay at this resort. However, should we return to Turks and Caicos to dive, and we probably will, we will stay and dive elsewhere.
To be completely fair, I must acknowledge practical limitations on this dive operation. They are providing diving as a part of an all inclusive resort. Demand will certainly be high and providing upwards of 6-10 boats to have that small group experience is just not practical. I am certain that high demand also explains the large diver to DM ratio and probably explains why there is a need to surface as a group. I am confident that when they are launching from the dock on site, things can move quicker.
I know this is my first post on these forums. I tend to be a lurker, however, I have learned a lot from SB and felt a responsibility to give a little bit back. I hope someone finds this information helpful.
Beaches was a different experience. First, you have to attend an orientation at 3pm or sometime in the morning(8:30???). We attended the day we arrived. We are certified as rescue divers and the orientation group was very large. I suspect those two factors contributed to their decision to let us bypass the in-pool evaluation.
The boats are large and full. Everything takes a long time. As the waters of of Grace Bay were quite rough, they taxied us to the south side and launched from there. That probably added 45 minutes to the front side of the trip and another 30 to the return side. While I appreciate adapting things to local conditions, their process is already a long one that starts kinda late. Check in is at 8:15 and with the taxi ride(including a substantial wait for the taxi), boats didn't depart until 9:30 or so. I hope they can find some ways to shave time off of that process. Our returns to the resort were around 3-3:30pm.
We dove two days on the west side of Provo. The first day we had my wife and I, and another very experienced gentleman with one DM. So a ratio of 3:1 was very good. The second day we were with a group of 10 divers to the one DM. Dive briefings were adequate, though not the best and once underwater we were pretty much left to find things on our own. All our dives were around 30 minutes and once one person was low on air, we all went up. On one dive, my wife returned to the boat with 1700psi left in her tank.
The resort itself was quite nice. Being there with extended family was wonderful and we really enjoyed most aspects of our stay. For another family trip we would readily stay at this resort. However, should we return to Turks and Caicos to dive, and we probably will, we will stay and dive elsewhere.
To be completely fair, I must acknowledge practical limitations on this dive operation. They are providing diving as a part of an all inclusive resort. Demand will certainly be high and providing upwards of 6-10 boats to have that small group experience is just not practical. I am certain that high demand also explains the large diver to DM ratio and probably explains why there is a need to surface as a group. I am confident that when they are launching from the dock on site, things can move quicker.
I know this is my first post on these forums. I tend to be a lurker, however, I have learned a lot from SB and felt a responsibility to give a little bit back. I hope someone finds this information helpful.
. I know others feel the opposite about the diving there......maybe my week was just an off week 
. I would never book a dive vacation there but would never hesitate to dive there if I ever ended up on the island.
