427Dave
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Grand Bahamas Scuba Diving: May 5th, 2007 to May 12th 2007
We arrived and contacted Grand Bahamas Scuba, Fred and Melinda Riger. http://www.grandbahamascuba.com/
We went to Silver Reef on Sunday afternoon. This is a shallow reef and a great dive to get your weight and other things ironed out, especially after diving fresh water. We booked 8 more dives with Fred and Melinda.
The weather was not very cooperative while we were there. There was this no name, no storm that stirred the seas up and made them rough almost everyday. There were the fires in Florida that made 3 days very Smokey. This did not stop the diving however. Each morning we did a two tank dive to a different interesting site. The water temperatures started out at 80 degrees and by Friday had dropped to 75 degrees due to the storm.
My only problem was on diving Theo’s wreck and Shark Junction on Friday. We got back to the hotel and viewed our pictures of the day. We had seen 3 reef sharks and gotten some pretty good pictures. Also a good picture of a fairly large loggerhead turtle and of course Theo’s wreck. The next day we were looking at the pictures again and the SD card went bad. So all our Friday pictures with the sharks and Theo’s Wreck got trashed. Also that SD had a lot of our touring of the island. So all of that was lost. Next time I guess I should take a laptop to down load the pictures everyday, course then the laptop would fail
. I did have other SD cards with the diving from Sunday tru Thursday so not all was lost. These pictures can be viewed at http://www.scubaboard.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/2402
We had a great time, the dive boat was not over crowded (6-10), the other divers were a lot of fun, Fred and Melinda were excellent. I highly recommend if you are thinking of going to Freeport on Grand Bahamas to contact Fred and Melinda. We did go into Port Lucaya and check out UNEXSO, they looked like a typical cattle boat operation. They had 25 divers coming in when we were there. They do the Dolphin and Shark dives and all the ones that bring on customers, but they did not impress me.
We stayed at The Island Seas Resort, which is a timeshare. It was a great place and breakfast and noon lunch was OK, however the evening cook must not like to eat! Port Lucaya had a lot of great eating places however.
I highly recommend NOT flying Continental Airlines however. We had a direct flight round trip from Orlando booked, confirmed, and seats assigned. The flight over was OK and took a little over an hour. The flight back was were we ran into the nightmare! We got to the airport 4 hours early due to being kicked out of our Timeshare early. The airline told us we did not have seats on the flight, the flight had been way overbooked and it did not matter that we had confirmed seats. They then put us on a flight to Ft. Lauderdale. When in Lauderdale we could not find our flight to Orlando, we checked with the airline. They informed us we were on a flight to Key West. So we flew to Key West, then when we arrived in Key West we got a flight to Orlando. 8 hours later for what should have been 1 hour did not make us very happy when we finally arrived home, the only good thing, I do not know how they did it but our bags were in Orlando when we arrived.
We did find out about a ship that sails everyday to Grand Bahamas. It takes 5 hours and if we go again that is what we will do. It leaves Ft. Lauderdale at 8:00 am and is called The Discovery.
We arrived and contacted Grand Bahamas Scuba, Fred and Melinda Riger. http://www.grandbahamascuba.com/
We went to Silver Reef on Sunday afternoon. This is a shallow reef and a great dive to get your weight and other things ironed out, especially after diving fresh water. We booked 8 more dives with Fred and Melinda.
The weather was not very cooperative while we were there. There was this no name, no storm that stirred the seas up and made them rough almost everyday. There were the fires in Florida that made 3 days very Smokey. This did not stop the diving however. Each morning we did a two tank dive to a different interesting site. The water temperatures started out at 80 degrees and by Friday had dropped to 75 degrees due to the storm.
My only problem was on diving Theo’s wreck and Shark Junction on Friday. We got back to the hotel and viewed our pictures of the day. We had seen 3 reef sharks and gotten some pretty good pictures. Also a good picture of a fairly large loggerhead turtle and of course Theo’s wreck. The next day we were looking at the pictures again and the SD card went bad. So all our Friday pictures with the sharks and Theo’s Wreck got trashed. Also that SD had a lot of our touring of the island. So all of that was lost. Next time I guess I should take a laptop to down load the pictures everyday, course then the laptop would fail
. I did have other SD cards with the diving from Sunday tru Thursday so not all was lost. These pictures can be viewed at http://www.scubaboard.com/gallery/showgallery.php/cat/2402We had a great time, the dive boat was not over crowded (6-10), the other divers were a lot of fun, Fred and Melinda were excellent. I highly recommend if you are thinking of going to Freeport on Grand Bahamas to contact Fred and Melinda. We did go into Port Lucaya and check out UNEXSO, they looked like a typical cattle boat operation. They had 25 divers coming in when we were there. They do the Dolphin and Shark dives and all the ones that bring on customers, but they did not impress me.
We stayed at The Island Seas Resort, which is a timeshare. It was a great place and breakfast and noon lunch was OK, however the evening cook must not like to eat! Port Lucaya had a lot of great eating places however.
I highly recommend NOT flying Continental Airlines however. We had a direct flight round trip from Orlando booked, confirmed, and seats assigned. The flight over was OK and took a little over an hour. The flight back was were we ran into the nightmare! We got to the airport 4 hours early due to being kicked out of our Timeshare early. The airline told us we did not have seats on the flight, the flight had been way overbooked and it did not matter that we had confirmed seats. They then put us on a flight to Ft. Lauderdale. When in Lauderdale we could not find our flight to Orlando, we checked with the airline. They informed us we were on a flight to Key West. So we flew to Key West, then when we arrived in Key West we got a flight to Orlando. 8 hours later for what should have been 1 hour did not make us very happy when we finally arrived home, the only good thing, I do not know how they did it but our bags were in Orlando when we arrived.
We did find out about a ship that sails everyday to Grand Bahamas. It takes 5 hours and if we go again that is what we will do. It leaves Ft. Lauderdale at 8:00 am and is called The Discovery.
