I just got back from Punta Cana and I wanted to share how my dives went.
I stayed at Sunscape the Beach which is north of most of the resorts and rather isolated. My uncle and I dove with Scuba Caribe, since they had a shop right on our resort's property. They have seven or eight shops in Punta Cana, each located at different resorts.
They don't have nitrox, or offer night diving. Our site offered dives at 9:30, 1:00 and 3:00. Two days a week, the morning dive was a two tank dive. Every fill I got was in the 2500 - 2600 psi range. They did have an excursion to Catalina Island and Bayahibe.
The DM's are rather laid back and nice guys, but don't have full command of English. Their dive boats are pretty small, and reminded me of a glorified rowboat, with an outboard motor. We had to gear up at their shop, carry our gear down to the water's edge, load it in the boat. The gear was stored underneath our feet, so the boat ride the dive sites was a little cramped.
My uncle and I did seven dives each. The Scuba Caribe dives sites we did from our hotel were the Aquarium, the Tunnel, the Coral Garden (twice), and Julia. Although the Scuba Caribe website has a dive schedule, they didn't really follow it at all. We also took the excursion to Catalina Island, which was a wall dive and a shallow dive.
A lot of the reef near Punta Cana is grey and lifeless, so I think it was dead. There are pockets of life from here to there, but they was a lot of swimming on each dive. The Tunnel and the Coral Garden had short underpasses you could swim through, but there was always a DM under there first.
These were my first ocean dives, so I saw ten times as much life their as I had in any of my quarry, mine or lakes dives that I had done previously, so I thought it was pretty cool. We mostly saw reef fish, but we did see a couple unusual things, like a stone fish, a couple trumpetfish, an octopus and a green morey eel. A couple dives had a good deal of surge, which caused me to get seasick on the first dive.
The Punta Cana dives were mostly above 60 feet and lasted about 45 minutes. I did bring a camera that a co-worker had lent me on the Julia dive, which turned out to be the best for life. The pictures are being developed, but I think I got some good shots of the morey eel, which was swimming free. My uncle and I saw it right as we were about to start our safety stop and we were the last two left in the water, so we were the only ones to see it.
The Catalina Island dives were much cooler. The logistics of getting there were a nightmare though. It is also a snorkeling trip, so there was about twenty people leaving from our hotel to go on the trip. It turned out to be a two hour busride from our hotel, mostly because the roads have so many potholes that our bus was swerving from one side of the road to the other to avoid them, regardless of the oncoming traffic.
We stopped about halfway at a bus depot of sorts to get a briefing from a Scuba Caribe employee. We were told that the snorkelers were going to be on a different boat for snorkeling but we would meet up for lunch on the island and all take the same boat back home (the dive boat, not the snorkel boat). One lady, who was traveling alone, I guess didn't hear that part, so she was left behind on the beach. Once we got back to the bus depot, halfway home, we were told we had to wait for her to catch up to us in a taxi. After an hour of waiting, our busdriver gets back on and says "Ready to go?" and we start driving. He gets a call 15 minutes into that trip and gets told to turn around, since she still hadn't gotten on. Once we get back, there were no Scuba Caribe employees around to let us know what was going on, but someone on the bus found the lady and we got to navigate the potholes covered roads at night. We left at 7:45 a.m. and got back at 7:30 p.m. It was not fun.
The boat for the Catalina dive was packed. The tanks were lined up on the outside of the boat and you had to gear up leaning over the side, since they didn't let you walk on the outside.
The wall dive there was cool. It was a max depth of 82 feet. There was a lot more life there then around Punta Cana. We spend the second half of the dive around 40 feet, and there was just as much going on there. The four divers from our hotel were grouped together with one DM, and everyone (except me) was pretty experienced, so we were able to stretch our dives out, because we didn't run into problems with air at all.
We did the second, shallow dive after a rather short surface interval. They served chicken noodle soup in a plastic cup during the SI, but it did not look appetizing to me, so my uncle got two servings. I think I liked the second dive better. It was in a flat shallow area, but it was a hour dive, and we saw a lot of cool things. We saw some sand flounders or something during our safety stop that were pretty unique. I wish I would have brought my camera for that dive, but I didn't want to take it on the excursion.
The lunch on the island was good food, and after they were done diving, they did a good job of keeping my cup filled with cerveza.
I'd do the Catalina Island trip again, but I'd try to find alternate transportation for the ride there. If they had a major four lane highway there, they trip would have been 30 - 45 minutes, but instead was a good two hours.
Sunscape the Beach had good food, and the Dominicans were all nice people, although some didn't understand quite enough English. Our resort was mostly Americans, but there was a good showing of other nationalities. I had never been to an all-inclusive resort before, so my basis was comparision was a Royal Caribbean cruise I had taken five or six years ago. If we go back, we are planning on staying at the Sunscape hotel in La Romana, so we can be closer to the better diving.
