glamourpuss
Contributor
I just thought I'd post a quick review of our day trip to the Great Barrier Reef last weekend.
After much research on who to go with, we ended up choosing Poseidon who leave from Port Douglas. While the trip was ok, the diving was pretty disappointing. For all the hype that the Great Barrier Reef gets, and the exorbitant cost of the day trip I expected a lot more.
Poseidon was fine. The staff were all really nice and the boat, and lunch both decent. My only major complaint is the dive times. While I understand that they have a schedule to keep, all of our dives were less than 45mins (safety stop usually starting at about 36-38mins in). We ended up getting back to port early and had to wait around for an hour for our transfer (booked through Poseidon) to pick us up. I would have much rather spent that extra hour or even just half of it, underwater, or with bit longer surface intervals.
As for the diving... well what can I say. If you're new to diving and don't have much experience I'm sure you'll be perfectly happy, but if you have anything more than just a few dives you could very well be disappointed like us. There was a lot of dead coral, and just not much in general to see. Our dive guide didn't point anything out to us, but as I said there wasn't really much to see.
We had planned on doing a couple of day trips since we're here for a few weeks, but after seeing the reef we've decided to save our money for diving somewhere else. At $300/ person for a 3 dive trip, we just didn't feel like it was worth it.
After much research on who to go with, we ended up choosing Poseidon who leave from Port Douglas. While the trip was ok, the diving was pretty disappointing. For all the hype that the Great Barrier Reef gets, and the exorbitant cost of the day trip I expected a lot more.
Poseidon was fine. The staff were all really nice and the boat, and lunch both decent. My only major complaint is the dive times. While I understand that they have a schedule to keep, all of our dives were less than 45mins (safety stop usually starting at about 36-38mins in). We ended up getting back to port early and had to wait around for an hour for our transfer (booked through Poseidon) to pick us up. I would have much rather spent that extra hour or even just half of it, underwater, or with bit longer surface intervals.
As for the diving... well what can I say. If you're new to diving and don't have much experience I'm sure you'll be perfectly happy, but if you have anything more than just a few dives you could very well be disappointed like us. There was a lot of dead coral, and just not much in general to see. Our dive guide didn't point anything out to us, but as I said there wasn't really much to see.
We had planned on doing a couple of day trips since we're here for a few weeks, but after seeing the reef we've decided to save our money for diving somewhere else. At $300/ person for a 3 dive trip, we just didn't feel like it was worth it.
