cduffey
Contributor
My husband and I just returned from a short trip to Harbour Island. I searched this board for information before we left, and found little info on the location,so I thought I'd briefly give my opinion and advice. We stayed at Coral Sands and the beach there is probably one of the most beautiful I've ever seen. The accomodations were a bit pricey, but the room was very nice -- I suppose we were paying for access to the great beach, because the service was definitely not reflected in the room rates. The island itself is just wonderful. The people there are the nicest I've encountered on a vacation anywhere. That may be true all over the Bahamas -- Nassau is the only other Bahamas location I've visited. The island is quaint with little colonial houses (many for rent). We dove with Valentine's. There are only two dive operations on the island, and I learned of the second after I had already committed to diving with Valentines. Their dive boat was big and fast. I would not dive with them again. The diving overall was so-so. Not a lot of fish life. Beautiful reefs and underwater topography. We had one dive where the dive master took us to a reef he had recently discovered and had dove only once. The top of the reef was supposedly at 80' and the bottom at 140'. (Did I mention we had a student diver on board? I am not certain that he did this dive, however). We dropped down the anchor line and when I found myself at 125' I was nowhere close to the reef, much less the bottom. My husband and I started making our way back up, watching the rest of the pack descend far below us. The only life I saw on this dive was a nurse shark in the distance and maybe some jack around. In retrospect, we probably should have refused to pay for the dive, but who wants stress when you're on vacation, and this was our last day of diving. As far as I know, no one was negatively impacted by the depth of this dive. In my opinion, this was reckless behavior on the part of the staff, especially when I am fairly certain he was not familiar with the skill and comfort level of most of the divers on board. The best thing about this dive was that I found out that my husband gets narced at 125'. It was no problem. He was having trouble reading his computer which was functioning normally. He trusted his buddy, didn't panic and we ascended slowly to a more reasonable depth -- I suppose that was worth the price of the dive.
