Heading to Curacao in a few weeks - few questions

[Diver OnLu]

Hi mbs,

I work for both All West Apartments and Go West Diving.

I've seen a lot of answers to your questions browsing the other comments already, so I'll focus on the gear storage/moving around:

If you plan to do shore dives in the afternoon after your boat dives, and you want to move around to different dive sites doing so, I would recommend you take your five gear with you and store it at All West over night. That gives you the most flexibility. At All West, the dive locker has a gate to the parking lot, so it is very easy to load your car with gear and air tanks. We provide boxes you can use to transport your gear, so as long as you don't carry any specialized gear like huge cameras for example it is not so hard to bring it up and down the stairs at Go West Diving from my point of view. Especially since you will not need to bring or take tanks from there (as long as you dive air, and not Nitrox).

To go shopping for groceries you will have to leave Westpunt if you don't want to confine yourself to the limited selection of the little shop we have in town. All West Apartments have big fridges, so plan for one trip to the supermarket per week, which maybe can be combined with diving more in direction to Willemstad or some sightseeing in town.

I hope this helps, for further information feel free to contact me via email

andreas@allwestcuracao.com

see you soon,
Andreas

 

[mbs]

Hi mbs,

I work for both All West Apartments and Go West Diving.

I've seen a lot of answers to your questions browsing the other comments already, so I'll focus on the gear storage/moving around:

If you plan to do shore dives in the afternoon after your boat dives, and you want to move around to different dive sites doing so, I would recommend you take your five gear with you and store it at All West over night. That gives you the most flexibility. At All West, the dive locker has a gate to the parking lot, so it is very easy to load your car with gear and air tanks. We provide boxes you can use to transport your gear, so as long as you don't carry any specialized gear like huge cameras for example it is not so hard to bring it up and down the stairs at Go West Diving from my point of view. Especially since you will not need to bring or take tanks from there (as long as you dive air, and not Nitrox).

To go shopping for groceries you will have to leave Westpunt if you don't want to confine yourself to the limited selection of the little shop we have in town. All West Apartments have big fridges, so plan for one trip to the supermarket per week, which maybe can be combined with diving more in direction to Willemstad or some sightseeing in town.

I hope this helps, for further information feel free to contact me via email

andreas@allwestcuracao.com

see you soon,
Andreas

Thanks Andreas, looking forward to seeing you soon as well!!! I do have a few other questions so look for incoming email

 

[ml3456]

Thanks Steve. Appreciate the advice.

ML

 

[Diver OnLu]

At least the shop/tank pickup at All West is on top of the hill - not down the stairs. Although Brian at Go West mentioned something about improving tank access at the LKH site last year. The steps are rough enough that when it was still OEWest there was a tank trolley - rusted and hadn't been used in years though when we were there.

Hi Steve,

For divers picking up tanks at GWD to go shore diving at other locations we offer an upstairs tank pick up/drop off for quite a while already. Tanks can be taken and returned anytime during our opening hours, 8am till 5pm. Just notify the shop staff, and we will open the upstairs tank room and help with the tanks.

The lift you mention has been causing us so much pain in the past, breaking down and getting abused all the time, that at a certain point we decided to take it out of service completely.

Anyway, I would say that the situation for divers renting tanks from us is fairly comfortable now, no matter if they want to dive at Alice in Wonderland or other places.

I hope this helps clarifying the status quo,

Andreas

 

[diversteve]

Thanks for the update, I was about to ask you the same question.