With our new open water certifications in hand, me and my dive buddy took a trip to Isla Mujeres last week. We had searched for dive operators on Isla Mujeres and really couldn't find a consistently good one so since the island is small we visited the dive shops. We did a 2 tank dive with Sea Hawk Adventures and a 2 tank dive with Carey dive center. The trip to Sea Hawk was to Mangiones reef; a shallow 30 foot dive in the National Park. We went with a couple who were literally getting diving instruction on the way to the dive site-we know enough Spanish to have been worried for them. Before the dive, at the shop, we asked about water and a snack during the interval and were told to "bring your own" which they promptly sold to us. The "senior" divemaster, who was attending to the Mexican couple, told us that although they would load our equipment for us, that we needed to be responsible for our own equipment-not a problem as that is how we were trained. Did I mention we had to wait for our dive master as it was explained that since this was a Sunday morning, there had also been a Saturday night. Our divemaster arrived looking hung over. We left the dock and then proceeded to two different locations to secure gas for the boat. Once this was taken care of, we went to the national park and got in the water. Our divemaster sobered up after the first dive, and was actually pretty good once he got in the water. We saw lots of fish on parts of the shallow reef. Being our first salt dive, we were both pretty excited. Back on the boat, the Mexican couple were treated to water and snacks by the older more gruff divemaster-talk about awkward. We switched out our tanks and helped each other ready for the dive as we did before-we also had discussed safety measures and dive plan as we did before. There wasn't much of an official dive plan except for go down and look around. On the second dive, our hungover divemaster was much much better pointing out interesting fish and sites. We swam between reefs in the shallow clear water. I could not recommend this dive operator. I don't know if it was a racial thing or what, but they didn't like the "gringos" and could hear them talking about "Americanos". I understood them enough to say "comprehende". Our second outing was with Carey Dive center. We went about a mile off shore to a place where there were some shallow reefs with arches and caves. Depth about 40 feet. The boat operator and divemaster spoke hardly any English. However, at the shop the senior divemaster had spoken perfect English-these guys loaded our equipment and attached the tanks to our BCs (we brought our own equipment); again, no particular dive plan so we discussed one ourselves as well as safety measures. Our young divemaster was bored-he wanted the dive to start and end. He wanted to surface at 1000 psi but we were both good on air and shook our heads "no" so we stayed down a bit longer. By the way, the boat was an "open" smaller boat with no cover. Our surface interval was maybe 12 minutes. On this dive, there were larger fish and lobster present, but we couldn't get too close to the fish as they were clearly wary of divers-I surmised that because this area was not in the national park that these fish had been hunted. I honestly felt luke warm about Carey dive center. It just seems like the dive shops are pretty hit and miss. We went to another dive shop off of Hidalgo, and the guy at the counter spoke NO English. We couldn't figure out where their upcoming dives were taking place, so we left that shop and decided to hang at the beach.
