Hey Dudes! Greetings from Jamaica!
This morning starts day 4 of our Jamaica vacations and I wanted to send an update of this awesome trip. This was not a planned SCUBA trip. This was planned as our annual "totally relax" trip. But we brought our SCUBA kits with us. Even though we are staying at Sandals, Montego Bay we booked two days of diving with Jamaica Divers in Ocho Rios. Mainly because even though the diving is free with Sandals, I have read so much about the dive team having an attitude. I really didn't feel like dealing with attitude. Also Jamaica Divers was highly recommend on Trip Advisor so we thought we would give them a shot. Also, our expectations on SCUBA in Jamaica were extremely low based on everything I had read. I have to say that so far I am blown away!
Christian, the owner of Jamaica Divers picked us up at the resort bright and early Monday morning. The trip to Ocho (and I quote) "Is 1.5 hours normally but only 45 minutes if I drive like a Jamaican….". Well, made it in less than an hour – and in one piece! Our DM was a Jamaican guy named Fruity. He was unbelievable. We did 2 dives. First was a wreck dive of a 100 boat called the Reggie Queen and two airplanes at about 70 fsw. One of the plans was said to have smuggled marijuana in the 70's. We were able to actually do a penetration on this plane. There wasn't a lot to penetrate – but still really cool!
Next we visited a reef that while not as colorful as the ones seen in the Florida Keys, it was really close. There were not a lot of large fish, but the life was extremely diverse.
I know a lot of people here don't like the dive op messing with their equipment. And I'm sure if I had asked, they would have left ours alone. Instead, they changed out our tanks during the SI (we of course inspected them before splashdown). They also took our kits down and rinsed all of of the equipment as well as our exposure suits. They kept telling us that we were there to relax…
We completed the Wreck and Naturalist speciality dives and with our previously earned PPB certification, earned our Adventure Diver certification.
We ended up staying the night in Ocho Rios. As I write this I am looking forward to two more great dives today. Fruity is supposed to pick us up in an hour. One of the dives is a wall dive. He said that what we will see today will be even better than what we saw yesterday. I'll update this thread later.
Here are a couple of dive pics...
Take care!
This morning starts day 4 of our Jamaica vacations and I wanted to send an update of this awesome trip. This was not a planned SCUBA trip. This was planned as our annual "totally relax" trip. But we brought our SCUBA kits with us. Even though we are staying at Sandals, Montego Bay we booked two days of diving with Jamaica Divers in Ocho Rios. Mainly because even though the diving is free with Sandals, I have read so much about the dive team having an attitude. I really didn't feel like dealing with attitude. Also Jamaica Divers was highly recommend on Trip Advisor so we thought we would give them a shot. Also, our expectations on SCUBA in Jamaica were extremely low based on everything I had read. I have to say that so far I am blown away!
Christian, the owner of Jamaica Divers picked us up at the resort bright and early Monday morning. The trip to Ocho (and I quote) "Is 1.5 hours normally but only 45 minutes if I drive like a Jamaican….". Well, made it in less than an hour – and in one piece! Our DM was a Jamaican guy named Fruity. He was unbelievable. We did 2 dives. First was a wreck dive of a 100 boat called the Reggie Queen and two airplanes at about 70 fsw. One of the plans was said to have smuggled marijuana in the 70's. We were able to actually do a penetration on this plane. There wasn't a lot to penetrate – but still really cool!
Next we visited a reef that while not as colorful as the ones seen in the Florida Keys, it was really close. There were not a lot of large fish, but the life was extremely diverse.
I know a lot of people here don't like the dive op messing with their equipment. And I'm sure if I had asked, they would have left ours alone. Instead, they changed out our tanks during the SI (we of course inspected them before splashdown). They also took our kits down and rinsed all of of the equipment as well as our exposure suits. They kept telling us that we were there to relax…
We completed the Wreck and Naturalist speciality dives and with our previously earned PPB certification, earned our Adventure Diver certification.
We ended up staying the night in Ocho Rios. As I write this I am looking forward to two more great dives today. Fruity is supposed to pick us up in an hour. One of the dives is a wall dive. He said that what we will see today will be even better than what we saw yesterday. I'll update this thread later.
Here are a couple of dive pics...
Take care!
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