Nassau Trip Report

[rje634]

We were in Nassau 3/26 - 4/2. We stayed at the Wyndham Cable Beach Resort, the hotel was average, not the best and certainly not the worst. My only complaint about the hotel would have to be the water in the room smelled a bit. The pool and beach are high points of the resort. The casino (which thankfully ended up giving me money) is on-site and there are several good restaurants. We only ate at the Angus steak restaurant which was excellent. Food in Nassau is very pricey, some of the restaurants we ate at were:
Johnny Canoe's - Very expensive for what you get but close to the hotel and the food was good.
Gaylords - Indian restaurant in downtown Nassau, very good food.
Double Dragon - Average Chinese, good food at average prices.
Bahamian Kitchen - Our venture into a local eatery, good cheap eats..
Churrascria Humidor(sp) - Brazilian grill that was EXCELLENT, be prepared to splurge.
Clay oven - good reasonable priced Indian food.
There were also a couple of other not worth mentioned for good or bad.

THE DIVING:
We dove with Stuart Cove for 3 days of 2 tanks dives and one day we dive the shark feeding dive. First the good, the shark feeding dive was amazing!!! The first dive was on a wall, there were about 15 - 20 sharks swimming around at a distance. The dive was the normal stuff, tangs, grouper, barracuda, and an assortment of smaller fish. the excitement for this dive was one person in our group ran completely out of air 15 minutes into the dive at 70 FSW. The DM had to give up his octo and bring him back to the boat. The Second dive was the feeding dive. Your kneeling in the sand at about 40 FSW in a circle, at this point the sharks know what is coming and they're circling. Once everyone is settled at the bottom the feeder hits the water, once he jumps in the sharks start to head for him. He gets in the middle of the circle and starts to feed them slowly so as not to start a feeding frenzy. The feeding last for about 15 - 20 minutes where there are about 50 to 60 sharks anywhere from 4ft to 10ft swimming all around. The shark get VERY CLOSE, I was actually slapped by a tail a few times. Once the food is gone the sharks lose interest and start to disperse, once it calms down your free to search for shark teeth in the sand. I found one. If you have the nerve I highly recommend this dive, at no point did I feel that I was in danger.
The other dive days I will just say that SC needs to seperate the divers based on their skill levels. I saw some of the the most inexperienced divers being taken on dives that they had no business attempting. It suprises me that there are not many dive related accidents on their dive trips. As for the profile they stick to a standard 30 - 35 minutes, with the first dive being around 70 - 80 FSW and the second anywhere from 10 - 50 FSW. The water temps where between 72 - 73 F.
The shuttle service that SC provides was on time everyday my only comment on that was their bus needs a gear storage section.
If anyones has any questions feel free to ask.

I will post pics soon, check my gallery.

 

[Dragon2115]

Nice photos. My wife and I went there at the beginning of February. Overall it was a blast, but we came away with the same impressions that you did about seperating divers by skill level. Other than that we had a great time with them.

One thing that caught my attention was that out of 16 divers (14 guests, one DM, and one photographer) on our boat only four of us had SMB's and only six had some sort of cutting tool with them. I was surprised to see just how unprepared people were willing to get in the water and was very happy nothing went wrong.

Btw, couldn't agree with you more about the gear storage on the bus.

Did you get to see any of the lionfish that have taken up residence on some of the wrecks?

 

[rje634]

Nice photos. My wife and I went there at the beginning of February. Overall it was a blast, but we came away with the same impressions that you did about seperating divers by skill level. Other than that we had a great time with them.

One thing that caught my attention was that out of 16 divers (14 guests, one DM, and one photographer) on our boat only four of us had SMB's and only six had some sort of cutting tool with them. I was surprised to see just how unprepared people were willing to get in the water and was very happy nothing went wrong.

Btw, couldn't agree with you more about the gear storage on the bus.

Did you get to see any of the lionfish that have taken up residence on some of the wrecks?

Got some great shots of the lionfish but the server crapper out last night while I was trying to upload. Check again, I'll upload some more tonight.

We had the same experience, 12 diver one DM, for the DM it was like hearding cats..
One incident involved a father and his 11 year old daughter who wasn't certified, she went to 60 FSW on a wall and then 20 minutes in she lost bouyancy control and shot from 45 FSW to the surface in about 10 seconds. The Father had NO CLUE WHAT WAS GOING ON. He didn't even know this happen to his daughter.
Then the guy who ran out of air and 70 FSW, I have never seen anyone so reckless with there own personal safety. The problem there was the practice of pairing buddies on the boat, which really ends up being solo diving.
I understand that SC wants to fill up boats but when my $80 dive day gets wasted or limited because SC decided to put AOW certified divers on the same boat with people doing their FIRST DIVE, and yes we had one person that had never dove in the ocean before. BTW that person got lost on the second unsupervised dive and showed up back to the boat a half and hour late.

OK I'm through ranting for now....

 

[DeputyDan]

Not to defend SC - but I would bet most all of these less experienced divers would lie when asked about experience and which group to be put with.

Even newbies have AOW cards when PADI (not bashing here) allows them to go from OW to AOW with no dives in between.

I agree on the lack of preparation by recreational divers everywhere. I bet most all of those folks were using rental gear and that a large majority of those do not own their own gear anyhow.

 

[Ber Rabbit]

When we went we only dove with the newbies on a couple of dives then SC put us with a group of experienced divers and we were doing 120 foot dives with the shallow part of the reef being at 60 feet. Our DM just acted as a guide but we didn't have to go with him as long as we were back to the boat on time. Maybe we just got lucky having a fairly large concentration of experienced divers at the time we were there.

Like Deputy Dan said, anyone can have an AOW card and say they are experienced.
Ber :lilbunny:

 

[rje634]

DeputyDan you make good point and yes people will lie about their experience if they think it will get them a better dive experience. I wish I had an answer for SC because there is no easy way, from their part, to handle this. I would only suggest to them to perhaps TRY to seperate divers based on skill levels. I would happily show my log to be put with a group of divers that had at least some open water dives under their belts. I just think with 4 - 5 boats going out they could do a better job assigning divers to boats based on experience. My other comment is the DM to diver ratio is way to high given the skill of some of the divers. I am a firm proponent that you are ultimately responsible for your own safety. However given what I saw on some of the dives these people are not looking out for themselves and are completely putting there lives in the hands of the DM's.
The dive experience wasn't all bad, but overall it was one of the worst I've had in years.
Ber, I think you did get lucky.

A couple of times the DMs appologized to us for being limited by the other divers in our group. We asked if there was anything they could do concerning our upcoming dive days and their response was "that is all up to the people at the registration desk". Upon asking the people at the desk to put experienced diver together the answer was "we don't do that".
It was just ashame that SC won't cater to experienced diver after they put all the small dive ops out of business.

 

[DeputyDan]

They could have one boat only for folks with over (50 for example) a certain number of dives AND - I repeat and - have their own gear.

It is my experience that these two items are a big factor in assessing experience while still on land.

 

[tangfish]

I went diving off of the Bahamas, staying in Nassau as you did. Also went with Stuart Cove. Pretty good operator. I was just surprised by the state of the reefs there, they were very badly damaged, brown and yucky.

 

[rje634]

They could have one boat only for folks with over (50 for example) a certain number of dives AND - I repeat and - have their own gear.

It is my experience that these two items are a big factor in assessing experience while still on land.

Agreed..

 

[Dragon2115]

The only "bad" dive we had was the very first one, Pumpkin Patch. That part of the reef was like Funkyspelunker said, damaged, brown, and yucky. The rest of our diving was pretty decent. Where my wife and I are buddies we get to avoid the insta-buddy thing so that makes everything a little less stressful.

The whole purpose of our trip was to dive with the sharks so of course we bought the DVD of the dive. How touristy of us, I know. Now, I remember getting run over a few times during different dives while I was taking pictures and yeah, ok, people are rubbernecking so they don't see you occassionally. Ok fine. Well, when we watched the DVD later and were a little surprised by how many people couldn't A.) control their buoyancy, B.) swim without using their hands, and C.) keep their dangly bits :icoeek: from hanging off all over the place.

I agree, most are renting their gear and aren't familiar with it. I can understand that. But to get in the water without even some basic safety stuff like an SMB? I can see what you mean by people putting total faith in the DM and the operator they're diving with. Luckily we didn't have any incidents like some of you other people did.

Regardless of any of that we had a good time. Although Nassau is not high on our list of places to go, never was really, mostly because it's pretty expensive and there's no shore diving. (We got spoiled on Bonaire last summer. Returning again this fall. ) However, if you've never been diving with sharks where they bump right into you I would definitely say do it once just to experience it.