Nekton boats after hurricane Michael

[diverdoug1]

I think the Nekton did quite well for many years after losing the dive deck early in her history. The safety chains were not engaged and during a deep water crossing when relocating between Belize and Florida, things got nautical. the lift cables wore and broke. I really feel this had absolutely nothing to do with the demise of the company. They won a number of dive industry awards after this incident, which occurred nearly 10 years before their closure. I was also sorry to see the company die, but it was like losing a loved one to dementia. They were gone a long time before they were officially dead.

 

[Shasta_man]

I did the Rorqual to St Croix a while before the demise. A decent trip and crew.

After diving in the Pacific already, diving was pretty meh on the Southside for terrain and quantity of sealife except the pier which was nice because there were various critters like octopus and lobsters living amongst the debris and you could dive almost for hours because it was shallow. We got to the North side for one day and it was much much better in terms of terrain and sealife. We saw a hammerhead there. However, they took us back to the Southside after diving the day because of fear it would be too rough for the customers.

My experience with Swath was that it was pretty good when stopped but worse when underway which isn't surprising given we're driving a building shaped object on water. Some cons were we woke up one morning to the worst smell imagineable due to the sewage backing up in the toilet. Not on the floor but it was bad enough. Moved us to another room at the bow after that. Could catch some random whiffs on the dive deck after that. Crew took care of us but perhaps things were already rolling downhill as they had a lot of interest in doing their own dives and the "get the customers out of the dining area so crew can eat" method of dining wasn't too cool after a few days.

Also recall some numbskull guest harassing an octopus by prodding it with a snorkel (so that's what those things are for). It's notable because that scene made it on the dive video they sold us which almost exclusively had one of the two groups of divers on it because the video guy always dove with them.