Now decompressing from a week and change at the Sandals resort in Grenada, I thought it might prove useful to someone to give a quick review of the resort and, for purposes here, the dive operations and experience.
A few words as a foreward. This review is coming from an inexperienced diver perspective (newly minted AOW with 30 dives). Other locations I am comparing and contrasting against in my head are West Palm Beach, FL, Bermuda, and St. Marteen.
On the resort, it was spectacular. My wife and I were celebrating our 25th anniversary and everything about the resort did that event justice. The accomodations were truly 5-star, the staff were almost without exception remarkably friendly and inviting, and the food was outstanding. Despite being at near full occupancy, we never felt the slightest bit crowded. There were two pools, one quiet one near the ocean (as in 100m from it) and another further inland that was more of a party with music playing and a swim-up bar. The resort is literally 3 minutes from the airport, however, given there are only 5 gates and maybe 5 or 6 flights in or out every day, we rarely even noticed the sound of planes overhead let alone have it something that was distracting. All in all, far exceeded my expectations to the point where we've now booked our upcoming family vacation at the Negril site this coming May rather than our original plans for a self-planned Aruba holiday.
Now, onto the more important info...the diving.
The staff were the best I've encountered in all my (limited) time diving. Their operations are professional, extremely driven by safety, but still friendly and courteous. We did our AOW training on-site, and our instructor Adrian Steele was exceptional. All equipment is included in the price of the vacation, however, I can't comment directly as we brought all of our own. It did look to be in good condition and there were no complaints by anyone we dove with across the week. Their filling operation did seem a bit antiquated perhaps, with several lines going from a split with a single pressure gauge rather than a true filling bank as I've seen before. However, normal process was to check both tank pressures before the boat left so there was never a problem with under/overfills that couldn't be rectified in minutes.
The one downside that many here may see is how they handle each dive. Dives are done in small groups with a DM guide leading the group. The dive is based on the first to reach 800-1000 PSI in the group (regardless of how the rest are faring on their air) or based on target time of 40-45 minutes. Given that I'm a new diver and an air hog, it didn't impact us that much as I was always the one to turn the dive. Of course I felt bad, but everyone was happy to be up to the boat first and get the dibs on the snacks (cookies, pastries, fruit, ect. from resort...MUCH better than the normal chips and rice crispy treats I've seen elsewhere). Also, they limit people to two dives per day. It does seem like the DMs/Instructors can adjust that to add a PM or night dive as well, but we were more than content with just the two in the morning, then beach/pool in the afternoon.
As for the sites, the reefs were vibrant and the wrecks sweet as well. The two capstone dives for us was a rippin' dive at Shark Reef on the Atlantic side of the island in a 3kt current, and a dive of the MV Shakem which bottomed out at ~105'. There was the normal variety of reef fish everywhere, along with two ray sightings, several nurse sharks, stonefishes, lizardfishes, and a turtle that buzzed us on the first mentioned dive above.
Pictures can be seen
here. This was our first use of the new camera/strobe, so you'll see a wide variety of quality - sorry for that.
Getting the strobe power dialed in was harder than I expected, especially when I turn the dial the exact opposite way for a whole dive before figuring out why everything was washed out. Also early on we didn't understand the strobe wasn't firing in Auto mode. But hey...we're learning the whole UW photography thing, so I'm quite pleased with most of the latter photos. Any exceptional pics were taken by me, the rest by the Mrs.
Feel free to reply with any questions/etc. or PM with them and I'll be happy answer.
Now to start the countdown for Negril....114 days...
