Review - Sandals Grenada

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Mrs. Stoo and I got hitched here, long before it was Sandals. It was called La Source then. It has just reopened following a hurricane-induced renovation and it was a great place. Grenada is one of the few "destination wedding" countries where the marriage is legal back in Canada (and the US I expect). Many destinations the marriages aren't actually legal and require a civil ceremony when you return.

While we loved the resort, we were less than impressed with the diving. The island itself is very nice. It's lush and a foodie's paradise.

I'm glad the OP enjoyed their trip!
 
For T&C, I will make the following recommendations:

  1. Club Med Turquise was awesome – and significantly cheaper than Beaches and kid free!! Drinks were great and made to order. I admit, I had to re-educate the bartenders on how to make a GREAT margarita, but I also saw every guest ordering it my way after that.
  2. Flamingo Divers for your scuba. They will even pick you up @ the hotel and drop you off. Mickey and Jayne are AWESOME. I had to dive with another operator the final day and it was not good (I’ll leave it at that).
Out of curiosity, why dive with Flamingo vs Seafari at CM? I've dove with the CM folks at both Turkoise and Columbus Isle and have always been very impressed with their operation. The boats are larger, but other than that, I have nothing to complain about.
 
While we loved the resort, we were less than impressed with the diving.

I can imagine that's true for someone in quadrupile digit dives. For a couple where number of dives is half their age, it was great! All about perspective. :p
 
On the off day when Flamingo was sold out, we went w Caicos Adventures. There was a huge fight over who was going to drive us all back and I think the guy that eventually did was drunk. The awesome thing about Flamingo is 8 max on the boat. Now, if I could go back and do it all over again, I would go on the Aggressor. The ride from the dock to the reefs is 45+ minutes each way and it makes for a LONG day –approx. 6 hrs to do 2 dives.
 
I can imagine that's true for someone in quadrupile digit dives. For a couple where number of dives is half their age, it was great! All about perspective. :p
Sandals are fantastic resorts that also offer some diving. They're not the best dive resorts.
 
Mrs. Stoo and I got hitched here, long before it was Sandals. It was called La Source then. It has just reopened following a hurricane-induced renovation and it was a great place. Grenada is one of the few "destination wedding" countries where the marriage is legal back in Canada (and the US I expect). Many destinations the marriages aren't actually legal and require a civil ceremony when you return.

While we loved the resort, we were less than impressed with the diving. The island itself is very nice. It's lush and a foodie's paradise.

I'm glad the OP enjoyed their trip!

I'm surprised to hear your opinion of the diving in Grenada .

I enjoy it. Little critters are huge and plentiful. Aquadives takes us to a myriad of different types of sites.

Of course, my opinion is a bit coloured by the overall beauty of the island.
 
I can imagine that's true for someone in quadrupile digit dives. For a couple where number of dives is half their age, it was great! All about perspective. :p

In fairness, the 10 days that we were there followed a solid week of heavy rain, so the visibility wasn't great. We did a couple of dives on th Bianca C which I loved. (I was damn near late for my nuptials... a little extra deco to do!) It's also possible that since the place had just reopened, it maybe the dive crew wasn't overly experienced with where to take us. I've read lots of good reports, so don't put much weight in my experience.
 
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. :D

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. :oops: 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. :rofl3:

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... :clearmask:
Thank you sooo much for this detailed review because I'm eyeing this exact resort for the experience you outlined. We want to do two tank morning dives followed by afternoons on the beach and be pampered throughout the process

One question your review didn't answer- do they provide a safe spot to store your gear brought from home? One thing I loathe is lugging around wet gear. We BYO BCs, wetsuits, booties, fins and like to store those at the dock. We carry our masks and computers back to the room, and rent the regs, tanks, and weights.
 
One question your review didn't answer- do they provide a safe spot to store your gear brought from home? One thing I loathe is lugging around wet gear. We BYO BCs, wetsuits, booties, fins and like to store those at the dock. We carry our masks and computers back to the room, and rent the regs, tanks, and weights.

You can freely store any/all of your equipment in the dive shop. Where it's a private beach there is zero traffic from outside the resort, so it appeared quite safe and secure. Once we got to know the staff after the first or second day, they offered to rinse/hang the equipment as well. Some days that was with mixed results as it seemed our bags weren't unpacked to e.g. rinse the boots/fins/etc. But the days I took care of it myself (aside from the ribbing of 'you're on vacation...enjoy yourself...we'll do this!') nobody cared if I dropped our stuff in the dunk tanks quickly myself.

Also note that there is no 'rent' either - anything you could need is included in the price of the room.
 
I admit, I had to re-educate the bartenders on how to make a GREAT margarita, but I also saw every guest ordering it my way after that.
I have to ask... what were they doing, and what did you have them do differently?
 
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