Just returned from our trip and wanted to share some details.
Our experience on St. Lucia was
excellent! Chester and his crew were amazing. Despite us being all the way on the north end of the island, he arranged for a driver to pick us up and shuttle us to and from his shop in the south.
I viewed that as a plus because it gave us a chance to see a lot of this new-to-us island. The two gals with us - my wife and our son's girlfriend - didn't enjoy the ride quite as much because the road is very windy, twisty, and narrow. Personally I loved it but their sensitive tummies didn't approve. Nevertheless, they both soldiered on and we arrived in good shape in about an hour.
Let me be right up front about a couple of things. First, your impression of Chester's shop might not be super positive initially. He's RIGHT on the beach (good) but the physical facility has seen better days. Don't let this dissuade you... he locks it up nice and tight while you're away from the shop so your street gear is safe and dry, he has good equipment (including his own tank filling station), and he's 100% on top of everything. We've dived with way worse looking shops but I wanted to say something so folks don't jump to any immediate and inappropriate conclusions.
Second, same comment about Chester's dive boat. It's basically an open hull with abeam seats. No dedicated tank storage spots, no level surfaces. Our crew was... "hesitant" at first, but I told them to keep an open mind. Chester came through again! He works that boat like a master. His captain materialized from nowhere and did a great job. They loaded up our first tanks, proved that getting into the boat was a lot easier than it may have at first appeared, and off we went.
The air was warm, the water calm, and the breeze modest. Both of our dive sites are close to and visible from his shop. The boat time to both was under five minutes; you could surface swim them if you needed to.
We dove Superman Flies first, which is a left (south) turn from his shop. Turned out to be a nice drift dive like all the other writeups describe. But WOW, the color spectrum. Chester said "You've never seen colors like this!" and he was right. The juxtaposition of different brightly colored coral beats anything we've seen elsewhere. There was small fishes and such too, but the highlight here was the coral.
Once we surfaced, we hopped back into the boat (surprisingly easy, even from the open water) and returned to his shop for a surface interval and to grab our second tanks. He got some fish fritters from a nearby vendor as a snack, plus some bottles of water, so we felt very well taken care of.
Once fed, watered, and geared up, we took a right (north) turn this time, went around the first point, stopped, and dropped into Pinnacles. As good as Superman Flies (SF) was, I personally felt Pinnacles was even better. All the same color variety as SF but with much more 3D geography as you swim around and through the namesake pinnacles. There were some coral "things" here I'd never seen before (I'll append photos below) and the vertical walls are just awe-inspiring. Average max depth was ~60 feet but we dropped close to 80 at a couple of points to investigate interesting things.
The highlight of Pinnacles has to be... the lionfish. Chester brought along a spear on this second dive and within a couple of minutes had speared a nice mature lionfish which he kept on the triple-point. Shortly after he found a full sized moral eel (which were overwhelming the most common lifeform on all islands of this particular trip), and he held that lionfish out to the moray.
The eel absolutely
assaulted that lionfish. All the action attracted two more, and suddenly we had a full-on feeding frenzy! The eels used every bit of their flexibility to get advantageous holds on various parts. When they'd tear off a chunk, they'd do this amazing self-knot move that looked hopelessly convoluted yet they always unwound from it. Chester later informed us that they form this knot so they can pull the chunk of fish against it to tear it into smaller pieces.
I've read about efforts to train eels to hunt lionfish. The problem was that they learned to associated divers with a meal - not exactly what we're looking for. I believe this is why Chester left his spear standing in the sand for a while, so the eels would associate the meal with this inanimate object and not the human who was a few feet away on the other end AND who swam away while the spear stayed behind. We circled back to pick it up 5-10 minutes later and the eels had safely dissipated.
With two dives completed, we piled back into the car and this time the driver took the route much more slowly, which solved the queasiness problem for the girls. Our driver gave us a nice running commentary so we learned a lot about the island above the waterline too. One note: Bring cash for the driver (~$180 round trip plus a tip) as they don't have the means to process credit cards. Chester can do cards just fine for his shop's expenses.
Bottom line: I give my highest recommendation to Chester and Action Adventure Divers on St. Lucia. From start to finish he took care of everything. It all went exactly as he described, except that the diving was better than he promised and exceeded all of our expectations. Our crew all agreed that St. Lucia was the most beautiful of the islands we visited on this trip and that's WITH the girls feeling a bit queasy. Great island, great local dive shop, great divemaster, great diving. What's not to love?
