Trip Report: Belize Aggressor IV (April 2017)

[RCB1882]

Belize Aggressor IV (BAIV) has been reviewed by a number of people before myself. The existing “literature” on BAIV is quite thorough, so I recommend reading the reviews of both drrich2 from May 2015 and also Lavalamp from December 2016. For those who also subscribe to Undercurrent, we were on the same cruise as the one that was reviewed by Lynda Dufree.

By way of context, this was my wife and my first liveaboard experience. We started diving “seriously” in December 2015 and have thus far done Kona, Cozumel, Grand Cayman, Roatan, Little Cayman, and, most recently, two blissful weeks in Bonaire. We booked the trip in early 2017 with a $500/person discount promotion.

Boat/Crew

A number of reports sing praise for Captain Eddy. He apparently is from Honduras and will be taking over at the helm for the Roatan Aggressor that will start sailing in early June 2017. (Though I just glanced at the Aggressor-provided logs and saw that Eddy captained the May 6 cruise) We had Lowell O’Rourke as our captain. Dive guide duty was divided among Lowell and Monique, John, and William. Jerry had chef duties and was assisted by Jean. Elia was the steward.

As for the ship, take a look at drrich2’s great review, which provides a wonderful photo tour of the ship. His photos are still accurate as of April 2017, though I think the carpet in the dining room/salon area has been refreshed. Bathrooms are small, but we only ended up using the in-room shower once -- the morning that we left the boat. All of our other showers took place at the stern, which has one very warm shower on each side (along with big jugs of shampoo and conditioner).

One thing that might be helpful to know is the storage situation in your room. There are two bedside stands in each room with a couple of drawers. The beds also have a single floor-level pullout drawer. There is a cutout at the foot end of the bed for stashing a duffle or something like that. There is a cabinet over the bed but this is difficult to access if you’ve got the room configured as a king-sized bed (as opposed to 2x twins). The bottom side of the cabinet (i.e., what you look at if laying in the bed) has an individual light and double socket 110v plug. My socket also had two USB charging ports as well but my wife’s side did not. Finally, there is a single closet in the room as well.

The BAIV website says that each cabin has a TV and DVD player, which wasn’t the case for us (although we didn’t really care). Our room had a wall-mounted LCD and digital media player, from which you could plug in a USB drive or SD flash card to play movies or shows. The unit itself is a Micca Speck G2 (Micca Speck G2 Ultra-Portable Media Player | Micca Electronics). The salon/lounge area has a DVD player and assortment of movies.

The “Know Before You Go” sheet asks that you pack with soft-sided luggage. I wouldn’t worry too much about this. Once you arrive, you are told to pick a place on the dive deck where you’ll keep your gear all week. NB: I recommend picking someplace the middle. The areas closest to the stern are high traffic because that’s where the showers are located. The areas closest to the bow are opposite the camera tables, so that could be a high traffic area depending on the number of photographers on your particular cruise. After you’re done unpacking, you simply leave your luggage outside your room and it disappears into the bowels of the ship and returns at the end of the week when it’s time to pack up (i.e., you’re not responsible for stowing your luggage).

Lavalamp’s review noted nightly power outages. Speaking only for our trip, we didn’t experience anything quite that systematic. The air conditioning conked out on the first night when we were transiting out of Belize City, but other than that (very warm) hiccup, things on the boat appeared to run smoothly.

The daily schedule was as follows:

6 am: Cold breakfast available (buffet)
7 am: Hot breakfast available (cooked to order)
7:50 am: Dive briefing
8:00 am: Dive #1 with sweet snack afterwards
11:00 am: Dive #2 (same site as first)
12:30 pm: Lunch buffet
1:50 pm: Dive briefing
2:00 pm: Dive #3 with savory snack afterwards
4:30 pm: Dive #4 (same site as third)
6:00 pm: Dinner (mixture of plated and buffet style)
7:30 pm: Dive #5 (same site as third) with boozy hot chocolate afterwards

We had a bit of a weird schedule because the tour of the island wasn’t available on the day of our Blue Hole dive, which is when they normally try to schedule it. As a result, one of our “normal” days had a trip to the island slipped in there, which made for a pretty busy day.

Food

Very good in my opinion. Better than CoCoView in Roatan but not quite as good as Little Cayman Beach Resort. I never went hungry -- that's for sure. Menus posted on the Aggressor's website were exactly what we had. My wife is a vegetarian and she was quite happy with the accommodations made for her dietary disability. In terms of booze, the boat brought bottles of Belikin Lager, Lighthouse Lager, and had a couple of kegs of Belikin Lager. Red and white wine were available at dinner each night. Plastic bottles of sodas (Coke products) and cans of both club soda and tonic water were also available.

To be continued...

 

[RCB1882]

...Continued

Diving

The winds were stronger than normal during our week. The ride out from Belize City was a bit of a rollercoaster -- enough so that it was hard to sleep until we made it to our night mooring. No one got sick so far as we know. We only made it over to Turneffe for our last day of diving. The plan was to do two dives there -- a dawn and morning dive -- before headed back to Belize City, but the visibility was bad and so we only did one dive before heading in. The rest of our diving was done mostly on Long Cay.

The visibility seemed lower than we’ve observed elsewhere in the Caribbean, but I suspect we just had a below average draw from the distribution. We found Belize to be decently fishy. On par with what we observed in Bonaire a few months earlier in February. We regularly saw spotted eagle rays, turtles, and both spotted and green morays. One of the most interesting things we saw was on the last dive, where we saw yellow stingrays mating. Also a few juvenile spotted drums here and there. A few people saw a shark or two but we only caught a quick glimpse from a distance.

With two exceptions, there was a single dive guide in the water on our dives. The exceptions were the first dive, which was to help make sure people were good with weights and the like, and the Blue Hole dive -- for obvious reasons. We did our own thing on all but a couple of dives. You are allowed to dive your own tanks with the proviso that if you’re good on gas consumption, try to be among the first to hop into the water. My median time across 21 dives was 68 minutes and we never felt rushed. Water temperature was 81-82 degrees per my Mares Puck Pro, which After the first day, a couple of the guides would spear lionfish while they were diving, which they stuffed back into the reef (i.e., they didn’t proactively try to feed sharks with them).

Our particular week was pretty loose with regards to enforced buddy diving. There were 4 individual travelers. One of them followed the dive guide on all of the dives. The other three were, at times, de facto solo divers in that they were often only within very distant visual contact with any other divers. Of those three, one carried a SpareAir. The rest had no additional gear that we saw. We weren't huge fans of this.

We also weren’t thrilled with some of the reef behavior we saw. A significant number of people carried and used on a regular basis reef pointer sticks. We also observed two other divers grabbed handfuls of the reef to steady themselves to take pictures and on other occasions to simply feel the reef itself.

A few miscellaneous things I thought worth noting:

(*) Highly recommend having spring-backed fins. As others have noted, the BAIV provides “fin-tastic” or “fin-nomenal” service of putting on your fins for you on the swim platform and taking them off before you get back on. Spring-backed fins make life easier on the crew and prevent you from holding up the line of people wanting to get in.

(*) Recommend bringing a roll of masking or gaffer tape that you can use to secure doors and the like if the boat encounters rolling seas. The closet door, for example, closes but there can be a bit of a rattle that pops up at 3 am while you’re trying to sleep.

(*) If you’ve got a windy week, believe the crew when they tell you the hang bar will come back! Don’t swim after it. Just wait for it. And, once you’re on it, we found it to be a heck of a way to spend a few minutes flying through the water like Superman -- even if you’ve already done your safety stop. A school of jacks hung out below the boat waiting for food leftovers and we saw some big tarpon there, too.

(*) We are highly risk averse, so we flew into Belize City a day early and stayed at the Radisson Fort George. None of the touristy excursions really appealed to us (cave tubing, zip lining, or seeing the ruins), so we just loafed by the pool at the hotel, which was fine. As of April 2017, the BAIV is departing out of the cruise ship area, so folks were able to do shore excursions on the Friday after we returned to port. We stayed on the ship but others hung out at the hotel, which is a few minutes walk away.

Summary

Despite what we believe were subpar diving conditions, we still had a terrific time. Diving doesn’t getting any easier than this. Across just under 5.5 days of diving, I spent 23 hours underwater and loved just about every minute of it. We’re looking forward to giving other liveaboard destinations a try, though BAIV has set a high bar for us (and we could definitely see ourselves coming back to Belize on BAIV for another trip).

Cheers.

 

[drrich2]

Glad you had a good time. Sounds like they didn't do a shark feed dive. When I went, a guide spear fished lion fish one dive, then on a later dive they were used in a perforated 5 gallon bucket to draw sharks, and it was on a later dive they were distributed here & yonder by a different guide.

Richard.

 

[Damselfish]

The “Know Before You Go” sheet asks that you pack with soft-sided luggage. I wouldn’t worry too much about this.

I wouldn't worry about getting special soft-sided luggage for many liveaboards if you already have something else to use and know what you have will be ok on a given boat. But if you plan to do more liveaboards and are buying luggage, soft is still a good idea. It's true you don't have to stow it in your cabin on many boats and they will probably have the space to stash all the bags. But they are still going to encourage soft luggage, because if _everyone_ showed up with hard luggage they might actually have a problem storing it all, and it's sometimes just harder to deal with on a boat. (Doors can be narrow, and the places they tend to stuff things are not always rectangular like luggage.) And, there will be some liveaboards where you may need to store it in your cabin, or simply want to because it can be more convenient. We've been on some where there's plenty of room to roll our duffels under the bed, and can keep stuff in there we don't need much but might want sometimes during the week.

 

[BDSC]

Thanks for the report. We are headed there in May of 2018!

 

[Scoooter961]

Thanks for the report. We are headed there in May of 2018!

@BDSC
Which date in May are going on? May 5-12 or 12-19? We haven't decided which one yet...

 

[BDSC]

We are going May 26th - June 2nd but I chartered the entire boat and I think I may have sold the last spot today actually. The boat gets excellent reviews! Would love to have had you guys join us if I still had spots.

 

[Scoooter961]

Awesome have fun! I guess why that date is gone LOL

 

[RCB1882]

Quick follow up to my initial review. Earlier this week I received the following email from Larry Speaker, VP of Operations at Aggressor:

"We are writing you today to follow upon reports received from the Captain where he informed us that your cruise experience was negatively impacted due to the diesel fuel odors on board through out the week.

Prior to your boarding a fuel spill occurred in the bilge (nothing went into the sea). The crew on board worked diligently alongside local outside service personnel to clean up the spill and dispose of it properly. This also caused boarding to be delayed from the published times.

We know how important holiday travels are for our guests and as such, would like to work with you to ensure that you have the opportunity to enjoy the full LiveAboard Lifestyle experience Aggressor Fleet is known for. Because we did not live up to your expectations or our own, the owners of the Belize Aggressor IV have authorized us to issue you US $250 voucher as an incentive and compensation for this voyage. This voucher may be used for any destination in the Aggressor Fleet on a future voyage AND may be combined with a special or money saving incentive that available at the time you make your next reservation.

We know that you have choices in planning your dive vacations and we are happy that you chose the AggressorFleet for this experience. Please feel free to contact me should you wish to discuss this matter further. "​

Travel has to be completed on the voucher within a year from the date of issue -- so early June 2018. For what it's worth, we didn't notice that boarding was delayed by a perceptible amount. As for the smell, I thought the boat smelled like a boat. I certainly wouldn't have wanted to be in the one cabin on the engine room deck, where I suspect the odor was much stronger (and hopefully people in that cabin were compensated at a much higher rate).

 

[drrich2]

AND may be combined with a special or money saving incentive that available at the time you make your next reservation.

That piece is very important; you can knock that off the price during one of their sales. I wish you didn't have to book a new trip within a year, but it still shows some good faith.

Richard.