diverdowndh
Contributor
Went down, the weather was great! Stayed at Caribe Blu, dove with their dive shop, Blue Angel. Boy is Cozumel busy this time of year, one day during the week there were 11, count them 11, cruise ships in port. One of the taxi drives estimated 50,000 people in town that evening. This was my second time staying at Caribe Blu and using Blue Angel.
Caribe Blu - a nice, inexpensive place to stay. However, the traffic was LOUD! Our room air conditioner had a problem and kept shutting off - and the traffic would keep you up at night! We had them fix it right away and had some intermittent problems with it. I don't mind letting the ocean breeze and the ocean sounds rock me to sleep but with the traffic you could not sleep unless the very loud AC was on. Rooms are simple but nice, good maid service. Have WiFi in the lobby, I believe it was free (didn't use it). The little restaurant on top of the dive shop was OK, very busy most times so we didn't use it much. If you got there early for the ala carte breakfast you could do well. When coffee ran out you were out of luck <grin>.
Blue Angel Dive Shop - having already dove with them less than a year ago, I was familiar with almost all of them. We were on a LDS trip and it seemed like my GF and I were the only ones tipping, and they were slightly reluctant to go all the way down to the Columbia wall or the other good walls way down. Because our group was 10-14 we used their big, slow boat most days during the week. It took forever to get out there, lots of boats/divers beat us to the sites. On a couple of days we got to use the faster boats, breaking up the group - this got us to dive sites MUCH sooner and subsequently the critters seemed more abundant and not all scared away. I had asked for a 100cu ft tank for my first dives in the morning, and my gf and I wanted EAN32 for all our second dives, the shop was VERY good about having this every day. I used their nitrox checker, it worked without a hitch.
All in all the weather was great, just the island was busy. Coming off a trip to Fiji I was sad to see the lack of color on the corals. It may be our imagination but it seemed like there was a lot of mossy covering on the bottom, coral and anything that wasn't jus sandy bottom. On shore dives, the place was dug up and really worse than uninteresting - it was like a construction site. We only dove right off our dock at Caribe Blu so I'm sure there is better shore diving on the beaches farther down south, but with all the rebuilding from hurricanes it just wasn't worth diving out there around our hotel.
We also took a day to rent a scooter and go to the other side, this is our 7th trip to Cozumel and this is our tradition. We hit the Rasta bar, which was REALLY busy with cruise shippers, most of them really good people but in a hurry. When we go to the islands on a dive trip our goal is to slow down so we sit back and chuckle to ourselves about how big of a hurry the poor cruise shippers are in. We drove north to our favorite place, Coconuts and my GF had a couple of maitai's - I NEVER drink when on my Harley, and do not on a scooter, so I drank many Fanta Orange sodas. Had some dinner, some really rude French people were there, let their small kids throw sand in the air until about 3 tables full of people downwind of them made a scene and then left. Fortunately for us we were not downwind of them! They just didn't seem to care until one guy really got loud about it.
We flew down with Frontier, direct from Denver right into Cozumel - this was a nice flight both directions. Not having used Frontier for quite a while, they seemed to really go out of their way to make sure everything was good on the flight. They were friendly at the ticket counter, the whole flight was as good an experience as an airline flight can be these days!
Hope this helps or is informational!
Caribe Blu - a nice, inexpensive place to stay. However, the traffic was LOUD! Our room air conditioner had a problem and kept shutting off - and the traffic would keep you up at night! We had them fix it right away and had some intermittent problems with it. I don't mind letting the ocean breeze and the ocean sounds rock me to sleep but with the traffic you could not sleep unless the very loud AC was on. Rooms are simple but nice, good maid service. Have WiFi in the lobby, I believe it was free (didn't use it). The little restaurant on top of the dive shop was OK, very busy most times so we didn't use it much. If you got there early for the ala carte breakfast you could do well. When coffee ran out you were out of luck <grin>.
Blue Angel Dive Shop - having already dove with them less than a year ago, I was familiar with almost all of them. We were on a LDS trip and it seemed like my GF and I were the only ones tipping, and they were slightly reluctant to go all the way down to the Columbia wall or the other good walls way down. Because our group was 10-14 we used their big, slow boat most days during the week. It took forever to get out there, lots of boats/divers beat us to the sites. On a couple of days we got to use the faster boats, breaking up the group - this got us to dive sites MUCH sooner and subsequently the critters seemed more abundant and not all scared away. I had asked for a 100cu ft tank for my first dives in the morning, and my gf and I wanted EAN32 for all our second dives, the shop was VERY good about having this every day. I used their nitrox checker, it worked without a hitch.
All in all the weather was great, just the island was busy. Coming off a trip to Fiji I was sad to see the lack of color on the corals. It may be our imagination but it seemed like there was a lot of mossy covering on the bottom, coral and anything that wasn't jus sandy bottom. On shore dives, the place was dug up and really worse than uninteresting - it was like a construction site. We only dove right off our dock at Caribe Blu so I'm sure there is better shore diving on the beaches farther down south, but with all the rebuilding from hurricanes it just wasn't worth diving out there around our hotel.
We also took a day to rent a scooter and go to the other side, this is our 7th trip to Cozumel and this is our tradition. We hit the Rasta bar, which was REALLY busy with cruise shippers, most of them really good people but in a hurry. When we go to the islands on a dive trip our goal is to slow down so we sit back and chuckle to ourselves about how big of a hurry the poor cruise shippers are in. We drove north to our favorite place, Coconuts and my GF had a couple of maitai's - I NEVER drink when on my Harley, and do not on a scooter, so I drank many Fanta Orange sodas. Had some dinner, some really rude French people were there, let their small kids throw sand in the air until about 3 tables full of people downwind of them made a scene and then left. Fortunately for us we were not downwind of them! They just didn't seem to care until one guy really got loud about it.
We flew down with Frontier, direct from Denver right into Cozumel - this was a nice flight both directions. Not having used Frontier for quite a while, they seemed to really go out of their way to make sure everything was good on the flight. They were friendly at the ticket counter, the whole flight was as good an experience as an airline flight can be these days!
Hope this helps or is informational!
