Nics
Registered
We had a terrible experience diving with Ankermi on Flores. I want to share this experience to warn other divers.
Ankermi resort has some beautiful well maintained bungalows directly on the seafront. The restaurant is beautiful and serves great food (the best we had on Flores). We were really enjoying the place and were very happy we stayed there. Until we decided to do some diving...
Before diving we spoke to Kermi, the owner of the place. He seemed to be in hurry and a bit annoyed by us wanting to check the equipment. His Swiss wife was not there at the time so we were going to dive with a local dive guide. Kermi told us this guy speaks good English. The next morning the boat came, which was a local fishermen boat with no place to store the equipment properly. We were with 3 divers and our guide. Going in to the water a lot of bubbles came out one of my hoses. The dive guide told me I could dive with it, but I did not want to. There was no extra equipment so I swapped with the guide's equipment, which had no depth meter...
My buddy and I are both PADI Open Water Divers so when at the briefing (which was translated by the other, Indonesian, diver) the guide told us we would go to 30meters we told him we did not feel like going any deeper as 25 meters. That was ok, he said. So without my depth meter I decided to follow the guide. At a certain point my buddy stopped me, we were already at 32 meters and the guide was going deeper!
For the whole dive the guide was not checking on us what so ever. When we reached 50 bar we decided to go up by ourselves, the guide did not even noticed us going up...
At the boat we confronted him with this, but he did not understand what we were talking about. After only half an hour on the boat he told us to gear up again for the second dive. We told him to wait another hour, which he first did not agree to. We refused to gear up after such a short time. For the second dive we decided to check really carefully on each other for air, depth and time and to stay really close to each other. This turned out to be a life saving decision. After about 45 minutes I asked my buddy about his air: it was 70bar. Only one minute later he came to me signing 'out of air'. We started sharing air and decided to go up to do our safety stop. After 3 minutes of safety stop the guide saw us sharing air and pulled us down on our fins. He 'told' my buddy to breath on his own, because his meter still showed 60bar... But is still was not working... So we went up, the guide continued diving. At the surface my buddy could not inflate his BCD, because there was no pressure. We yelled and waved to the boat, the boatmen saw us, but did not come. We had to swim for 10 minutes...
On board I found out there was no first aid kit and no oxygen tank...
After this experience we did not want to do more diving with Happy Dive, because it did not feel save. We were really shocked by what had happened. Back at Ankermi we wanted to tell Kermi about this, but we just saw him for 5 seconds on the jetty and then he was gone...
When we saw him around the resort later that night we tried to tell him in a very calm way what had happened. Immediately he started shouting to us and he got very angry. He called us names and started threatening us and even he said he would do 'crazy things' to us and our family... He even said he would 'destroy' us when we posted a bad review on internet... All night long someone was sneaking around our bungalow, which made us feel really unsafe. The problem is that you can not leave the place easily at night, because there is very little traffic on the road.
The diving here is really beautiful with amazing corals, but don't go with Happy Dive, it is not save.
If you decide to stay at Ankermi, stay out of any discussion with the owner, he seems to be really crazy and dangerous.
Ankermi resort has some beautiful well maintained bungalows directly on the seafront. The restaurant is beautiful and serves great food (the best we had on Flores). We were really enjoying the place and were very happy we stayed there. Until we decided to do some diving...
Before diving we spoke to Kermi, the owner of the place. He seemed to be in hurry and a bit annoyed by us wanting to check the equipment. His Swiss wife was not there at the time so we were going to dive with a local dive guide. Kermi told us this guy speaks good English. The next morning the boat came, which was a local fishermen boat with no place to store the equipment properly. We were with 3 divers and our guide. Going in to the water a lot of bubbles came out one of my hoses. The dive guide told me I could dive with it, but I did not want to. There was no extra equipment so I swapped with the guide's equipment, which had no depth meter...
My buddy and I are both PADI Open Water Divers so when at the briefing (which was translated by the other, Indonesian, diver) the guide told us we would go to 30meters we told him we did not feel like going any deeper as 25 meters. That was ok, he said. So without my depth meter I decided to follow the guide. At a certain point my buddy stopped me, we were already at 32 meters and the guide was going deeper!
For the whole dive the guide was not checking on us what so ever. When we reached 50 bar we decided to go up by ourselves, the guide did not even noticed us going up...
At the boat we confronted him with this, but he did not understand what we were talking about. After only half an hour on the boat he told us to gear up again for the second dive. We told him to wait another hour, which he first did not agree to. We refused to gear up after such a short time. For the second dive we decided to check really carefully on each other for air, depth and time and to stay really close to each other. This turned out to be a life saving decision. After about 45 minutes I asked my buddy about his air: it was 70bar. Only one minute later he came to me signing 'out of air'. We started sharing air and decided to go up to do our safety stop. After 3 minutes of safety stop the guide saw us sharing air and pulled us down on our fins. He 'told' my buddy to breath on his own, because his meter still showed 60bar... But is still was not working... So we went up, the guide continued diving. At the surface my buddy could not inflate his BCD, because there was no pressure. We yelled and waved to the boat, the boatmen saw us, but did not come. We had to swim for 10 minutes...
On board I found out there was no first aid kit and no oxygen tank...
After this experience we did not want to do more diving with Happy Dive, because it did not feel save. We were really shocked by what had happened. Back at Ankermi we wanted to tell Kermi about this, but we just saw him for 5 seconds on the jetty and then he was gone...
When we saw him around the resort later that night we tried to tell him in a very calm way what had happened. Immediately he started shouting to us and he got very angry. He called us names and started threatening us and even he said he would do 'crazy things' to us and our family... He even said he would 'destroy' us when we posted a bad review on internet... All night long someone was sneaking around our bungalow, which made us feel really unsafe. The problem is that you can not leave the place easily at night, because there is very little traffic on the road.
The diving here is really beautiful with amazing corals, but don't go with Happy Dive, it is not save.
If you decide to stay at Ankermi, stay out of any discussion with the owner, he seems to be really crazy and dangerous.