Scuba anyone?
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Getting old has some challenges....
At least, I may be able to see a few more macro critters on the next trip.....
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I posted this on Scubaboard on June 11, but I figured tha might be useful here too:
Roatan Anthony's Key Resort (AKR) trip report
My son and I just spent a week diving in Roatan at AKR. I'm a long term diver; he got certified at AKR (he did the online portion beforehand). Here are my notes in no particular order (typing that in the Roatan airport):
- When you book, consider the diving schedule before you decide on your arrival day. Night dives are Tue and Thu. Shark dives are only Thu & Fri. We landed & departed on a Thu so we missed one of 2 night dives and all the shark dives.
- They organize & staff their boats by week; they moved me from one boat to another after the week end.
- We landed Thu Jun 4th. The resort was definitely not full then. On Sat, they had a very large influx of guests (I heard 90 people) and that changed the feel of the place a bit: more crowded dives / better post dive ambiance.
- As a whole, we found AKR a very well run operation. The staff is generally very helpful and friendly. The PADI instructor my son had (Kelvin or Calvin) was great. He taught him 1 on 1 and he was very thorough and personnable.
- The dive boats are also well run, but the dive groups can get big (11 diver guests in my case most days). The dive sites are dove by all the ops around. They seem to coordinate to some extent but it's not rare to pass another group by the end of the dive. The divers I was with were all reasonnably or very experienced and there was no major issue with any of them.
- I dove nitrox on a DIN reg and had no problem whatsoever. On the morning of the dive (or the night before if you're smart as the mornings get crowded), you go to the tank room by the dive shop, chose your tanks, test them, remove the insert if you dive DIN, label the tank with your locker number & boat name, and position the tank in the area reserved for your boat. The staf will bring the tanks to the boats. Once I got a tank with only 100 bars, so make sure to check the pressure when you test the tanks. This is even simpler if you dive air on yoke I guess.
- The food is ... adequate. The breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus never changed for the included options (they do have "catch of the day", which changes). The main courses were, at best, fine. Starter soups were always good, starter salads were always v. mediocre. Desserts were over sweet IMHO. To be specific, the food quality was below what you'd expect at a family restaurant in a large coastal city in the US. This said, when we were there, they had mangoes available at the entrance of the restaurant so we shared 2 mangoes each day (in addition to the breakfast fruit plate). That was great.
- If you're doing certification, make sure you communicate jointly with the PADI shop (instructors@anthonyskey.com) and the dive shop (diving@anthonyskey.com) before arriving. In our case we had some miscommunication (on their side) that would have been prevented had I realized those 2 are not exactly the same entities. (Those miscommunication were resolved satisfactorily a cple days before we left the US.)
- Have $15 or $30 ready when you land and again when you get ready to depart. The crew dealing with the airport is 3 people: driver, airport bagage handler / greeter, and bagage handler at AKR. It's awkward to tip one and not the others. I found myself with no easy cash to access when we landed and only 2 x $10 when we left...
- All boats have camera rinsing tanks. Most but not all have a dedicated camera table.
- All boats offer sun protection but it might not cover the entire boat. I'm sun-paranoid so I had several SPF50 sun hoodies that I wore when not in my wetsuit. Next time I'll try to find a similar option for my legs - maybe a pareo if that exists.
- I (male, 55) dove a 3mm Bare wetsuit with a 1mm hood and I was perfectly comfy. My son (19) dove once with his 3mm wetsuit then chose to dive with swim shorts and rashguard only.
- We had excellent weather the vast majority of the time, and some breeze 24/7, so we never saw a mosquito and never used the insect repellent.
- We had a bungalow right by the water (most seem to be). It was great: plenty of windows, good AC, a lovely patio with 2 hammocs over the water, large bathroom, etc.
- Even with the heat & wind, things do not dry well and I wish I had brought more than a single swimsuit, and more than 3 sun hoodies. I definitely had room in my bag (but given that my wetsuit had not dried completely by the time we packed my suitcase was slightly overweight at the airport and I had to do some suitcase rebalancing there).
- During our stay nobody asked for or hinted at tips. I had brought $300 in cash. I gave 1/4 each to the boat captain and dive lead, $20 to the baggage handlers (that all I had with me by then - see my point above) and the rest in an envelop to "AKR staff". They have a safe with a mail slot where you can leave your envelop.
My previous, most recent comparable experience was at El Galeon in Puerto Galera 2 years ago. El Galeon had much better diving, significantly worse rooms, smaller but often uncovered boats. Dive ops were of similar caliber I think. AKR has a lot more to offer to non divers. Needless to say, it's much easier to travel to Roatan than to Puerto Galera coming from the US.
