Montserrat Diving??

[sail_and_dive]

Has anyone been diving in Montserrat? Would appreciate information about the island itself (safety?) and details about diving - is there a better time of year to visit, is there a lot of current, is there shore and boat diving, etc.

 

[Rhone Man]

I have never dived Montserrat, but I have dived a lot of the islands around Montserrat so I feel vaguely qualified to give an opinion.

Caribbean diving tends to be warm water, good viz, low currents. Marine life varies, but as a rule of thumb, the poorer the country the fewer the fish (because more people eat fish on a subsistance basis: Cayman, BVI - lots of fish; St Lucia, DR, Jamaica - bugger all fish).

Montserrat is not known as a dive location, but I wouldn't read too much into that. It is not an easy place to get to, and the active volcano means it is pretty hard to promote as a tourist destination. Plus there are a lot of places offering excellent Caribbean diving that are not very well know outside of the Caribbean (Martinique has fantastic wreck diving, but nobody really knows. St Vincent has excellent reef diving, but you never hear about it). There are certainly commercial dive ops in Montserrat.

Hope that helps. I was going to take my son there on holiday a couple of years ago, but I gave up because, frankly, it is a bit of a pig to get to. You have to connect via Antigua, which itself is a pain.

If you do go, be sure to post a trip report.

 

[jaybombs25]

I made two dive trips to Montserrat in 2009. It is a bit of a hassle to get to since only tiny 19 seater aircraft fly into the island. However, the diving was very good by Eastern Caribbean diving standards. Lots of bigger fish, lobster, rays snake eels etc.

 

[silvernotch]

I just travelled to Montserrat in June and dove with Green Monkey Dive Shop. I would highly recommend Troy but I would send him an email to see if he's still on island. When we visited in June there were some changes going on where his shop is located and he was contemplating moving off island. We did boat dives the whole time and there wasn't much current. I'm not sure if there's any shore diving to be done as much of the island is up on cliffs and if you wanted to try off of one of the beaches you'd have to travel all the way to little bay to get tanks and then travel 15-20 mins back to the beach to dive. But the diving was beautiful. Absolutely everything is pristine since there's hardly any tourist traffic. Lots of turtles, rays, eels, etc. How many people are you travelling with? if you're going with a group of 6 Troy will take you to Redonda which supposed to be incredible but there were only 8 tourists on the whole island that week and we were the only divers.

The island itself is VERY beautiful and I would definitely do a boat trip with Troy to Plymouth to see the volcano destruction. But like Jaybombs said it is a PITA to get on island if you want to travel by plane (but it was definitely an adventure we will never forget ). We had to fly into Antigua then puddle jump over to M'rat on a 10-seater plane. I would look into the ferry but since we were travelling on a Sunday it wasn't running that day.

feel free to ask me any questions. There's a lot to talk about with Montserrat and I don't know where to start haha.

 

[sail_and_dive]

Did you do two or three dives per day? When you were not diving, what did you do? Were there plenty of hiking trails? Other than visit modern Pompeii, what else can you do on land?

 

[silvernotch]

Did you do two or three dives per day? When you were not diving, what did you do? Were there plenty of hiking trails? Other than visit modern Pompeii, what else can you do on land?

I only did 2 days of diving and did 2 dives a day. I wish we had did more. There are plenty of hiking trails around and there's a guy on island that is great for giving tours through the trails. I'll have to see if I can find his name, if not someone on island can tell you.

When we weren't diving we spent most of our time on Woodlands Beach. We had it all day everyday all to ourselves. We would pack lunches and hang out and go snorkeling. There's even showers there. We also hung out by the pool back where we stayed. You can also spend some time at the MVO but there's not a whole lot there. It's def cool to visit though. The tour with Troy to see Plymouth is a must and that was about 3 hours long I'd say. It's absolutely incredible.

Montserrat is definitely an island that you go to to relax. There's not really any shopping, only local joints for food (they are good though), and the nightlife is mostly hanging out at the rum shacks. We spent most of our time just lounging and hanging out with each other which is something we don't always get to do a lot of at home. I highly recommend it but just know it's different than your typical tourist destination. Hell most of the islanders asked us if we were British because hardly any Americans visit