BettyfromToronto
Contributor
I want to start by thanking everyone here for your feedback on SCC. We loved it so much we just booked today to return in April. 
We stayed a week at SCC going with the 2nd diver half price January package at SCC. Using Air Canada points for our flights the whole package was less than $2000 for the two of us. What a deal!
Our four hour direct flight arrived on Saturday night and thanks to the tips from everyone here; it was easy to find the ticket booth to purchase two $10 vouchers for the van ride to SCC. We had to wait about 10 minutes until the van filled up and then we were off. We arrived at SCC just before 9pm and I went to register while hubby went to the restaurant to tell them we would like dinner. We virtually got the last two meals.
After dinner we went to look for our room (#71) which was great. It was located on the same corridor as the dive shop facing the ocean and had the king size bed we requested. It also had two small couches/single beds that we used to hold our bags. The only negative was that there are stairs up to the bathroom and I tripped the first night at 2am doing a bathroom break in the dark.
Diving
We decided to not rush on Sunday morning to catch the 8:30am boats and instead waited until they had left to register at the dive shop. We had planned to do a morning dive and then I was going to take the Peak Performance Buoyancy course in the afternoon; but the instructor Jose suggested we do the course in the morning. This was good because it seems I didn’t need too much instruction and then we got an escorted tour of the SCC shore dive. After lunch we did our own dive which was fun.
Monday & Tuesday we were on the Reef Diver in a group of seven. Two guys from Calgary and a family of three from New York. Our DM was Nestor. There was also a group of four on the boat. Great boat with lots of room. The family of 3 (Mom, Dad & 19 yr old daughter) were new divers with only 14 dives under their belt. They seemed more interested in taking pictures of each other than improving their dive skills and we spent a lot of time avoiding them. Maybe if they had dove as a 3-man buddy team then I would only have to look at one place to keep out of their way. But for the most part they dove separately so I had to keep looking all over the place to avoid them as they were up and down like an elevator and we got bumped many times. My hubby’s biggest complaint was that they would go into the swim-throughs first and then stop to take pictures. We were then left behind fighting the currents awaiting our turn. On one dive we couldn’t get back to the opening and had to go up and over the reef. After 2 days of this we were told we should have asked to be moved to another boat but we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feeling. (After 4 days of the same I now know better). The SI was cold on these two days but thanks again to a tip from here I had bought a beanie & brought a sweater to keep warm. The other thing I like about SCC is that you get to dive your profile. When someone ran out of air; that buddy team went up with the DM’s safety sausage.
On Wednesday and Thursday the weather was warm and sunny and we were moved to a bigger boat called the Reef Star. Our group of seven plus a new person was on one side of the boat and a new group of eight was on the other side. Diving was fine and not the “cattle boat” I thought it might be. It was nice to go up top and catch some sun during our SI and the ride back home. The diving was good and we saw lots but still had to avoid the family of 3.
On our fifth and last day of boat diving; the family decided to not dive and rented a car to tour the island. I was so excited until I found out we had a new DM – Francisco and were moved to a small boat called the Coral Diver. We were now eight divers together with one DM. The trip out to the dive site was an hour long but not as bad as I thought. The first dive on Palancar Gardens was fabulous. The best of the week. Gentle current and for the first time I was able to relax as I wasn’t looking all over for someone to hit me. However the weather had started to rain and waiting on the small boat for the other divers was brutal. I was on the edge trying not to toss my cookies. Once we were underway to our second dive I was okay. Second dive was Punta Tunich which we did not enjoy as the current was fast. Probably because we were told to hold at 50’ when the bottom was supposedly 90’.
We wanted to do a Twilight/Night dive but couldn’t get any one else to sign-up. We finally switched to just a Night dive and Tim gave the OK for us to go out Tuesday night with only 5 of the required 6 divers. We were on the Coral Diver but it was fine for just one dive. The dive was at Paradise Reef and the current was fast. Thank goodness we didn’t bring the camera. We saw eight octopus and about six crabs with one being the biggest at almost three foot wide. We loved this so much we came back and tried to do another Night dive but again didn’t get enough divers until Friday when we had four and thought they might take us out but the weather was rainy on Friday so we decided to scrap that last dive and put out our equipment to dry for the flight home at 9pm Saturday night.
My hubby’s regulator had a bad leak but this was caught on the boat before it left so he ran up to the dive shop to rent some regs for this day. When we got back and the dive shop said they couldn’t fix it without a “kit” we took a taxi to the shop in town they recommended. It is called Cozumel Scuba Repair and is owned by Larry Cleghorn. He started to work on it and then handed it over to Javier; his technician once he arrived. The problem was our dive shop back home had put in the wrong size o-ring. They fixed this in about 5-10 minutes and there was NO CHARGE. Amazing. Such great guys. This shop actually makes their own equipment and Larry gave us the grand tour of his stuff. Our equipment is only 2 years old but we will want new stuff in 2014 before we move and retire in Hong Kong. We plan on going back to SCC in January 2014 and will probably buy all new equipment. Our equipment is Oceanic and pretty good but the dive shop here sold us cold water equipment when we only plan to dive down south. The weight of our equipment puts our dive bags at about 43 lbs dry. (Air Canada limit is one bag at 50 lbs)
Overall we really enjoyed the diving in Cozumel and as I mentioned above we have cancelled our May trip to Jamaica to come back to SCC in April.
Dining
We were at Fantasy Island in Feb 2011 and the food was pretty bad. Because of this my hubby thought we would get the same at SCC. Boy were we ever pleasantly surprised at how good the food was! The breakfast buffet got a bit boring after awhile but they did manage to change up some of the Mexican items. I thought it was weird that at breakfast you had to tell them if you were taking the Mexican special for lunch or ordering off the menu plus what you wanted for dinner but this worked out quite well. Lunch and dinner are sit-down service and the guys were amazing. They remembered our name & room number and that we don’t drink and only wanted the occasional coke. We were quite adventurous and tried most of the Mexican food and it was delicious. Even the filet mignon one night was so tender.
Other
Once we decided not to dive on Friday night we spent the afternoon in town. I love that the walk there was only about 15 minutes. We checked out some of the shops. Some days there were six big cruise ships in town but this was later around 4pm so the crowds were smaller. We bought a few souvenirs and visited several restaurants trying to find a place to have a lobster dinner on Saturday night before our flight as this meal was not included since we had taken dinner on our arrival. We finally decided on La Lobsteria located at 5a Av. Sur Esq. con 7. Fabulous place away from the cruise ship people near the town square. Lobster tails are huge (500 – 900 grams) and cost 1 peso per gram and comes with rice & veggies. Really nice and the owner Omar was wonderful.
Saturday we took a three hour tour of the island for $50 with a taxi driver we had met earlier and arranged to drive us to the airport for $14. He had a car that could handle our 4 bags. His name is Ruben Angel (taxi #395) and I can give you his cell number if you send me a PM. It poured all day so it we didn’t get out of the car when we wanted to. Ruben then took us to our restaurant at 5pm and then came back to get us at 6pm. He took us back to SCC where we said good-bye to everyone and were off the airport. We arrived at 7pm for our 9:05pm flight and we were pretty much at the back of the line. (Only flight at this time of night). It took just over an hour to get checked in because luggage tags and boarding passes were done by hand.
Summary
As I mentioned above; after crunching the numbers we decided to change our Jamaica flight in May to Cozumel in April. (Air Canada doesn’t fly to Cozumel after April and we don’t want to do the “bag drag” from Cancun after reading everyone’s comments here.) The cost is about $350 more to come to SCC because of the $400 penalty for changing our flights. Even though Couples Negril has better room, food and service; plus it is AI so all our fancy non-alcoholic drinks are free and there is no tipping…the diving (even though free) cannot compare to Cozumel. So we are back to SCC in April. We cannot wait and maybe this time I will see a spotted eagle ray.
Thanks again everyone for your help on making this a fabulous trip!
P.S. Will try to add photos later
Forgot to mention all the wonderful people we met: Sally, neighbours Christi & Chip, Christa, Derek, Tim, Mike and Joe.
We stayed a week at SCC going with the 2nd diver half price January package at SCC. Using Air Canada points for our flights the whole package was less than $2000 for the two of us. What a deal!
Our four hour direct flight arrived on Saturday night and thanks to the tips from everyone here; it was easy to find the ticket booth to purchase two $10 vouchers for the van ride to SCC. We had to wait about 10 minutes until the van filled up and then we were off. We arrived at SCC just before 9pm and I went to register while hubby went to the restaurant to tell them we would like dinner. We virtually got the last two meals.
After dinner we went to look for our room (#71) which was great. It was located on the same corridor as the dive shop facing the ocean and had the king size bed we requested. It also had two small couches/single beds that we used to hold our bags. The only negative was that there are stairs up to the bathroom and I tripped the first night at 2am doing a bathroom break in the dark.
Diving
We decided to not rush on Sunday morning to catch the 8:30am boats and instead waited until they had left to register at the dive shop. We had planned to do a morning dive and then I was going to take the Peak Performance Buoyancy course in the afternoon; but the instructor Jose suggested we do the course in the morning. This was good because it seems I didn’t need too much instruction and then we got an escorted tour of the SCC shore dive. After lunch we did our own dive which was fun.
Monday & Tuesday we were on the Reef Diver in a group of seven. Two guys from Calgary and a family of three from New York. Our DM was Nestor. There was also a group of four on the boat. Great boat with lots of room. The family of 3 (Mom, Dad & 19 yr old daughter) were new divers with only 14 dives under their belt. They seemed more interested in taking pictures of each other than improving their dive skills and we spent a lot of time avoiding them. Maybe if they had dove as a 3-man buddy team then I would only have to look at one place to keep out of their way. But for the most part they dove separately so I had to keep looking all over the place to avoid them as they were up and down like an elevator and we got bumped many times. My hubby’s biggest complaint was that they would go into the swim-throughs first and then stop to take pictures. We were then left behind fighting the currents awaiting our turn. On one dive we couldn’t get back to the opening and had to go up and over the reef. After 2 days of this we were told we should have asked to be moved to another boat but we didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feeling. (After 4 days of the same I now know better). The SI was cold on these two days but thanks again to a tip from here I had bought a beanie & brought a sweater to keep warm. The other thing I like about SCC is that you get to dive your profile. When someone ran out of air; that buddy team went up with the DM’s safety sausage.
On Wednesday and Thursday the weather was warm and sunny and we were moved to a bigger boat called the Reef Star. Our group of seven plus a new person was on one side of the boat and a new group of eight was on the other side. Diving was fine and not the “cattle boat” I thought it might be. It was nice to go up top and catch some sun during our SI and the ride back home. The diving was good and we saw lots but still had to avoid the family of 3.
On our fifth and last day of boat diving; the family decided to not dive and rented a car to tour the island. I was so excited until I found out we had a new DM – Francisco and were moved to a small boat called the Coral Diver. We were now eight divers together with one DM. The trip out to the dive site was an hour long but not as bad as I thought. The first dive on Palancar Gardens was fabulous. The best of the week. Gentle current and for the first time I was able to relax as I wasn’t looking all over for someone to hit me. However the weather had started to rain and waiting on the small boat for the other divers was brutal. I was on the edge trying not to toss my cookies. Once we were underway to our second dive I was okay. Second dive was Punta Tunich which we did not enjoy as the current was fast. Probably because we were told to hold at 50’ when the bottom was supposedly 90’.
We wanted to do a Twilight/Night dive but couldn’t get any one else to sign-up. We finally switched to just a Night dive and Tim gave the OK for us to go out Tuesday night with only 5 of the required 6 divers. We were on the Coral Diver but it was fine for just one dive. The dive was at Paradise Reef and the current was fast. Thank goodness we didn’t bring the camera. We saw eight octopus and about six crabs with one being the biggest at almost three foot wide. We loved this so much we came back and tried to do another Night dive but again didn’t get enough divers until Friday when we had four and thought they might take us out but the weather was rainy on Friday so we decided to scrap that last dive and put out our equipment to dry for the flight home at 9pm Saturday night.
My hubby’s regulator had a bad leak but this was caught on the boat before it left so he ran up to the dive shop to rent some regs for this day. When we got back and the dive shop said they couldn’t fix it without a “kit” we took a taxi to the shop in town they recommended. It is called Cozumel Scuba Repair and is owned by Larry Cleghorn. He started to work on it and then handed it over to Javier; his technician once he arrived. The problem was our dive shop back home had put in the wrong size o-ring. They fixed this in about 5-10 minutes and there was NO CHARGE. Amazing. Such great guys. This shop actually makes their own equipment and Larry gave us the grand tour of his stuff. Our equipment is only 2 years old but we will want new stuff in 2014 before we move and retire in Hong Kong. We plan on going back to SCC in January 2014 and will probably buy all new equipment. Our equipment is Oceanic and pretty good but the dive shop here sold us cold water equipment when we only plan to dive down south. The weight of our equipment puts our dive bags at about 43 lbs dry. (Air Canada limit is one bag at 50 lbs)
Overall we really enjoyed the diving in Cozumel and as I mentioned above we have cancelled our May trip to Jamaica to come back to SCC in April.
Dining
We were at Fantasy Island in Feb 2011 and the food was pretty bad. Because of this my hubby thought we would get the same at SCC. Boy were we ever pleasantly surprised at how good the food was! The breakfast buffet got a bit boring after awhile but they did manage to change up some of the Mexican items. I thought it was weird that at breakfast you had to tell them if you were taking the Mexican special for lunch or ordering off the menu plus what you wanted for dinner but this worked out quite well. Lunch and dinner are sit-down service and the guys were amazing. They remembered our name & room number and that we don’t drink and only wanted the occasional coke. We were quite adventurous and tried most of the Mexican food and it was delicious. Even the filet mignon one night was so tender.
Other
Once we decided not to dive on Friday night we spent the afternoon in town. I love that the walk there was only about 15 minutes. We checked out some of the shops. Some days there were six big cruise ships in town but this was later around 4pm so the crowds were smaller. We bought a few souvenirs and visited several restaurants trying to find a place to have a lobster dinner on Saturday night before our flight as this meal was not included since we had taken dinner on our arrival. We finally decided on La Lobsteria located at 5a Av. Sur Esq. con 7. Fabulous place away from the cruise ship people near the town square. Lobster tails are huge (500 – 900 grams) and cost 1 peso per gram and comes with rice & veggies. Really nice and the owner Omar was wonderful.
Saturday we took a three hour tour of the island for $50 with a taxi driver we had met earlier and arranged to drive us to the airport for $14. He had a car that could handle our 4 bags. His name is Ruben Angel (taxi #395) and I can give you his cell number if you send me a PM. It poured all day so it we didn’t get out of the car when we wanted to. Ruben then took us to our restaurant at 5pm and then came back to get us at 6pm. He took us back to SCC where we said good-bye to everyone and were off the airport. We arrived at 7pm for our 9:05pm flight and we were pretty much at the back of the line. (Only flight at this time of night). It took just over an hour to get checked in because luggage tags and boarding passes were done by hand.
Summary
As I mentioned above; after crunching the numbers we decided to change our Jamaica flight in May to Cozumel in April. (Air Canada doesn’t fly to Cozumel after April and we don’t want to do the “bag drag” from Cancun after reading everyone’s comments here.) The cost is about $350 more to come to SCC because of the $400 penalty for changing our flights. Even though Couples Negril has better room, food and service; plus it is AI so all our fancy non-alcoholic drinks are free and there is no tipping…the diving (even though free) cannot compare to Cozumel. So we are back to SCC in April. We cannot wait and maybe this time I will see a spotted eagle ray.
Thanks again everyone for your help on making this a fabulous trip!
P.S. Will try to add photos later
Forgot to mention all the wonderful people we met: Sally, neighbours Christi & Chip, Christa, Derek, Tim, Mike and Joe.
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