My wife and I just returned from our Thanksgiving week trip on the Roatan Aggressor. It was a fantastic trip. Here are some highlights/comments for anyone interested in this trip:
- The boat is excellent. It was re-furbished earlier this year for the new itinerary, and it shows - very clean and well-maintained. We had 17 out of a max 18 passengers on our trip and we never once felt crowded. The dive deck is probably the best I've yet seen. It's enormous, giving everyone plenty of personal space to suit up. The camera table is probably 6' square with three levels, so no issues there. The only note we made to the crew was that the sundeck could use some more shade. They were already working on this, with a tarp system scheduled for install the next time the boat goes into dry dock.
- The crew were excellent across the board. Captain Eddie is certainly the most enthusiastic and energetic captain I've met, which we found contagious. I can see why others have spoken so highly of him on his past boats. I won't list everyone else by name, but certainly a special mention goes to Dorian, an actual French chef, whose food was terrific (apparently recently voted best of the Aggressor fleet).
- Our fellow passengers were a really great group of people, and we had a lot of fun talking with everyone between dives.
- We got really lucky with weather. Whereas we heard the previous week's trip was a rainy mess, we had mostly sunshine, with just a couple passing showers one or two days. It was a little windy towards the end of the week, which made toweling off after dives a bit chilly, but had no impact on the diving.
- We also got lucky with the diving. Apparently the week before us was pretty bad, with limited viz on both sides of Roatan. We had good to very good viz most dives (45 to 80+ feet), with just 2 or 3 dives with really bad viz (15 - 25'). We were able to dive the north side of Roatan, the south side of Roatan and Cayos Cochinos. The crew said they would take us to Utila if there was a whale shark sighting, but reports were that viz was poor, and therefore not worth the trip otherwise. No whale shark sightings, so we didn't make it over. Overall, I'd describe the diving as good to very good. We're a bit spoiled with some recent trips to various parts of the Pacific, but by Caribbean standards it was really solid diving. Good macro at most sites, with two seahorse and one pipefish sighting towards the end of the week (thanks to the keen eyes and site knowledge of Captain Eddie and G). We had turtles on several dives, and generally good fish life. A few of us placed it squarely in the middle of our Caribbean diving experiences, with Turks & Caicos, the Caymans and Belize rating higher.
- I do need to report experiencing one of my scariest dives ever. The green moray I had been photographing came out of it's hole and chased towards me. The crew had instructed us to put our fins between us and and the eel in this case, and I did that. But the eel didn't stop, so I swam as fast as I could in the opposite direction. The eel followed, even after I made two 90 degree turns - probably a total of 50+ feet underwater. Finally it stopped the chase and returned to it's hole. I've never seen morays this aggressive, and suspect that the lion fish feeding is emboldening them. We saw another free swimming on the same dive (maybe the same eel?) and it came right towards me and then by me, without any apparent need to stay close to the reef for protection. Probably a freak incident, but I'd think twice before getting too close to one in the future.
- We had a bottom temperature of 82 degrees on every dive except one at Cayos Cochinos, where I registered 81 degrees. While there were opportunities to go deep on some of the walls if desired, I didn't see anything worthwhile down there, so we generally had max depths in the 60-70' range, with lots of time spent in the 40 - 55 foot range near the top of the reef.
I think that's it - overall, a really enjoyable trip on a great boat, and one I'd recommend to anyone. Happy to answer any questions if you have them.
James