Southern Caribbean advice- diving from cruise

[cwan]

Hi there! I'm going on a Southern Caribbean cruise for a wedding, and would like to fit some dives in. My husband and I have dove extensively worldwide, and are being selective in choosing between diving or exploring topside- we would like to do whichever is more interesting. Do you feel like any of these following islands are must-dives? I'm leaning towards definitely doing dives in St. Lucia, then choose either Grenada or St. Thomas as well. Any input appreciated, thank you!

St. Lucia
St. Thomas
Grenada
Antigua


Puerto Rico- we are based there for a week, do you feel the continental shelf or Desecho island more worthwhile to dive? Thank you! (and if by chance you have surf tips here let me know too- wonder if renting shortboard there is difficult i.e. rent-a-log)

thank you thank you!

 

[DazedAndConfuzed]

Recently did a southern caribbean trip.

We skipped St Thomas because we did that before and the dives were not really memorable, and the customary 'wreck dive' for croozebooze divers was a navy barge. But then others that dove there this time were happy about their dive, but then I don't know what it takes for them to be happy about a dive, given one guy had 10 dives (mostly cruise ship) and another mostly dive with drysuits in alaska.

I did St Lucia, got some tour boat hawking for passengers go back and get some tanks and the DM since it we had a saturday late arrival and no dive ops had any passengers that day, so they all sat it out (I guess saturday was a fly in/fly out day for most island tourists, so nobody was diving). We dove Anse La Raye and Anse Cochon. Visibility was pretty bad in La Raye due to rain the previous day and we did a beach dive in Cochon because the guy with 10 dives was the one that found these hawkers and he did some major buoyancy skrewup on the La Raye dive, causing the DM to take all of us on a super easy 2nd dive. I've stayed in Anse Chastanet before and dove almost all the sites toward the south, and I thought many (but not all) the dive sites were better than what they offer to the crooze divers. So if you dive there, try to get them to take you to sites near Soufriere. The guy with 10 dives asked specifically whether they go to the south and they answered yes, but I guess all the sites are south of Castries.

Also skipped San Juan. The 10 dive guy actually did a 1 tank dive there. He must have been real desperate for dives to dive near San Juan.

Did not go to the other 2 islands.

 

[Kryssa]

The only island of those we've dove on is St. Thomas. This was a nice family beach day at Coki Beach, with two dives from Coki Dive Shop. We always have non-divers with us and they very much enjoying the snorkeling while we did two tanks. We could have done a third if we wanted. The diving wasn't live changing, but the conditions were good.