I took my first trip to St. Eustatius (Statia) to venture beyond the well-known Caribbean dive destinations. I've been to many Caribbean islands and was looking for something different and/or better than I've experienced previously.
Getting There. It was a nightmare. On American, it took four flights and two days to get there from PDX. It was supposed to be PDX-LAX-MIA-STX-EUX. I had purposefully scheduled an 18-hour layover to get a hotel in Miami then catch the 10:30 a.m. flight from MIA-STX-EUX. How much could go wrong when you’ve got 18 hours between domestic and international flights? As they say, even the best laid plans…
Flight one (PDX) was cancelled, so I missed my connection in LAX. I was rebooked on Alaska from PDX to ORD, then American to MIA and onward. Then flight two (ORD) was cancelled and rebooked 9 hours later. American is infamous for keeping passengers uninformed on delays, and by the time they decided to cancel the ORD flight, it was midnight, and there was no way to get on another flight. There goes my hope of getting sleep. In the end, American kept me awake for 42 hours, and by the time I got to Statia, I was so exhausted, I cancelled the next/first day of diving. Fortunately, I was there long enough to move the dive schedule around.
Winair. This cockamamie airline is run like a circus show. Round trip from SXM to EUX was about $250, which included one 50-pound bag each way, for a 20-minute flight, but the whole ordeal from checking in at the airport to getting to baggage claim took about 3 hours. They have a “schedule,” but nothing is on time, and there’s no one around to ask questions. It’s a cramped 16-seater Twin Otter plane and very hot. If you have a personal item larger than a small backpack, you will be charged. They visually inspect your carryon and personal item and have a scale to weigh your items at the gate if they think it's overweight. Understandably, they don’t want to be overweight on a small plane. On the return flight, thankfully I had 5 hours of layover in SXM, because the flight was delayed over an hour. There’s no airport monitors, no gate agents, no Winair app, and the FlightAware app was not accurately updating. The only way to know the plane was coming was to look out to the horizon out of the lobby window.
I debated using the Makena ferry from St. Maarten to Statia, but their schedule is so unreliable so as to cancel service at the last minute. They’ve also raised their prices post-COVID to almost the cost of the flight--$100 each way when I checked earlier this year. I also talked with some European divers who were on holiday in St. Maarten and came by the ferry and they regretted it. The seas were very rough for the entire crossing of two hours.
Hotel. I stayed at the Old Gin House, which is an older property and needs some updating and not worth $250 per night. The outdoor furniture is rotted and there seemed to be a never-ending construction project going on on their property or the adjacent properties, so construction noise was an issue. This is a beachfront property, so that aspect was enjoyable.
The room had a kitchen and was clean, and the king bed was comfortable with plenty of hot water in the shower, and the much-needed A/C worked really well. Despite my diligence to keep all food in the fridge and not leave trash, there was a problem with ants. The place is not well sealed and there’s lots of cracks for critters to get in. Since the tap water is unsafe to drink, I got two bottles of water every day complimentary and each additional bottle is $3. The dive shop has a 5-gallon cold water dispenser to fill water bottles, so that was my source for drinking water.
There’s a TV but no cable TV. It has Netflix and YouTube. There is free wi-fi and each room has their own private router and password. I was impressed with the speed of the wi-fi, and I could stream Netflix. Since the hurricanes of 2017 hit Statia, I was told that the phone service was never restored, so the rooms have no phone lines. If you need something, you must go to the front desk and ring the bell, because usually the front desk gal is also working in the restaurant.
One drawback to the hotel’s location is the constant road noise, honking horns, and racing motorcycles at night, along with noisy wild roosters. The restaurant staff would have after-hours parties in the courtyard of the restaurant that spilled out onto the street with very loud music until the late hours. There are no sidewalks, so you walk alongside the road at your own risk. Not all drivers are courteous or slow down for pedestrians.
Old Gin House Restaurant. All divers get breakfast included from a set menu, which was a hearty meal, almost too much to dive on a full stomach, so I’d order the items and take most of it back to my room to eat later. The restaurant staff were some of the rudest people I’ve ever come across. The overall attitude was that the customers were a bother. Hygiene is not a priority. The kitchen is outdoor and open, and the cook would bring her screaming infant and leave it in a stroller while she worked, touch the baby, touch the baby’s grimy toys, then go back to cooking without washing her hands. They had a self-serve coffee station and left milk out in the heat to spoil. When I showed the server the spoiled milk in my coffee, she seemed to not understand that it should be kept on ice or somehow kept cold. If a guest left their table for a moment, the wild roosters would immediately jump up on the tables to eat the food.
The restaurant doesn’t serve vegetables, so I got a taxi ride to the grocery store and was there on a day when there wasn’t much left. And when I say grocery store, I mean the size of a 7-11. The food barge comes once every three weeks, and the first thing to go are the vegetables. By the time I got to the United States, I was craving a salad and vegetables.
Dive Shop. The (almost) onsite dive shop, Scubaqua, was a 1-minute walk from my room. I can’t say enough good things about the seven staff that works there. They are a great team, and everyone shares the duties of running a shop on a rotation basis, like driving the boat, being the in-water guide, filling tanks, cleaning, etc. They are all great guides and were eager to point out everything big and small. They were, by far, the best aspect of my trip. They made the dives so much fun.
They have two boats, but they were not using the larger boat for some reason, which I would have much preferred for entry and exit. We were on the small boat, “Yellow Boat”. There is no dock for the boat at the dive shop, so we’d load up in a pickup truck at the shop and drive to the harbor. The boat is very small and sits below the dock, and with no ladder or steps for entry, it was a challenge climbing, scooting, and hoisting yourself in and out of the boat. If you’re a short person or have any back issues or other physical hindrances, this will be very difficult. The boat has no shade and holds six comfortably, but a couple of days we had nine, and you really couldn’t move around.
The Diving Experience. Nitrox is included with this shop. My Nitrox fills were reliable at 31%-32% with 3000-3200 pounds. You could dive your computer, and 60-minute dives were the norm. Water temps were 82-84 degrees, much warmer than it’s supposed to be at this time of the year. It’s usually in the high 70s. The weather wasn’t cooperative and it rained off and on. It was quite windy at times, and the seas were choppy, especially in the afternoon. The visibility wasn’t always great . There were all the usual Caribbean critters and some less common ones, such as the rough file clam, red-tip sea goddess, a longhorn nudibranch. I'll attach some pictures. There was also a huge population of lobsters, many of which were pregnant, and a whole bunch of Sergeant Major egg patches. The marine life in the park was much more abundant than outside the boundaries. Aquarium was a beautiful dive site with the most variety of critters, and given the choice of sites, I voted to go to Aquarium again. One thing that was very disappointing was the purple algae that was choking the reef and the critters. It was so bad that I had to wave my hand in front of the camera to clear it out of the shot. You’ll see it in almost all of my pictures. The guides said it had been there for a few months and likely due to the water being too warm too early. I did not see any SCTLD or bleaching, but some sites were a bit nondescript if not a little boring.
Statia is known for its wrecks and rich maritime history and slave trade in the 1700s, so there are a lot of artifacts in the sand that you’re not permitted to touch. The hurricanes of 2017 churned up a lot of new artifacts and buried others. I don’t have expert eyes to spot artifacts, so if the guides didn’t point them out, I wouldn’t have been able to see them. I’ve attached a picture of a pelvic bone with a grappling hook in it along with a 350-year-old anchor. What a terrible way to die…
Scubaqua does one guaranteed night dive a week, and it was one of the best night dives I’ve ever done, and it was at the Chien Tong wreck. Some of the cast of characters: cryptic teardrop crabs, basket stars, squid, sponge crab, lobsters marching, stingrays, and enormous turtles. The wreck was alive and moving!
I'm only allowed five pictures at a time, so I'll follow with a few more in the next post.
Getting There. It was a nightmare. On American, it took four flights and two days to get there from PDX. It was supposed to be PDX-LAX-MIA-STX-EUX. I had purposefully scheduled an 18-hour layover to get a hotel in Miami then catch the 10:30 a.m. flight from MIA-STX-EUX. How much could go wrong when you’ve got 18 hours between domestic and international flights? As they say, even the best laid plans…
Flight one (PDX) was cancelled, so I missed my connection in LAX. I was rebooked on Alaska from PDX to ORD, then American to MIA and onward. Then flight two (ORD) was cancelled and rebooked 9 hours later. American is infamous for keeping passengers uninformed on delays, and by the time they decided to cancel the ORD flight, it was midnight, and there was no way to get on another flight. There goes my hope of getting sleep. In the end, American kept me awake for 42 hours, and by the time I got to Statia, I was so exhausted, I cancelled the next/first day of diving. Fortunately, I was there long enough to move the dive schedule around.
Winair. This cockamamie airline is run like a circus show. Round trip from SXM to EUX was about $250, which included one 50-pound bag each way, for a 20-minute flight, but the whole ordeal from checking in at the airport to getting to baggage claim took about 3 hours. They have a “schedule,” but nothing is on time, and there’s no one around to ask questions. It’s a cramped 16-seater Twin Otter plane and very hot. If you have a personal item larger than a small backpack, you will be charged. They visually inspect your carryon and personal item and have a scale to weigh your items at the gate if they think it's overweight. Understandably, they don’t want to be overweight on a small plane. On the return flight, thankfully I had 5 hours of layover in SXM, because the flight was delayed over an hour. There’s no airport monitors, no gate agents, no Winair app, and the FlightAware app was not accurately updating. The only way to know the plane was coming was to look out to the horizon out of the lobby window.
I debated using the Makena ferry from St. Maarten to Statia, but their schedule is so unreliable so as to cancel service at the last minute. They’ve also raised their prices post-COVID to almost the cost of the flight--$100 each way when I checked earlier this year. I also talked with some European divers who were on holiday in St. Maarten and came by the ferry and they regretted it. The seas were very rough for the entire crossing of two hours.
Hotel. I stayed at the Old Gin House, which is an older property and needs some updating and not worth $250 per night. The outdoor furniture is rotted and there seemed to be a never-ending construction project going on on their property or the adjacent properties, so construction noise was an issue. This is a beachfront property, so that aspect was enjoyable.
The room had a kitchen and was clean, and the king bed was comfortable with plenty of hot water in the shower, and the much-needed A/C worked really well. Despite my diligence to keep all food in the fridge and not leave trash, there was a problem with ants. The place is not well sealed and there’s lots of cracks for critters to get in. Since the tap water is unsafe to drink, I got two bottles of water every day complimentary and each additional bottle is $3. The dive shop has a 5-gallon cold water dispenser to fill water bottles, so that was my source for drinking water.
There’s a TV but no cable TV. It has Netflix and YouTube. There is free wi-fi and each room has their own private router and password. I was impressed with the speed of the wi-fi, and I could stream Netflix. Since the hurricanes of 2017 hit Statia, I was told that the phone service was never restored, so the rooms have no phone lines. If you need something, you must go to the front desk and ring the bell, because usually the front desk gal is also working in the restaurant.
One drawback to the hotel’s location is the constant road noise, honking horns, and racing motorcycles at night, along with noisy wild roosters. The restaurant staff would have after-hours parties in the courtyard of the restaurant that spilled out onto the street with very loud music until the late hours. There are no sidewalks, so you walk alongside the road at your own risk. Not all drivers are courteous or slow down for pedestrians.
Old Gin House Restaurant. All divers get breakfast included from a set menu, which was a hearty meal, almost too much to dive on a full stomach, so I’d order the items and take most of it back to my room to eat later. The restaurant staff were some of the rudest people I’ve ever come across. The overall attitude was that the customers were a bother. Hygiene is not a priority. The kitchen is outdoor and open, and the cook would bring her screaming infant and leave it in a stroller while she worked, touch the baby, touch the baby’s grimy toys, then go back to cooking without washing her hands. They had a self-serve coffee station and left milk out in the heat to spoil. When I showed the server the spoiled milk in my coffee, she seemed to not understand that it should be kept on ice or somehow kept cold. If a guest left their table for a moment, the wild roosters would immediately jump up on the tables to eat the food.
The restaurant doesn’t serve vegetables, so I got a taxi ride to the grocery store and was there on a day when there wasn’t much left. And when I say grocery store, I mean the size of a 7-11. The food barge comes once every three weeks, and the first thing to go are the vegetables. By the time I got to the United States, I was craving a salad and vegetables.
Dive Shop. The (almost) onsite dive shop, Scubaqua, was a 1-minute walk from my room. I can’t say enough good things about the seven staff that works there. They are a great team, and everyone shares the duties of running a shop on a rotation basis, like driving the boat, being the in-water guide, filling tanks, cleaning, etc. They are all great guides and were eager to point out everything big and small. They were, by far, the best aspect of my trip. They made the dives so much fun.
They have two boats, but they were not using the larger boat for some reason, which I would have much preferred for entry and exit. We were on the small boat, “Yellow Boat”. There is no dock for the boat at the dive shop, so we’d load up in a pickup truck at the shop and drive to the harbor. The boat is very small and sits below the dock, and with no ladder or steps for entry, it was a challenge climbing, scooting, and hoisting yourself in and out of the boat. If you’re a short person or have any back issues or other physical hindrances, this will be very difficult. The boat has no shade and holds six comfortably, but a couple of days we had nine, and you really couldn’t move around.
The Diving Experience. Nitrox is included with this shop. My Nitrox fills were reliable at 31%-32% with 3000-3200 pounds. You could dive your computer, and 60-minute dives were the norm. Water temps were 82-84 degrees, much warmer than it’s supposed to be at this time of the year. It’s usually in the high 70s. The weather wasn’t cooperative and it rained off and on. It was quite windy at times, and the seas were choppy, especially in the afternoon. The visibility wasn’t always great . There were all the usual Caribbean critters and some less common ones, such as the rough file clam, red-tip sea goddess, a longhorn nudibranch. I'll attach some pictures. There was also a huge population of lobsters, many of which were pregnant, and a whole bunch of Sergeant Major egg patches. The marine life in the park was much more abundant than outside the boundaries. Aquarium was a beautiful dive site with the most variety of critters, and given the choice of sites, I voted to go to Aquarium again. One thing that was very disappointing was the purple algae that was choking the reef and the critters. It was so bad that I had to wave my hand in front of the camera to clear it out of the shot. You’ll see it in almost all of my pictures. The guides said it had been there for a few months and likely due to the water being too warm too early. I did not see any SCTLD or bleaching, but some sites were a bit nondescript if not a little boring.
Statia is known for its wrecks and rich maritime history and slave trade in the 1700s, so there are a lot of artifacts in the sand that you’re not permitted to touch. The hurricanes of 2017 churned up a lot of new artifacts and buried others. I don’t have expert eyes to spot artifacts, so if the guides didn’t point them out, I wouldn’t have been able to see them. I’ve attached a picture of a pelvic bone with a grappling hook in it along with a 350-year-old anchor. What a terrible way to die…
Scubaqua does one guaranteed night dive a week, and it was one of the best night dives I’ve ever done, and it was at the Chien Tong wreck. Some of the cast of characters: cryptic teardrop crabs, basket stars, squid, sponge crab, lobsters marching, stingrays, and enormous turtles. The wreck was alive and moving!
I'm only allowed five pictures at a time, so I'll follow with a few more in the next post.
