Three tank trip in Looe Key for $42 on Living Social

[jimw]

Yesterday in an email to a friend who also canceled, Looe Key Reef Resort and Dive Center said that bottom time would remain the same at 3 hours for 2 dives or a 90 minute bt per dive. This is apparently coming from the office. The day before, Dagmar who said she was with the dive op; said that bt is now 35 minutes per dive or 70 inutes total.

There seems to be a disconnect among'em! .........leading to:

...............boatloads of pi$$ed off divers!!

 

[AceszHigh]

Yeah when I went diving with them (and stayed in their hotel) about a year ago it was a 3 tank trip with an hour of bottom time if you got in the water right away. But, really I wasn't that impressed with Looe Key. We did three different reef dives (don't remember the site names). The finger like reefs were kinda cool but I'd much rather dive Molasses reef in Key largo from what I saw!

 

[mrx3000]

Looe Key has some really cool stuff if you spend the time to find it. Fortunately for the reef (but may be somewhat unfortunately for divers) dive ops take people to the eastern part, same few moorings all the time. Western part is a bit deeper and nicer. I usually swam over that way on the last stop of the 3-tank dive (as they moved from east to west, last mooring was within reachable distance of the west end).

I planned to go dive with Looe Key divers sometime soon, but with this new policy - I'd rather charter a powerboat to go there for the day. Anyone wants to share the ride?

 

[Reck Diver]

Discounting the Open Water Cert. Course???? I'm okay with it, however Some think it is not possible to deeply discount the course and provide anything close to adequate instruction.

Here's one man's thought's about a discounted program offered at a Pompano Beach Dive Shop.

I sincerely hope I am wrong, but I will be shocked if you do not end up with a terrible excuse for dive instruction....

The instructors training you are essentially losing money to train you, and will need to get you through the class as fast as they can..

this is no way for you to get the chance to learn....

You will find thousands of divers on SB that will tell you quality instruction is much better than cheap instruction...

So you think he will be safe if not taught BOUYANCY CONTROL, or any of the basic skills? You might as well just tell him to buy a fake card and dive with no real certification....

it will be a travesty.

Get your money back now, and sign up for a real class somewhere else.

 

[LowVizWiz]

Ok so here's the deal, they are now running 2 trips per day instead of the 3 tank trip they used to run in order to accommodate for the large number of people who took advantage of the LivingSocial deal. I imagine that after July 6th when it expires things may go back to normal whatever that is for them.

For me the initial lure of this deal was a 3 stop trip in the keys not necessarily the cost. Being a "local" with access to similar diving much closer, any perceived savings from this deal quickly vanish after the nearly 3 hour car ride from Miami/Ft. Lauderdale area. So when I called to make my group's reservation and was told they had switched to two (1-hr) dives I should have cancelled, but some in my group still wanted to dive down there so we decided to go.

The boat is a standard ~40' corinthian catamaran like you see all over the keys taking snorkelers and divers and they pack every bit of it with both snorkelers and divers. On my trip they had about 43 people on board at about a 50-50 split between divers and snorkelers. This would have been strike two had I known this before driving down.

To make matters worse, we happen to pick the Super Moon weekend. Their boat access the reef through a very shallow channel which during this particular low tide is not deep enough for their boat to cross. This is only relevant, because they absolutely needed to get back from the reef before 4pm resulting on a much shorter 2 dive than planned. I'm giving them a pass for this, as we did cross the channel a little before 4 pm and we could see that this wasn't a made up excuse. The boat barely made it with the type of load we had.

The diving was excellent as it usually is in most shallow reefs around the keys. We had all the usual suspects with a really nice huge goliath right under the boat, 2 reef sharks and a black tip shark. This made the trip worth while for our group as it was the first shark sighting for some of them. One nice absence was the lack of lion fish, none were spotted.

The bottom-line, if you are in the area the trip is probably as good as any other dive op in the area. And if they resume their 3 tank trips once the living social deal expires it would be much better as I don't expected it to be as crowded as it was this time. Definitively is not a day trip you want to make from SFLA. It would be much better to make an extended weekend of it with the family as the "resort" (I use that word loosely) side looked ok for a short stay. YMMV.