Hi Maresman,
I spent a week with the aforementioned Bill Tewes and Dive St. Vincent last August, after having read the undercurrent article. IMHO, it was one of my most enjoyable, and in some ways, absolutely my most enjoyable Caribbean dive experience. I've been lucky enough to have dived St. Lucia, Dominica, Guadalupe, Bonaire, Little Cayman and Guanaja (and lots here at home in Florida) so I feel I have some perspective.
It's certainly true that you won't find a lot of big fish in St. Vincent, but the small stuff---wow! Frog fish of every color and description, seahorses at almost every site in perfect camera-ready poses, lots of fish and critters I'd never seen before, loads of typical Caribbean reef fish, a half dozen octopi, and so many eels of so many colors and sizes that they became ho-hum by the end of the week.
I personally found the reefs to be in spectacularly healthy shape, with tons of sponges and gorgonians and plenty of coral. They're perhaps not as monumental in size as Bonaire or Little Cayman, but they appear to be untouched. There are a couple of nice walls to dive, lush with healthy sea life and other nice reefs.
Perhaps the best part of the experience, however, was the Dive St. Vincent op with Bill Tewes. This wry, weathered Texan, who ran an op in PNG for years before expatriating to St. Vincent, personally makes certain that every dive is a delight. He sports an etch-a-sketch type slate on which he writes the names of his latest find during your dive. You'll approach, read the name of the creature Bill's found and follow the extended, amputated Radio Shack antenna he uses as a pointing device to the species in question. He's usually the last one out of the water, just brimming with enthusiasm for this dive which, of course, is one of thousands he's taken at these sites. He dives every single dive with his clients (except, in my case, for a night dive on which I was the only diver when one of his quiet, humble, but extraordinarily capable and conscientious Vincentian crew members led the dive.)
If you have any taste for muck diving (which I didn't know I had!) you'll be in heaven, as that's Bill's religion. A couple of the 90-minute (!) dives we did in the sand yielded an impossible amount of strange beautiful and, in some cases, otherworldly critters. The only downside is that you have to push Bill somewhat to dive a regular reef, since he hates to leave his world of "muck".
I'm a single diver and found it pretty cool that Bill became a real buddy during my stay; inviting me to accompany him to a cocktail party on chi-chi Young Island and picking me up at the hotel for this jaunt. Introduced me to locals and other divers and generally made sure a good time was had by all. I've read of some folks being put off by his bordering-on-caustic, and dryly, lightly sarcastic sense of humor. But I found his needling me for my 5-mil wetsuit and accompanying weights and the bantering in both directions which ensued to add to the fun of the trip.
The boats are not particularly accomodating; the crew sets up your gear and stows it for'd in horizontal cubbies until dive time, when a full compliment on the boat makes for some sloppy gearing up, what with no benches or racks on deck. But, the atmosphere is so relaxed and the dives so long (as long as you've got air and deco time) that it ceases to matter.
I stayed at the Sunset Shores and found the accommodations simple but very comfortable (in the Holiday Inn mode), with plenty of room on the round table provided to download my pix onto my laptop. Also lots of hefty transformers for 110v available to guests to take to their rooms. Nice, remote-controlled AC unit. Never a hint of a question of security: left my laptop in the room every day. the food was quite good, if repetetive after a few days, but there's excellent dining to be had close by. A nice, quiet, grassy couryard overlooks a small white picket fence, beyond which lies one of those quintessential Caribbean scenes of small sandy beach, flat water dotted with yachts and the thickly-forested Young Island beyond. I found it nice that the beach was visited each day by local folks; mothers with loads of kids splash-dashing in the water, an almost continuous soccer game on the beach and fisher-folks gliding by on their kayak-like vessels.
All in all, I could do nothing but recommend the St. Vincent experience, though I did not dive Bequia (BECK-way, they pronounce it). Feel free to email me for more info. ENJOY!
PS: Here's a link to some of my St. Vincent photos. Click on St. Vincent once there...
http://photos.yahoo.com/peterjquatz
