SHUT UP ALREADY AND TALK ABOUT THE DIVING, DANGIT!!!
Ok, Ok....on to the important stuff. First the disclaimer on where I've been to compare it to: I've dove in St. Maartin (so-so, but worth doing if you're there), Saba (among the best so far), Jost Van Dyke, St. Kitts/Nevis area, some springs in Florida, and repeat trips to the Flower Gardens National Marine Sanctuary off the Texas coast in the Gulf of Mexico. Of all of these Saba wins for overall beauty and drama, but the FGNMS is best for fish life and hard coral cover (no soft corals - too deep and too cold in the winter for theme to survive, and on Stetson bank it's all sponge since even hard coral won't attach to the clay substrate). I won't be able to compare diving in Dominica to a lot of the standard Caribean or Central American destinations like Bonaire, Belize, Curacao, the Bay Islands, or the Playa coastline. That said, I was very satisfied with the diving off Dominica.
I'd say in terms of reef cover and health it rivaled Saba (which is similar in being a volcanic substrata, vs. a lot of spur and groove type coral growth) but was much bigger or distributed, e.g. where on Saba the pinnacle dives are really confined to small areas by the sheer slopes, Dominica has room for much "longer" walls within recreational diving depth. There was a fair amount of coral rubble in the shallows at the top of formations, which I don't believe is still the result of fishing activities but don't know that for sure...once you hit about 35 feet from there on down to our dive limits it was really pretty pristine. There were some crab traps in the Scott's Head Bay area off Soufriere, but people gotta eat. We did not see a single shark, even a nurse, so if that's your main thing you might choose to dive elsewhere.
The primary dive operators clustered just south of Roseau are the Anchorage, Dive Dominica (which serves Castle Comfort, Fort Young, and Evergreen), and Al Dive and Watersports which is newer and I believe has a restaurant but not a hotel on site. At the south end of the island you have Nature Island Dive which is reportedly a much smaller, more 'exclusive' operation (but see my comments on boats to follow), and up north there are one or two around Cabrits or Portsmouth (don't take my word on that...I was getting a bit fuzzy on that side since we didn't spend much time there.) With the Anchorage they have both larger and smaller boats to dive off of. Check their site at dive.anchoragehotel.dm if you want stats. Most of the time we were diving off their smaller powerboat which was rigged with outboard benches for 8 dive setups, had a central rack for 8 more tanks for the 2nd dive, and plenty of seating and stretching out area...definitely no cattle-boat. My wife and I got spoiled being the only two divers the first couple days aside from Izzy and one or two DM's (they clearly didn't
need that many to guide us, I think it was a fun day for them too). Over the weekend a big group came in from Barbados for diving just Sat and Sunday and we went out on the catamaran "Passion" which was more configured for whale watching, but wasn't bad for diving really....plenty of seating, you set up your tank and BC and just laid it down to keep it rolling on the (fairly calm) trip out to the site, and entry and egress was via a ladder (stair) arrangement that went down between the pontoon hammocks. It was a bit narrow but if you were careful it really wasn't a problem. I won't say anything bad overall about the big group - some of them were clearly good divers - but my wife and I sat out Sunday after enjoying the Saturday dive with them, and resumed on Monday where two other couples joined us for the days that followed. On Wednesday we were alone with one DM again. By contrast every morning we saw the bigger doubledecker Dive Dominca boat leave the dock to go pick up a slew of divers from Fort Young. We did meet a group of 6 divers who stayed at Castle Comfort and who said they went out on one of Dive Dom's smaller boats separate from the bigger 'cattle boat', but overall we were kind of smugly congratulating ourselves for our choice of the Anchorage.
I have heard great things about Nature Island Dive down in Soufriere and hoped to meet Simon while there, but circumstances didn't allow it (apparently he was recovering from a minor illness). Especially during the slower part of the season, and avoiding cruise-ship days, I don't see any reason any of the operators would 'force' you into a cattleboat situation except perhaps if you were staying at the Fort and they just picked you up together with whatever other divers were staying there. (Had we known about the big group from Barbados ahead of time I bet with a minimal charge we could've gotten them to still take us out separate on the smaller boat.) Dives usually left dock between 9-9:30 am, hung out on the water for the safety stop drinking juice or water and sunning, then returned usually between 1 and 1:30 pm. Even the southmost sites were not a far 'drive' from the Anchorage site. They will do diving to the north but only upon request with larger groups (I didn't get a minimum, but I'm guessing a full boat like 6-8.) Our divemasters and guides, Kian, Sherman, and Kevin, were all enthusiastic, friendly, great divers and fish spotters, and worked hard to make sure we had a good time. Fills were uniformly 2800 - 3000, dive rules were usually to try and hit the boat with 500 margin, and a large rinse tank was right at the top of the dock for gear. They'd do full setup/teardown if you let them or let you handle your own gear...storage in their locker room between dive days was plentiful with hangars for both wetsuits and BCDs. The boat had a large cooler on it for a rinse tank for my camera.
Being heavily volcanic in origin and geologically 'young', Dominica has pinnacles, shallow boulder-rubble slope shelves that drop off, and sheer walls and holes. A lot of the diving along the whole southwestern coast is actually in the sunken caldera of a huge former volcano. (In fact there are places along the shoreline, and dive sites, where volcanic gases are still bubbling up and heating the water and sand). Current was mostly effectively zero, and seas were quite calm; I'm sure time of year has a lot to do with the latter if not the former. The dive briefing frequently went something like "the buoy is in 20-25 feet, we'll go down the line, head west or away from the island to the drop, and then keeping the formation to our (left/right) we'll track along the (wall/slope) to 80 feet. Bottom there quickly goes to 1500 feet or so, we suggest you don't." The walls had very little current with one site exception to be noted later, which meant it was a matter of leveling at your max depth (80ish for the first dive, 70ish for the second, although they weren't overly strict about it - I frequently hit high-80s and saw one couple who was a little less cautious well into 100), toodling along until someone (usually me) declared 1500 psi, curve up to 50ish or so and turn around for a nice level profile there (negating the need for a deep stop even if you like to do one), and make our way back. Almost all the dives were managed where our last 5 minutes or so returning to the mooring area were well into safety-stop range, and then the DM's would let those with lots of air left hang out to their limits, both deco and tank, assuming they'd repeat a 3-minute stop if they dipped back below 25 feet. The planned dive length was about 50 minutes bottom, 1 hr safety stop, then 60 minutes bottom; most of my logged times personally (new camera, big lungs, typical American male excess weight) averaged about 46 minutes for the first dive and almost 50 for the second, with the very last dive a nice leisurely 66 minutes without the camera. Most dives were average depth in the low 60s to high 40s all told. I'm sure for those of you who find oxygen optional, longer profiles and safety stops could be had with prior arrangement. Afternoon dives were also available with prior arrangement; although I thought I'd want to dive more we ended up just taking our time, processing photos or hanging out at the bar and reading in the afternoon. I'm no pro photog and this was a vacation after all.
The soft coral and sponge color was incredibly vibrant and sometimes overwhelming (at least to me, so for those of you who want to chime in about how much better the South Pacific or Coral Triangle is, please back up to the disclaimer paragraph above). There didn't seem to be a lot of algae except in the shallow boulder field and rubble areas. Dives could be a bit darkish especially for the first dive of the morning (the diving is on the west coast of an extremely mountainous island, and depending on the formation most of the slopes and walls had you diving with the formations to your east so you're in the shade until at least late morning) but even on cloudy days was still very acceptable. Visibility in terms of water clarity typically was around 50' with the occasional dive at 60-70 and the occasional dive at less (one shallow section in a bit of current over the top of the formation the visibility dropped to probably 25-30 due to 'blown sand'). So it wasn't as clear as Saba (regularly 60-70+) or the FGNMS on average, but was still quite satisfying and blue and made for good picture taking. Fish were not hugely plentiful in large sizes, as there is subsistence fishing around the island, but there were many juveniles, many of the smaller fish like squirrelfish and chromis and the like, and on at least one dive there were large schools of midsized jacks that cruised thru while we were at the site. My guess is the bigger stuff is more off the east side of the island where the Atlantic currents hit and flow, but not currently considered diveable (we did ask about drift diving over there and were told it would be more like a speedboat race to keep up with you). We did see dolphins on one of our trips out to the dive site, and turtles were seen almost every day on the surface and on three out of six days while diving. Eels were always visible (black and white spotted moray, goldentail moray, yellow spotted snake eel, even a huge green moray which is supposedly not often seen in this particular region), there were a lot of urchins where there was a very large die-back elsewhere in the Caribbean, crinoids and gorgonians everywhere, anenomes, barrell sponges almost large enough to use as a bathtub. While there weren't any really large predator fish or pelagics visible during most dives there were many puffers (huge on some sites), chromis, squirrelfish, triggers, trunkfish, the occasional parrotfish, southern stingrays, and the like. We were shown several frogfish, stonefish (and I found a couple on my own), sea horses, an octopus, a whole 'orchard' of garden eels off the shore dive and Champagne sites, and we spotted a Flying Gunard on the appropriately named dive site. Typical spiny lobsters, smaller crabs, arrow crabs, and cleaner shrimp were in abundance. Trumpet fish ranged from tiny to around 2 feet in length.
The shore dive off the Anchorage dock was surprisingly nice and will let you get as deep as you like, too. A boulder scree slope which looks initially unpromising gives way to a sandy shelf (veritable FORESTS of garden eels) with occasional coral cluster and then suddenly slopes off with coral all over the place. Before we knew it we were over 80 feet down, no where near the end of things available to see if you were intent on heading deeper. Paralleling the shore and using the various mooring points as markers, we went well past the moorings for Dive Dominica before we headed back. I really wanted to do more dives here after the first, but somehow we always were lazy and content after the morning boat dives and it just didn't happen. But I'd think you could easily make a couple days out of just diving right there, especially with a camera.
My photos are still a work in progress, but I think at this point all the below water shots are culled from our six days of boat diving (we paid to add a day from the original package). I'll be adding from the abovewater pics for probably as much as a month after this post. They can be found at
Flickr: rtrski's Photostream if you're curious. Don't let any lack of photographic merit influence your decisions please, I'm still learning! Bottom line we really enjoyed the trip, the people we met, and while we're still new enough to diving (hit my 80th dive here) that we'll likely try out new places for a few years to come, Dominica is firmly filed in the 'would do again' category once the sampling urge dies down a bit.