Help! Cuba or Caicos?

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Hi guys, I need to know how good the diving is in Cuba. I´m planning to either go to Caicos or Guardalavaca, Cuba. Any advice is appreciated,

Thanks
 
just diving in Thailand, thats where I got certified, but what me and my wife are looking for is great visibility .
 
ok - the vis is 25 metres plus. Guardalavaca has a dive centre called Eagle Ray. You are where I was at when I went there. My advice: go somewhere else. The coral is brilliant but there are few fish to see.

The equipment used by the centre is newish but I managed to overbreathe a reg at 32 metres and it was not much fun.

On my eighth dive I went OOA at 25 metres despite being told to indicate when I was at 100bar and 50bar. (Inexperience and not taking responsibility for my own actions could have got me killed. My OOA resulted in a 6 metre swim to the DM to get his octopus. My mistake (among many) was to underestimate my responsibilities as a diver - the dive centre won't do it for you - they show you the sites but expect you to be competent. I wasn't.

Now don't get the wrong idea about what I'm trying to say. The viz is superb but to really enjoy it you need to have a few more (shallow) dives under your belt - no one stopped me doing a 32 metre dive but in retrospect I wish they had.

I think you'd be better off going to a different location where safety standards are higher but if you are determined to go nonetheless I think you'll enjoy it but make sure you look after yourself. And we also had 2 divers going into mandatory deco after one particular dive - those guys were able to look after themselves but was not planned that way. In fact gas planning was to stay down as long as possible with scant regard to any sort of reserve. When I look back I really enjoyed my dives there but knowing what I know now I don't think it was safe diving.
BTW PM me by all means - I don't mean to sound so negative but I do think you have to made aware that you might end up pushhing yourself beyond your comfort zone. Hopefully you are not the idiot that I was.
 
No- there are some shallower spots but the deeper stuff does tend to be more spectacular particularly the coral - there are reefs, but as I said before, fish life is not prolific due to overfishing. One thing I do have to say is the coral formations are really really spectacular - it's pristine and absolutely stunning to look at it.

The deepest dive they do is 40 metres but you don't want to be doing that dive at this stage in your diving career. When I was there (2003) the shallow dives were done in the morning at 9 and 11 with the deeper dives in the afternoon. The shallower dives might have the equivalent of a Discover Scuba session on one of those dives - the dives exluding the Discover Scuba dives went to about 15 metres max on those dives with a little surge in places.
 

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