Anyone been on the Island Dancer

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greenflash1

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Thinking of doing a trip on Her. Would like to dive the bigest cruise ship wreck in the Caribbean!
 
Hello

Just finished our trip on the Island Dancer last weekend most of our group has gone back to the states a few of us are still enjoying Grenada. If you want to dive the Bianca C, I would suggest doing it from one of the land based dive operations. The Island Dancer only has one dive on the Bianca C. If you like wrecks you will want more than one dive to see the whole thing. The deck is in the 100-115 ft range with the bottom around 160. I did 126ft with only minor penetration, and never came close to seeing the whole deck area. The vis was about 40ft and we had a little current.

Plus the Island Dancer was not up to Peter Hughes normal standards. This boat was recently added to the Peter Hughes Group. The boat use to be called the Sea Hawk. The boat is not owned by Peter Hughes but is owned by a group of investors who purchased a Peter Hughes franchise. This is the norm with the Peter Hughes fleet but this boat is not up to the standards of the rest of the fleet.

The crew is new to the area. The longest amount of time any crew member (other than the cook) has been assigned to the Island Dancer was 2.5 months most less than that. The current crew has not been up past Tyrell Bay of the island Carriacou. Because of this we ended up diving a number of sites a couple of times and even one site three times. The crew told us we would have to go all the way to St Vincent to dive Tobago Cay to clear customs, which they were not willing to do. We found out after we got back to Grenada the crew had been misinformed and all we had to do was check into customs at Union Island on the way to Tobago Cay. It only took us a day ashore in Grenada to find this out. We were told by a couple of local divers Tobago Cay is the best diving in the Southern Caribbean. The crew was nice and tried to please but they did not have the knowledge of the area as they should. After talking with the crew over a few days I discovered they are not happy with the current owners of the boat, and some will not be back after their tour, if they can not work out salary problems. This will mean the Island Dancer will continue to have problems.

I do not think the Island Dancer has a large enough fresh water supply (hold). We had a large group (12) and used all the staterooms. They asked us to watch our fresh water consumption. Because the supply on board was down and the fresh water converter had a slow out put. But when we returned they made know attempt to take on fresh water for the next trip.

Two of the three lower staterooms had an unpleasant odor. We had to leave the doors open to these staterooms in and attempt to keep the odor down.

The diving was good even though the vis never was over 50ft the week we were there. All diving was done via a tender boat. Because we had 12 divers it made diving off the tender difficult. We were packed in titter than sardines. The tender boat’s GPS nor bottom finder worked. This along with the crew lack of the local area made it more difficult for the crew to find the reef a few times. They would have to drop in the dive master under the pretences of discovering which way the current would be going then pick up the dive master and move to another location 100 yards away and doing it again until they found the reef.

As a group we felt we did not get what was promised. Our biggest complaint was not going to the Grenadines. If they advertise going to the Grenadines then they should take you to the Grenadines. Even though we enjoyed the dive site we were taken to. We did not expect to dive so many repeatedly. The food was great and the crew did try real hard. We got the impression they were not allowed to take us to the Grenadines we suspect it was because they were not allowed to burn the fuel. I would not suggest diving on the Island Dancer in the near future. We hope they get their act together. We are enjoy our time on the island of Grenada.
 
Hi GreenFlash
Questions about the Island Dancers Crew. May have worked with them in the TCI. Was the Captains name Ben? Was a couple "Darin & Nina" part of the crew? Just following up and trying to find where some old friends are working these days. If by any chance these guys where part of the crew I will bet they did their best in trying to give you the best dive experience they could.
 

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