Dive stops in Western Caribbean (Carnival Cruise lines) - Advice!

[Papa_Bear]

If you book through the cruse they won't leave without you! If not you can inform the operator, but it still depends on others that have booked and conditions! You should have enough, but who knows????

 

[timetraveler]

Here's our list:

* Grand Cayman - Neptune's Divers, Cayman's Original 8 Divers Max
* Roatan - Roatan Shark Dive
* Belize - Not sure yet. We do know that currently Carnival isn't offering any diving.
* Cozumel - Cozumel Diving: Blue XT SEA Diving, Cozumel Mexico

Most ships dock from 8am to 5pm - i noticed that the outfit in Cozumel offers a 2 tank morning and evening dive - is there enough time to do 4 dives and get back to the ship?

Not if you want to use Blue XT Sea Diving (as recommended in the post you quoted) Their morning boat goes out too early for some of the cruise ships. Their evening/night dive goes at dusk and stays until well after dark. One of the things I like about Blue XT Sea is that they don't rush their dives. They let you continue until you run low on air. Plus they give you a decent surface interval. But that policy wouldn't allow you to squeeze in four dives during the hours your ship is in Cozumel.

If you can arrange to dive with Blue XT Sea, I think you'll be very happy with a morning 2-tank dive.

 

[Waterskier1]

Most ships dock from 8am to 5pm - i noticed that the outfit in Cozumel offers a 2 tank morning and evening dive - is there enough time to do 4 dives and get back to the ship?

I believe that you would have enough time, if you could find an operator who would work with you. I took the Grand Cayman, Roatan, Belize, Cozumel itinerary on Carnival Valor last Sept. I booked my own dives in Grand Cayman and Roatan and had good experiences. I wasn't all that impressed where Hugh Parkey, the operator who was contracted by Carnival. The places where they took us were had poor visibility, relative to all the other locations, and they seemed more interested in pushing their food, drinks, and trinkets than diving.

In Cozumel, we used Carnival also, since we couldn't find a less expensive option, and it had the potential to be quite a bit more, depending on which pier we docked at. One would be close to the other dive ops and the other a taxi ride away. I was diving with a new diver, and he didn't want to put this to chance. (I have cruised over 45 days and have NEVER used the cruise line's excursions. I've always used recommendations from previous cruiser and made my own. I used CruiseCritic.com for much of my research. That said, I would recommend using the Curise's operator in Belize, simply because of time. While you are not an hour tender ride away, it is a good 15 minutes, and you don't know how long it would be standing in line at each end. Back to Cozumel. The operator was the pits. My first "cattle boat" boat dive. The divided the 20+ of us on the boat into 3 groups. We had no longer than 20 minutes underwater. Between dives one of the crew removed the integrated weight pouches from my buddies BC (I use my own weight belt) and forgot to put them back in. I did a buddy check with him, but was not diligent enough, since I didn't check for weights since there were in for the previous dive. He couldn't get underwater. The dive guide came up after we didn't submerge with the rest of the group and realized (maybe he was the one who took them out?) that my buddy didn't have his weight pockets. He had to call the boat back, which took a while, and this delay resulted in our group having only a 15-20 minute dive. They rushed us back on the boat and took off. As we were walking down the pier with our gear to the Valor, we noticed a second group was loading into the same dive boat. I think a sister ship came in a half hour later than us, and they were taking their divers out. They returned well before (your only gone about 2 hours if you don't count the waiting around to make sure everyone is there) either ship was preparing to leave. That said, I have no idea how you could make arrangement with that dive op to go on both ships cruises'. I won't be using them again in any case.

If you do your due diligence in checking out the tour operators at different ports, you can obtain a far superior excursion and much less cost than what the ship offers. Remember, they can only provide an excursion up to what the weakest person can tolerate. I've seen them trying to carry people up the rain forest so they could ride down in tubes through caves. That group didn't get near the trip we got. Also remember that word travels fast on the internet, especially bad words. If a tour op doesn't get his passengers back to the ship in time, he stands to loose a very significant amount of business in the future. I've had many tell me they have a speed boat on contract to rush us out to the Cruise ship should we be unavoidable detained. That's never happened.