Express has a nice looking shop and their check in procedure is run well. I dived 7/30, 7/31, and 8/01 last year. I dived the Bill Perry, 11-mile (tugboat), and Goldfinch Reef. 11-mile had the best viz at 15 feet, the other two were more like 5-10 feet. It may have been a fluke last year as I remember hearing reports at the dive club meetings of Moorhead City, NC having crappy viz last year too and I know that is out of the ordinary for NC.
Water temperature was about 77-79 degrees at depth. The three sites I visited ranged from 50-65 feet.
Another plus with Express is you can park and unload your gear pretty close to the marina and their boat. You do have to move your vehicle after it is unloaded, but only across the street to where the shop is. Traffic is something to consider, although I stayed at North Myrtle Beach and at 7AM there really wasn't anyone on the road between there and Murrell's Inlet.
If you did a search you probably found some of my comments in another posting, but in case you didn't here's some of it.
The boat rides are about 45-60 minutes one way. There were 4 or 5 people that got pretty sick on each dive I did. I would recommend motion sickness remedies. One guy got sick while gearing up and couldn't get out of his harness or get his tank out of the rack to stand up in time and ended up puking on his buddy. Not cool.
As far as pricing goes, it varies with the distance of the sites, but I paid $90-100 for the charter plus another $15 to rent each Nitrox tank as I didn't have my own tanks at the time.
They have water on the boat, but you need to bring your own snacks.
My wife ended up canceling her remaining 4 dives after encountering the low viz the first day. They were very understanding and gave her a full refund even though their policy says otherwise. Also, they ended up changing one of the sites due to heavy currents and called me the day before to inform me. I ended up switching to an alternate day because I would have repeated 11-mile twice if I kept the same dive days. No problem whatsoever with switching.
One thing I learned from the experience was to get your dives in early on in your trip, especially if you don't plan to dive every day of your vacation. That way if weather or other circumstances cause you to miss a dive or prevent you from diving the site you really wanted to visit, you have a chance to make it up later that week. If you wait until the back end of your trip, you have less flexibility.
The Express Watersports webpage has much better viz estimates on their wreck descriptions, so hopefully the low viz I encountered is not the norm. In any event, you are on a wreck, so it's not like you're going to get lost (as long as you stay on the wreck).
Let us know what the conditions are like when you return.
