Hi Carlos,
Thanks for replying back to me. I personally, as a non-diver, really appreciate your descriptions of topside activities. What types of restaurant cuisines are there? For example Mexican, Indian, Italian, Thai, Chinese, or Japanese. Are there any other land-based activities in addition to the hiking? I would love to try zip-lining. You mentioned it was a fairly large place. Are there places to run quads?
I am currently pursuing my AAS degree in hotel and tourism management. Did tourism take a big hit from the hurricane? How did the hotels fair? I plan to gain employment at a hotel/resort as an event manager.
I read your comments about diving to my husband, and he asked several more questions. He said the 30ft giant stride sound exhilarating. He wondered how you managed 125 minutes at 60 feet? The RDP limits 60-foot dives to 55 minutes, and even if it didn't, that's a long time on one tank. He said it must have been a steel 100. Is that correct? What type of creatures swim the waters at night?
It has been a number of years since I was there, but from all I saw of the aftermath from the recent Hurricanes (
Maria) I'm sure some things have changed; looked like a lot of damage. My comments were based on what I remember from our trip years ago, so not really in a position to attest to how life on the island is currently. Hopefully they are recovering well. Perhaps someone else will chime-in with news on how things are going. There were some interesting places to eat and hangout, but you had to dig around to find the special ones. As I recall many of the good spots leaned towards the usual Mediterranean/seafood, etc., but it's been a while.
The island is about 22 miles long with just about every type of terrain; even strangely divergent micro-climates from lush humid rain forests to dry/arid scrub-land; from flat areas to steep and hilly, and everything in between. Some places are breathtakingly beautiful; others not so much. I recall there being a lot of cyclists around. There are a few golf courses, and I wouldn't be surprised if they had some good zip-lining somewhere. Never noticed any quads while I was there, but probably could do some horseback riding. We stayed at
Carambola in Davis Bay, which was just beautiful at the time. We shore dove the whole area from Cane Bay almost all the way down to Hams Bluff; plus many of the western sites, including the famed Frederiksted Pier. The shore diving alone was one of the big attractions for me at the time.
Most people dive the Frederiksted Pier in kind of a "
down-n-back" fashion; were the profile would progress from shallow to deep, then back to shallow. It was a little difficult to dive the entire thing down and back on an standard AL80. So, we rented some AL100s from Carambola, drove to Frederiksted, and jumped off the far end of the pier; which is a pretty fair walk from shore fully loaded. From there you have to surface swim the remaining distance out to the very end of the structure. We were able to do the extended dive time because only the start of the dive was at 60ft. From there you are immediately progressing into shallower and shallower depths getting off-gas credits until you are back at the shore end, which was maybe 10ft-15ft deep; never even got close to blowing out. We even had time to go back along the ruins of the previously pier structure that had been destroyed in a hurricane many years before. [
My all-time record is 128 minutes in Cozumel on a steel HP120/EAN36 starting from about the middle of Palancar Gardens, across Dalila, and finishing at the end of La Francesa Shallows - no fish story!]
Anyway, as far sea life is concerned; pretty much all the usual stuff you would expect to find in the Caribbean. Sea Horses seemed to be what everyone was talking about at the time, but I remember there seemed to be an unusually high turtle population in the area. Some other divers at the hotel had seen pods of dolphins and a shark or two, but we never got to see those on that trip. I believe there are Humpback whale migrations through there during certain times of the year too, but did not see any of those either unfortunately. The craziest thing were the hermit crabs. We were there right in the middle of the mating season, and they were everywhere and on everything - millions of them covering just about every square foot of the resort.
I had considered moving to the USVI myself at one time, but would probably want to get a better assessment of how their recovery is looking. I dove Grand Turk a full year after hurricane Ike flattened the island, and they were still struggling with a lot of issues at the time. Just an unfortunate reality of Caribbean life.
