Roatan Dive Excursion: Anthony's Key Resort

[timetraveler]

I see that your ship was Royal Caribbean. Mine is the Crown Princess. Unless my information is incorrect, my ship docks at 10AM Roatan time.
I'm sorry to hear that AKR takes 16 divers on its boat. That is not my favorite kind of dive trip, but as of now, it seems to be the only practical choice.

 

[petsin]

You should double check that, as I was asured by my travel agency that all Ports of Call docking times were local time (like planes), but they really were "ship time", which is usually the time zone of the departing port. All our ports of call were on he same time zone as the ship (GMT-5) with the exception of Roatan which was GMT-6. This made me doubt that I was going to make it thus I only prepaid 1 dive with Barefoot divers in case I would really arrive at Roatan at 10:00am and miss the 10:30am dive. But, in the end Barefoot divers were correct in telling me that I would arrive at 9am and the travel agency was wrong.
So, if your ship is departing from Florida (GMT-5), most probably you will arrive at 9am at Roatan if your ship info. says 10am. Most of the other Caribbean islands are on GMT-5 so you will arrive at the correct local time there.

Also, if your ship arrives to Mahogany Bay, then you are really close to Barefoot Resort compared to my ship that arrived to Coxen Hole, about twice as far. It will take you 10 min to reach the resort and you wont get into a traffic jam in your way back as was my case.

 

[paula1326]

We used the Carnival excursion in Nov. 2010 for the 2 tank dive in Roatan. It was a bad operation! The operator was Anthony's Key. They sent one boat with captain, 1 dive guide, 1 dive master. There were 21 of us diving. Way too crowded. They divided us up into 2 group and my group was told to get in and descend to about 40' where our guide would meet us. While getting in one-by-one and then descending we were unaware that we're being swept away by the current. Descended to 110' and realized there was nothing around at all. Began to slowly come up, most of the time I had two other people swimming near me (OUT OF 11). By the time my husband and I surfaced we were 1/4 mile from the boat. Since there was only the captain on board we had trouble getting noticed. Swam for a long,long,long time before he came to us. Then he had to shut off the motors, run down and to the back of the boat, to help us out of the water. We were the first back to the boat.

Some people were very frightened, some very angry. We talked with the dive master about our guide and she apologized for the fiasco. So we decided to do a second dive where the entire group would gather around a buoy and descend together. That dive was awesome along a wall with all 21 of us in line. Safe and happy. But-- there is no excuse for Anthony's Key to skimp on personnel. They allowed a potentially fatal situation to occur. Unforgivable when I'm paying full price for a service.

 

[hypertech]

If you were supposed to be at 40 and ended up at 110, I don't think you can blame the boat or DM.

My experience was the opposite. About 10 on the boat. The DM led the dive well and did a good job pointing things out and keeping the group together.

 

[dmoore19]

Paula 1236, you don't say what site you went to but having been to Roatan and staying at AKR,
some of the dives sites have current and are drift dives. We always did our safety stop right below the boat and it was easy to just come up, when the ladder was not being used, and climb aboard.

Sorry you had such a miserable time in such a wonderful place.

 

[dmoore19]

Paula 1236, you don't say what site you went to but having been to Roatan and staying at AKR,
some of the dives sites have current and are drift dives. We always did our safety stop right below the boat and it was easy to just come up, when the ladder was not being used, and climb aboard.

Sorry you had such a miserable time in such a wonderful place.

 

[divezonescuba]

We did the cruiseship thing to AKR. Our primary purpose was to see if we would want to stay there a whole week. After doing the dives, we decided to pass.

One of the things that disturbed us was that they kept saying that they wanted us to do a bouyancy check off of the dock before we left. We'll I've seen better visibility in a bottle of chocolate milk. Apparently they had some rain recently. Ultimately, they did not do the buoyancy check contrary to what they kept telling us.

The dives were so-so.

Next time, we might try to do something with Coco View, if thats possible.

A nice thing about the resort was at least on our trip they did not pack us into the boats. They were very large PRO 48s with plenty of space for everyone. The tanks were also filled to 3000. This was a welcome change from Costa Maya were we dove with Dream Time.