A two pronged question... how is the diving operation, and how are the dive sites served nearby described...
From the TB Website:
Our dive boats leave daily at 8:45 am, 11 am and 2 pm. We do one night dive per week. We scuba dive mainly on the north shore of Roatan in the area between Sandy Bay and Punta Gorda. Only a few minutes away from our shop you’ll find some of Roatan’s best dive sites. Like the world famous Dolphin Den and the wreck of the Odyssey.
The best thing about diving the north east side of Roatan is not having to share the dive sites with other dive operations. All our dive sites are private and only dived by Subway Watersports.
Having the dive sites close by we come back to the dive shop for our surface intervals.
When we go to some of the further dive sites we do a two tank dive in the morning and one tank in the afternoon. On request we offer two tank dives or day trips to the fantastic Morat Wall with surface interval at Pigeon Cay a tiny deserted island.
Each of our four dive boats takes no more than 6 to12 scuba divers to one dive site and all dives are guided by a PADI Divemaster. We do multilevel dive profiles with one hour dive time.
We keep a dive boat on the South Side of Roatan as an alternative in case of rough sea and also to offer you diving on Roatan's most famous dive site Mary's Place. We are one of the few resorts that can guarantee 365 dive days per year.
The hotel dive package includes 3 boat dives per day. Should the sea conditions not allow us to do 3 day dives out of the dive shop we will take our guests by bus to an alternate location on the south side so that you can still get two dives in that day. This scenario may happen between December and March during a cold front.
Notes: The divesites are "private" only when they are not being used by another dive-op, which would indeed be most of the time- they would be exclusive to TB... although, the two that they mention are hardly strangers to other competing dive ops.
Their description of their valid bad weather options is telling. Other dive ops located N/W just give up when the weather turns bad and Northers close down diving up that way. Most dive ops located N/W don't even admit these oft encountered situations- but TB through Subway has access to boats on the south side where the diving is all but 365. This is one of the very few N/W ops that is so flexible. In that they only offer a 1-two tank boat dive when this occurs is a real negative, this is the price you pay for a N/W side dive op. At least they are doing their best- a lot better than almost anyone else in that situation!
Taking the occasional very rough weather into account- think about what eons of such weather has created in terms of reef structure. Diving on the N/W is deeper, darker (it is shaded from the Sun), and has fewer color and Corals, but has dramatic channels and chutes that have been battered into the walls. (As compared to FI's South shore)
Their description goes through some interesting twists. To answer your question directly- their dive times are similar to FIBR, but FI offers you night diving via shore dive any time... TB can not offer shore diving as the reef is far out from shore.
As with FI, I always urge readers to do some math while looking at the clock. TB does refer to 1 hour dive times, something which FI doesn't necessarily offer. That said, at TB:
8:45 leave dock
9:00 tie off & jump in
10:00 exit dive
10:20 return to dock
11:00 depart
11:15 in water
12:15 out
12:35 back home
14:00 depart, dive #3
The above TB schedule, as you can see, is a lot easier to get all three boat dives (and lunch) than FIBR's schedule, which really pushes most people to 2 boat dives per day. As you likely recall, it was a hustle to try to make it to both AM boats at FI.
If you go, you tell us: Can you really get through the lunch process at the "well-known to be" pokey-slow dining facility at TB- so that you can do the jump-off-the-boat boogie at 12:35 and be back, ready to dive at 1400 hrs? It's tough to mix dive-dive-dive with the Honduran conception (glacially slow) of upscale meal service.
Make no mistake- It is still a resort schedule designed to allow guests greater flexibility of dive time options... versus greater quantity of dives.
Before retaining Subway to provide their dive services, the place was absolutely laughable as a dive resort. I believe that TB has one of the best DM's I have ever met, Osman Gomez, working there at Turquoise Bay, and that is, to me, a really big deal.
