This report is written by Ken who enjoyed the services of Aldora Divers in late March 1997.
Aldora's dive boats at Playa del Sol for lunch.
The diving in Cozumel is absolutely spectacular. Most of the main attraction dives are shear walls starting with coral heads and buttresses at 40-60 feet and dropping to depths as great as 600-1000 feet. The coral ridgeline defining the inner and outer portions of the reef can be as high as 60 feet itself. There are swim throughs on every dive and some dives have caverns and tunnels. Everything is covered in colorful corals and sponges. You typically cover a lot of ground on each dive as there is a 2-5 kt current that you ride gliding by the scenery. It is easy to duck behind a ridge if you want to stop and look at something. There are lots of divers in the water each day, but they are spread out over many many miles of reef due to this drift diving so you don't actually run into many people underwater (assuming you dive with the right people, see below). There is lots and lots of sea life including small tropicals, large grouper, large eels, barracuda, turtles, rays, enormous lobsters, sea cucumbers and much much more. I think we saw something more unusual, or larger, or smaller than we'd ever seen before every day we were there. Typically you don't see too many large pelagics (like sharks or dolphins) since you dive the inside of the channel and there is a tremendous amount of diver related noise in the water which tends to keep them at a distance. Visibility is typically in excess of 100 ft. Water temperature is at its coldest 78F and up to 84F in the summer.
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Barracuda |
It is vital that you dive with the right people if you go, and near as I can tell there is only one company that fits the bill. We dove with Aldora Divers. The diving market is extremely competitive there. In peak season there can be up to 1500 divers in the water a day. This mass market has driven prices down to $40 for a two-tank dive trip.
Whatever you do, DON'T SIGN ON WITH LOW PRICE OPERATORS. Life will be hell for you. Drift diving requires that you stay together in your group as a boat follows your bubbles above. The group must descend and ascend together. You must exit and board a live boat (one with the engine running). This all must be done for safety as a result of the strong currents. The problem with the cheap operators is not that they are unsafe (there are very few accidents for the number of divers there) but that the safety constraints combined with their style of diving will make your trip miserable.
We watched a lot of the cheap boats each morning. They typically start slow and late and get to crowded dive sites. The boat rides are as long as 45 minutes. They break up into "small" groups of 8 divers and a master. They dive a rectangular profile on Al 80's. They get *maybe* 20 minutes bottom time at the deep depths of Cozumel dives (down to 130ft, average dive is to 100ft). This is assuming no one in your group screws up forcing everybody to the top. We heard many stories of boats dropping their divers imprecisely and the group spending almost all their bottom time fighting current to find the reef. If your lucky they might have enough computer divers to form a computer diver group, but bottom times won't improve much due to the small air supply and the fact that you can be guaranteed to have at least one air-sucker in the group forcing everybody up. The boats are often packed with 24 to 40 divers for the larger ones, and at least 16 on the smaller ones. You take a short surface interval and do a shallow inshore second dive, probably further north on the island close to town where all the boring reefs are so the boat can get back early enough to take out an afternoon group of divers. Your day ends by lugging your gear up to your hotel room to rinse it in bathtub or shower and then hanging it on your balcony.
We paid $65 a day with no package deals available. It was worth every penny and was good enough that the two of us paid a combined tip of $20 every day we were there (and felt we were tipping on the low side). We dove with Aldora Divers. They have 4 boats that cruise at 35-40 kts and can reach the southern dive sites in 15 minutes. Every morning started with us passing all the other dive boats and being in the water before they were a speck on the horizon. They picked us up at our hotel dock. They took our equipment when we arrived and stored it, put it on the boat that would meet us, and rinsed and stored it each night. There are never more than 6 to a boat and the divers are split by ability so you'll only run into an air sucker if you are one too. The boats have GPS so we always dropped right where we should have. They use high pressure steel tanks up to 120 cu ft in size. Bottom times are always at least an hour. Everybody uses computers and the dive masters dive perfect triangular profiles spending the maximum time at each depth. You take a long surface interval at a beach resort to have an early lunch and do a second dive at a real site, still at depths up to 90 ft with hour or longer bottom times. When we got off the boat we just left our gear and walked across the street to our hotel. This is the only way to dive in my book.
We dove for six days, two dives a day and a night dive on one day. Here are the dive summaries, and some of these include other occurrences of the day not diving related. They have been written sequentially so figures and pictures or descriptions of sea-life are omitted in subsequent occurrences.
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