Dominican Republic
This isn’t Muck Diving! True, but that doesn’t mean those in the Midwest cannot treat themselves to some of the more exotic diving experiences. Because the traditional Muck Diver doesn’t dive in paradise everyday information on dive ops, hotels, what should I do and not do become essential when planning a trip to paradise. Because of all these questions, we thought we would give everybody a one-stop place to go to learn about these places and hopefully help with planning your next trip. Once again, the success of this relies upon those that have taken the journey. So, please help out and tell us about your trips and what worked and what did not work.
Dominican Republic – Dive Report
September 2010
Original Post by FinBob on ScubaBoard
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Bayahibe is reported to be the best dive area in the Dominican Republic
(DR). Samana and Punta Cana being acknowledged as other dive sites. We
stayed at the Iberostar hotel, I had a total of 14-dives over a 2-week
period with Dressel Divers an on-site, Belgium company. The instructors
were young, multi-lingual and enthusiastic. Generally I found Dressel to be
a professional operation with training offered at both the OW & AOW
level, but limited in PADI specialty. The dive briefings were informative,
the staff helpful with safety a priority. You dived to their profile and
the dive ended at 750psi. You carried your own gear (50 yards) to the boat
were tanks were waiting. The boats accommodated around 16-divers with a DM
for every 6-8 divers. The dive day was morning 8:30AM and afternoon 1:30PM.
I preferred a double tank morning dive but this was not an option. However,
a night dive was offered once/week. Island excursions were available to:
Catalina and Catalinita with lunch on the beautiful Saona Island.
The coral was decent, as was the fish: stingrays, trumpets, puffers,
lions, box, trunk, pipe & a large Jack fish. However the visibility was
not as good as hoped for. The highlights for me were the two wrecks: St
George (105′)& Atlantic Princess (42′), along with an exciting first
night dive: Octopus, cuttlefish and moray eels! If you do go, the best DM
is Julie
My fiance and myself went diving off of Catalina Island right before Christmas this past year. She loved it. The only thing I didn’t like was the fact that it was definately a well know dive spot and boats of all sizes were docked there, either for diving or to just visit the island. I believe this was the reason that the viz wasn’t up to what I was expecting (I was certified in the keys where I was used to 100ft+ viz (my fiance was certified up here so she probably didn’t mind the 50-60 ft viz)). It also kind of bothered me that out Divemaster was going around touching all of the reefs. But on a positive note, we broke my fiance’s fear of going down deep (90+ft on our first dive) and we had a very memorible dive that she will probably never forget.
As far as hotels and stuff like that, we stayed at the Grand Paridise in Bravero (outside of Punta Cana). It was one of the cheapest all inclusive resorts that we could find. (don’t go there unless you have a strong digestive fortutude, she got sick right before we left and we think it was because of the pizza that we ate one day). We went down on the first day to try talk to the dive center on the beach. They told us that they would only go if they had 12-15 people, and that we would need to find the rest of the group to go. So we decided to walk down the beach to the other resorts in the area and tried to figure out if any of them would take us out. About four resorts down, we made our way to the Baja Principe where we found a better deal and a we didn’t have to find others because they were filling the boats on there own.