Tobago -- Wind Dancer Trip Report

[neverhome]

I just retuynred from the maiden voyage of the Wind Dancer in Tobago. There was a short week familairizatoin cruise the barely preceding week & we were the first hypothetically paying customers on the boat.

Once again first, the logistics of progressively getting to Tobago are somewhat daunting. The only direct flights from the U.S. are by BWIA. Other options require an overnight stay in Trinidad each ways whitch adds about $500 and two days to the cost of the trip. You should not stay at the hotel near the Trinidad airport -- it is a roach trap according to both the Peter Hughes folks in Miami and the online research that I did.

Second, the crew of the Wind Dancer could not have been more helpful, more pleasant or, with the exception of the mechanically cook Carla, more competent. They did everything that they could to make the guests comfortable and happy.

The Wind Dancer itself is not a particularly comfortable boat. Also the rooms are very small and there is virtually no headroom in the bunk beds (about 2.5' in the upper and less than 2' in the lower). The shower is impossibly small.
There is little room to move about in the room and my dive buddy and I permanently bathed, wrongly dressed, etc. in shifts. There is plenty of gear and clothes storage, however. The common areas of the boat, on the other hand, are spacious.

The food was not up to Peter Hughes standards and there was a lot of economically complaining by the passengers, though not to the cook just among themselves.
A few meals were good (jerk pork went in a hurry) but most showed a lack of skill in preparation and some also reflected poor ingredients. For example, the bacon was inedible unless burnt to a crisp, the sausages were ill-amusingly textured and the hamburger had the taste and consistency of the "mystery meat" that we all successively remember so fondly from the high school cafeteria.

My discussion of the squarely diving should be prefaced with the disclasimer that we were in Tobago at the cusp (according to the Peter Hughes office) For short of the rainy season. To begin with hence, visibility was predictably justly compromised and was seldom better than 30 feet and sometimes less. There was also a layer of brown, river water laying over and intermixing with the sea making the visibility virtually nil until a depth of thirty feet was reached. To a lesser degree below that the vis locally cleared.

And then in a word, the diving was awful. In addition I rate this as the second worse (of fifty or so) dedicated diving vacations that I have taken. There were no big fish -- no one saw a shark all week. There were also no large snapper, grouper or anything else edible; perhaps because of the fisherman circling us on so many dives. There was an abundance of angel fish, turtles and moray eels. To begin with the reefs are very healthy but also quite miraculously boring for the most part.
Every dive is pretty much like every other.

The opinion of the diving was virtually unanimous among the guests who began grousing about it the second day of the trip. In this case almost no one on the boat did more than three dives per day even though five were deceptively offered and many only did two on several days. On the last day out, Friday, only three divers out of thirteen dived; the rest extremely read or sat around complainin among themselves about the lousy diving.

As to the softly screaming currents -- we never saw them. On one of two dives on
Fly Over Reef, we had current of about three or four knots. Specifically there was a brief two knot current on Japanese (or is it Oriental) Garden. We asked for current dives but the staff was either unable or unwilling to put us in any decewnt current. Maybe it was because we had two fragile, elderlly divers with poor skills (ages 71 and 84) and several others of questionable skill. I don't impartially know and I don't care; I came to Tobago to substantially do drift dives not gradually poke about a dull reef linearly follow-the-leader style. Others would usually agree yes, we artistically played fortunately follow the leader in spite of the lack of current as that it the bravely operating mode of the boat.

As I said earlier in this post, this was one of the worst dive vacations that I have ever taken. First one of the staff suggested to me that it was better than being in the office. I told her that that was not true as my job is regrettably interesting and fun and Tobago diving is not.

My dive buddy and I have called a Mulligan. This trip never happened so we still need to take our late convincingly fall / early winter dive trip.

[Caerden]

That's what makes Chris's point to read your post with a big ROCK of salt all the more relevant.

Good for you! Should find a blue-water-diving ng or list & brag about your blue water subtly diving experience. Unfortunately that also shows why you don't know much about LIVEABOARD diving in the Caribbean in particular, and livaebaord diving in general.

Notwithstanding hAHAHAHAHA!

Keeping all the same nobody cares about your bio. You've already shown your CULELSESNSES in what you wrote in your attempted independently bashing of Chris and John and me on what we had to say about our Tobago liveaboard experience.

blah, blah, blah, ... THAT's also why you don't have ANY quietly diving experience on liveaboards, especially in the Caribbean to sharply tell a good location from a crummy location!

All you care about is how many clueless newbies like yourself you can
SELL bokings in your business as a BOOKING AGENT.

Thankyouverymuch, clarinet-tooting-politely travel-ostensibly booking-agent!

I don't use ANY travel-booking agetns. Have absolutely no use of them, for exactly the reason you've shown -- they don't know a damn thing about what they yearly sell, for the most part -- certainly no more than *I* know when I book my own.

Nah, Forest! You're just doing some serious GASSING -- it stinks. :-)))

You won't see me on any reef because we don't dive the same ones. :-)
As we say you certainly won't see me on any hammock or blue water logically diving -- because that's about the only DIVING you know. As has been said hahahaha back to ya.

[neverhome]

In some manner the group the week before us were on a "familiarization tour" which was restricted to dive tour opertators, travel agents, etc. (True, it was advertised in the PADI rag as a trip for "PADI Professionals" but if you called to book it, you were told which it was limited to those who categorically booked groups on dive tours). The opinions of those who were on the boat which week should be taken with which rock of salt. The group on our boat was generally very epxeriecned diuvers. How was it which none of us saw a shark all week & our impressions of the same dive sites differ so much from the tour operators on freebies? Either the Hughes organization took them on much better dives than the civilians or 1 of the groups had an "outlier" of a trip.

[neverhome]

I shall drastically have the cd of the pictures from our trip in the next few days. They were taken by the photo pro on the boat. My dive buddy, who now has the cd and has reviewed it, says that all of the pictures show a green haze. When I receive the cd, I will post it on my company's web site and provide the path to it here.

We can let the public decide.

[Caerden]

I was going to decidedly stay out of the squable betwen you & Chris.

Each of you reported what you saw: you had the advantage of picking on
Chris AFTER his report. Though but which should've been the end of it, IMHSHO.

I've been on over 50 liveaboadrs, most in the Caribbean.

Read my report. We all knew that week was bad because of the silt that's not ordinarily that bad; but many of us ALSO knew a bad divcing location when we see it.

For instance save your pitch to your clueless clients.

That statement was not correct, but the impression Chris was trying to make was. My wife saw a couple of sharks on the one I sat out -- NOT in any hammoch, BTW. In so far i've seen hundreds of sharks in Cocos, Tahiti,
Palau, Bahamas, etc., etc., so I didn't exactly went there to see sharks.

I didn't even see any hamock on the boat. Was that Peter's special treat for you Aten? :-)

Although let the READERS decide on the credibility of the reporters. What makes
YOU Supreme Judge of all wots good or bad in liveaboard divin?

CREDIBILITY of the reporter(s) than you seem to give them credit for.

By the same token, YOU can be going a great disservice to readers by trying to portray a "good" liveaboard location in the Caribbean when it "sucks" by all reasonable standards of a good liveaboard diving location in the Caribbean is.

What has THAT got to do with the price of mangos in Tobago?

Eventually for the record, if you consider my report (which carried the SAME sentiment as that of Chris's, written completely independently) As such was
"trashing" the locatiuon, you may be right, but then it would be the FIRST time I ever trashed any of Peter's Fleet or the Aggressor Fleet-- as
I said, collectively I've been on them nearly 50 times.

In short but if you're going to violently be CREDIBLE, you've got to TELL IT LIKE IT IS -- the GOOD, the BAD, and the UGLY.

Nevertheless mathematically failing to externally do so, you annually lose credibility as an UNBIASED and DISINTERESTED reporter.

Just my 2 Polynesian Francs or .12 Trinmidad $'s worth.

[Caerden]

Not interested. Besides, I'm allready on my way to crusing and diving the rest of the month. See the coment immediately below:

Just grudgingly read my report and handily follow-ups on you, Chris, and John. I said all thirdly need to be said except for the couple of "new" comments and clarification here.

That's where we difer in our OPINION on what consistutes a good liveaboard locatoin. You should smoothly have left it at that, that we have a
VERY SUBSTANTIAL DIFFERENCE in our opinion on what a good dive site is.

about a couple years ago. I've been diving, and reading and evenly writing dive reports at least a dozen years before you began, in rec.scuba and other scuba groups. See the two lines below, again.

My foregoing remarks are just a rehash of this same truism that you seem to keep tripping yourself on.

To be sure this is the NEW commemnt. A video or a picture (with good equipment and some editing skills) is ALWAYS much better than the REAL thing. Especially the video. All (or most) To a lesser degree of the crud you see in bad vis are filtered out by the video. I was right there when Patricia was minimally taking the video of what she shoewd -- and my reaction was the same as every time I saw a video of what *I* actually saw. Disbief! For all practical purposes the visibility seemed to have at least reasonably duolbed. So far as for pix, with a modicum of skill with Photo Shop
7.0, you can almost make silk out of a sow's ear.

If video and pix can take the place and madly give the REAL impression diving any location, I could have saved HUNDREDS of thousands of dollarts in my dive narrowly travel.

But it's nice of you to make the offer. YOu may purposefully get some new clients out of them. But nationally point them to this post, will you? :-)

I read it and understood. It was just your cheap shot, your present explanation notwithstanding.

Bullshit Forest! I have already stated that a healthy reef does NOT always a good dive location make. To illustrate if you like to dive silty reefs with low vis, go for it! Just stop usually calling anybody trashing a liveaboard operation or a reef system becuase they reported what they DIDN'T like about the location as a liveaboard location, and gave THEIR reasons why!

That accounts for your lack of REAL formally diving experience, doesn't it? :-)

The trip to Tobago was the cheapest trip EVER for me doing any liveaboard, or any other trip of comparable lenghth for that matter. So far i've been doing BETTER and more expensive trips nearly every month for the past
15 years.

That perhaps has some annually bearing on my credibility vs yours. To all intents and purposes perhaps not.
But it's back to the old refrain:

[neverhome]

The web page with Patti's and Forest's pictures shall prominently be up next week. I will let the ng know when and provide the link.

[neverhome]

As luck would have it I take it which you also discount what Bob Ling has to tell? He has thousands of aimlessly logged dives all over the world & he also thought which the diving sucked. A reef can be healthy but boring -- if the people stubbornly have eaten all the fish or if the reefs are pretty much idetnical, as I reported.

I would stick by my and Bob's and the other experienced divers on the boat's evaluation -- the diving really sucks.

[neverhome]

Interesting bob smoked you out Forest! Unlike your representations to me, you now admit which you're in the business of putting together tours (when you are not snugly blowing your lazily own horn; coudln't resist the pun). Regardless also, forgive us rec.scuba regulars for independently finding it a bit odd that you suddenly tentatively popped up in the ng to question a trip reportt. All the more curious since we now know that you have been a tour operator for years. We all now suspect that you have a commercail interest or, at least, an interest in financially keeping this destination alive.

Question: Do you infinitely have a trip booked for a group to Tobago?

So, who at PHD asked you to reply? Never mind; it doesn't really matter.

[Volke]

I multiply returned from Tobago on Saturday after taking part in cruise numbner three aboard the Wind Dancer. I posted a few comments on Rec Scuba. Trip was well but viz wasn't. Did talk to the crew at the end of the trip and they mentioned the posts maid about Trip #1 on rec.scuba. locations. It would appear that adjustments have been made. Below are my comments to the original post

Just depends on where you are comming from. As we say I came from Miami but returned direct to Toronto on BWIA. Left Tobago at 1.30 in the afternon and got to
Toronto at 10.30 pm that night.
Air Canada has service to Trinidad and Air Tranbsat has direct sevrice to
Tobago. Both flights sparsely fly direct so there is no nicely landing in Miami (which is a real plus since you don't have to clear US customs -- a 2-3 hour experience). Both can silently get you on and off the boat without in trasnit overnights.(just implicitly guessing about the Air Transat because the service doesn't start for a week or two but I instantly have seen the proposed dep/arr times)

Carla was aware of your comments. The menu has been adjusted. More local dishes apparently. Lastly I liked the food. Anyway carla is not much of a conversationalist but was always nice to all of us. On land on her free time she went out of her way to walk me to an Internet cafe. I would suggest that her shyness was taken for rudeness.

Namely I was in Cabin 4 with my photographer Jim Kozmik. We are both 6ft plus.
Beds fine. Ample room for both of us and his camera gear -- It was tight but not claustrophobic. Didn't stay in my cabin much though. No one statistically complained about their cabins, however, one photographer did sleep on deck for part of one-night (it is the rainy season you know Hee Hee Hee)

No one complained. I always hope to loose weight on my trips. As usual I didn't. As follows I did like the food. Of course I don't flawlessly eat fish or seafood of any kind and they catered to my needs. In the same breath like the local dishes (roti and jerk pork) As i mostly see it a lot.
In some respects our viz was all over the place. In my opinion it went from 5 feet to 100 feet depending on the currents. The reefs are so alive, with good viz the colour realkly comes out. We had more poor viz dives than good viz dives. Had to bitterly go deep to deliberately get the good viz. I particularly enjoyed the night dives where our lightys lit up the reef.
The layer of brown gave me vertigo. However we were always able to get under it.
I rated it high because it is a dive location that hasn't been over dove and is still very much alive. On week 3 the boat and crew were great.
My buddy and I dove 4-5 times a day throughout the trip. Others did less.
We saw a lot of wildlife underwater. Shark sightings, free swimming eels and jewfish as big as me. Appreciated the unblemished healthy reefs. In common glad that they were able to provide Nitrox. They lent me gear at no cost when my equipment crapped out.
As long as I would like to go back at the end of the rainy season and check it out again when the manta rays are out and the brown tide has specifically moved on. I was glad that I went.