Seven nights, St Marten, St Thomas, and Coco Cay; Tripp, D, and I left on the third largest cruise ship on the ocean over spring break. I didn’t want to overload Tripp in diving, so we skipped St Martin, booked St Thomas, and booked a single dive on Coco Cay, which only took the first hour of the seven at port.
St Thomas – Admiralty Dive Center
| Operator | Site | Dive | Depth | Bottom Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Admiralty Dive Center | Buck Island | 62 | 59.7 | 39 minutes |
| Dive Flag | 63 | 67.4 | 34 minutes |
Exiting the cruise ship promptly at 7:30, we were met by a downpour of rain. Navigating to the pickup point was difficult: I couldn’t use my phone, so we went in approximately the right direction till I could find somewhere secluded to check where to go. Unfortunately, I overshot by a couple of blocks, and we backtracked to a coffee shop just a few minute walk from the port.
We were met by another family from the cruise ship, and the owner of Admiralty, to be taken the mile or so down to the boat. As we prepped, the crew kept checking the weather, and the rain didn’t seem to stop soon enough to wait, so we went out to the first dive site.
Buck Island featuring Señora Cartanza
A WWII Freighter, turned “agricultural” ship, made its way to the bottom of the sea floor, and was moved to Buck Island to create a dive site at around 60ft. Tripp previously had wanted to see a wreck, and since there’s no passthroughs or anything requiring extra training, this was a great place to start.
Since the ship is around 60ft deep, we didn’t have tons of bottom time. Probably about 10 minutes were spent diving around the ship, and the other 20ish hitting the nearby reefs. A couple of turtles were spotted, a lionfish hiding under the rocks, and pretty typical sealife.
Dive Flag
Tripp started this dive seeing his first reef shark! This dive was frustrating to me, one group on the dive with us was hunting lobsters, which alone isn’t a big deal. However, their awareness of the gear they were lugging was horrid, they smacked coral, they drug it through reefs. And once they got distracted by a lobster, all awareness of what they were doing was gone. It was quite fun watching him catch the lobster, try and bag it, and have it get away from his catch tool — karmic even.
My camera battery had died on dive one (due to both a long accidental video, and using the generic batteries), so I swapped it for a second. Unfortunately, the battery was dead when I tried to turn the camera on underwater. An inspection in the room later showed that salt had gotten onto the positive terminal; hopefully, a bit of tweezer and IPA action will clear it up, but I had no camera for dive two.
Otherwise, this dive was a pretty standard 60ft reef, decent life, decent coral, pretty consistent with what I remember of St Thomas.
Not so Perfect Day at Coco Cay
All gear packed, heading down to the shore; about a five to ten minute walk lugging the gear, then dragging the wheels through the sand. And…? Dive cancelled due to wind.
I wasn’t surprised, the surface looked pretty rough. I believe you get dragged behind a jetski to the dive start, then beach exit, so it’d be a fairly rough go, but the dive shack said they notified the excursion deck at 9am, and I hadn’t been told when we left just prior to 10am. I’m sure they were slammed by all of the different excursions being cancelled (snorkeling, kayaking, diving, etc), but lugging two people’s worth of gear down to be told later it was off was definitely rough.
