The following report has been picked up on the Internet on January the 2nd. 1997. The content is as written by the author.

The article is fetched from http://www.proaxis.com/~barton/scubadiving/tripreports/cozumel.htm

The author, Barton T. Brown, can be contacted on e-mail at barton@proaxis.com

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Cozumel, Mexico

Dec 13 - Dec 25, 1996

Cozumel 1996

Cozumel is certainly a good location for those divers that like effortless drift diving and varied bottom topograghy ranging from shear walls with arches and dive through’s to wide, flat reefs teaming with colorful fish.

My wife, Claudia, and I spent 8 days diving in Cozumel in December 1996. What follows is a brief synopsis of what we experienced.

Disclaimer:

I have absolutely no financial connections with either Fiesta Inn or Aldora Divers, except of course that I paid my bills!

Travel:

There are at least three general ways to get to Cozumel

1. fly to Cancun then fly via Mexicana/aeromexical to Cozumel
2. fly to Cancun, drive down the coast and take a ferry to Cozumel,
3. fly directly into Cozumel.

It seems obvious that one would do the third option but since we were using up frequent flyer miles, we had to fly to Cancun then flew on to Cozumel. This approach will add a couple of hours to your trip time and about $50/person round trip to your airline ticket costs.

Lodging:

We stayed at the Fiesta Inn just south of San Miguel (10 minute walk to town or $1.50 taxi ride). The Fiesta Inn is billed as a medium priced hotel (~$80 night/room). The accommodation’s were clean and nice. We had a third floor room with an ocean view which made the 6:00am wake up time tolerable (the dive boat arrived promptly at 8:00am). The most striking architectural feature of the Fiesta Inn is a large, nicely landscaped swimming pool and courtyard surrounded on three sides by the hotel. The hotel is across the road from the ocean but access is easy and safe via a short tunnel under the two lane street. The food at the onsite restaurant was very good and moderately priced. The service was excellent.

Dive Operator:

Now for the best part. Before the trip, we reserved space with Aldora Divers. Their selection was based mostly on information available on the internet (both their web site and discussion on rec.scuba). They are a little more expensive than some dive operators ($65/two tank dive vs. ~$50) but well worth the difference based on our experience. What do you get for the price premium? Small dive groups (six divers max plus dive master) and potentially much longer bottom times - see the table below of our dives with an average dive time of 80 minutes!. I say potentially because that depends on you and your air consumption rate. Aldora does ONLY computer diving, not dive tables. If you don’t have a computer, they supply one for your use. Using computers, combined with high pressure 80, 102, or 120 cu ft steel tanks opens the door for extended bottom times. Your first two tank dive will be a relatively shallow 80 ft. and is considered a checkout dive for the DM to asses your skills. After the first day they make every attempt to put equal skill levels on to the same boat (they have three boats now with another almost finished). So how did this translate into bottom times? Daniel was our DM the first day. Each of the other buddy pairs had a new diver with high air consumption so our dive times were about 55 minutes (compared to ~35 minutes for those operations using PADI tables). The second day, we were put on a boat with just one other couple who were new to Aldora (by the way, Aldora picked us up at the Fiesta Inn dock). Our dive master was Antonio. Prior to the first dive I whined a little to Antonio about not wanting to spend the rest of the week doing repeat checkout dives. This may have set the stage for the dives to follow. Both of the other divers on the boat had high air consumption and needed to start their safety stops after about 45 minutes into the dive. Rather than have us all ascend, Antonio sent up an inflatable marker on a rope, which he held. The other divers ascended to 15 feet, did their safety stop and were picked up by the boat. We continued our dive until we reached 1000 psi, at which time we also ascended for our safety stop. Our dive times increased to about 75 minutes. The next day we repeated this process with 76 and 80 minute dives. The following day we did a 121 fs dive that lasted a total of 90 minutes followed by a 50 fs dive lasting 115 minutes. This was apparently an new dive time for Aldora so Antonio suggested the next day that we try to add some margin to this record. The result was a 56 fs max depth dive for 121 minutes. The three of us each surfaced with 600 psi left. Claudia and Antonio used 102 cf tanks, I had a 120 (although Antonio had to share about 500 psi from Claudia). The whole point of this drawn out story is that if dive time is a priority, I would highly recommend Aldora. While we went for dive time, we were always safer than the safety margins Aldora uses for deco times and the out gassing safety stop..

 Did we see anything? Only nurse sharks, turtles, rays, large green moray eels, spotted eel, barracuda, lobster, crab, squid (night dive), octopus, the endangered Mexican toad fish, groupers, the standard array of parrot and angle fish, and very interesting coral. Since this was all drift diving, it was almost effortless (hence the long dive times) while at the same time we covered large distances. We saw one - two miles of reef on our two hour dive.

One additional note. The minimum water temperature was 78-79 degrees F. A 2mm suit WAS NOT ENOUGH for 70 - 120 minutes in the water. I strongly recommend getting a second 2-3mm shorty wet suit to add as a second layer over your standard warm water (2mm) suit.

Dive Buddies:

If you happen to read this, a warm hello to Bill, Angela, Jim, Kris, Matt and Grace. We enjoyed diving with you. And Jim, your hysterical laughter at 60 fsw when I was 'attacked' by that moray eel was permanently recorded on my video. Claudia and I get a real kick out of that segment of the tape!

Dive Masters:

Aldora has three full time dive masters: Memo, Antonio, and Daniel and one 'contract DM', Flash. Memo, Antonio and Daniel are certified instructors while Flash is DM certified. We did not get a chance to dive with Memo, but if his in-water presence matches his attitude on land, it should be an enjoyable dive. We dove the first day with Daniel. He was very competent, although he swam a little faster than I preferred. We had two dives with Flash, the first was somewhat of a disaster (we missed the entrance to Devil's Throat) but he really worked hard to make it up to us on the second dive. Antonio? I hope all our future dive masters will be like him. Very competent, very aware of what his divers were doing, very aware of his surroundings. He aborted one dive because of strong current in the wrong direction and took us to another location where we had an excellent dive. I especially liked the speed of his dives - very slow so you had plenty of time to look.

Summary:

Would we go back again and use Aldora Divers? YES! After 19 dives at Cozumel, we will visit other locations first to have new experiences but I expect we will be going back - as long as we can dive with Aldora. I am afraid that they have permanently raised our expectation level for dive operators. I can only hope that we will be lucky enough to find other dive operators at other locations that use high pressure tanks, limit the size of the dive group, and require computer diving.

Dive Operator: Aldora Divers

Send comments and suggestions to barton@proaxis.com

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