Disappointing Diving
Jul 14, 2024 Jasper17Cot
Sandals Grenada is a beautiful resort with a number of great restaurants and the usual service that you expect from Sandals. We were there before the hurricane in 2024 and hope that the resort and all the staff and their families have avoided the worst of the devastation that this storm brought.
We would particularly like to mention Ginger in the…
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Sandals Grenada is a beautiful resort with a number of great restaurants and the usual service that you expect from Sandals. We were there before the hurricane in 2024 and hope that the resort and all the staff and their families have avoided the worst of the devastation that this storm brought.
We would particularly like to mention Ginger in the Loyalty and Travel Office, Antonette in the Italian restaurant and the lovely Kisselle around the pool by the beach and for their great service and friendliness during our stay.
The Diving
We had chosen Sandals Grenada predominantly as it was recommended as a great diving resort. The diving unfortunately disappointed. We did a number of dives over several consecutive days. Our main complaint was the lack of organization. The dive boat rarely departed on time. There were often delays due to insufficient weight belts, insufficient weights, insufficient regulators. On several occasions the tanks were not filled up to the standard 3000 psi, but were at around the 2500 psi level. The dive staff blamed this on customers not identifying used tanks at the end of a dive. This is not the case - a diver does not come out of the water with 2500 psi remaining. The likely cause of these low pressures is that the tanks were filled in the sunshine in the heat of an afternoon and then cooled.
There was rarely any indication of which divers would be going with which Dive Master until a minute or two before we were due to get into the water. Some groups would be very large – up to 12 divers with one DM. Allocation of groups was generally determined by where you happened to be sitting on the boat or by DM’s picking their favorite guests. It was unusual for a group to be allocated based on similar experience or preferences.
A fault of some DMs underwater was that they would often be well ahead of the rest of the group and seldom turned around to check if the accompanying divers were OK. If any diver had had a problem, it is unlikely that the DMs would have noticed.
It was rarely possible to get a straight answer to a straight question, for example asking “Where are we going today?” or “Who am I diving with today?” would invariably lead to the response “You will find out momentarily”.
Sandals has introduced an “Elite Diver“ status in recent years. This is a paid-for service that entitles divers to a guaranteed spot on the dive boat and a free private dive during their stay. This system has been poorly thought-out and leads to further problems on the boat. The Elite Divers can just turn up in the morning (without booking) and request a spot on the boat. This means that the Dive Team do not necessarily know how many divers will be on the boat on any particular day. Elite Divers on a private dive have their own dedicated DM, which means that other divers on the boat end up in larger groups. There should at the very least be a requirement for the Elite Divers to book their spot on the boat the previous day.
There are a number of great dive sites around Grenada and we did experience some very nice diving. The Veronica L. wreck in particular was spectacular in terms of the fish life around it (but situated near a very boring reef that we were obliged to dive as well). There are however 18 dive sites listed on the Sandals website as the best dive sites in Grenada and we only dove on 5 of those sites in 11 days of diving. This website also shows a picture of the Grenada underwater sculpture park next to a banner saying “always included“. The sculpture park is in fact not included and costs an additional $100 as a third dive in the afternoon.
The dive boat did not often venture more than a few hundred yards from the beach. The aim seemed to be to get the [free] morning diving completed as quickly as possible, so that the boat could return to the beach for [paid] snorkeling or boat trips in the afternoon. Dives were generally curtailed after 35 minutes rather than when a diver in the group was starting to get low on air. This frequently meant that experienced divers were coming out of the water (particularly on a second dive) with more than half a tank still remaining. Our longest dive in Grenada was 48 minutes whereas we dove for over an hour at other Sandals resorts.
By chance we encountered the resort Loyalty and Travel manager during our stay and were able to relate some of our frustrations to her. To her credit, the organization after that did improve a little. The dive team then seemed to listen to the guests’ preferences for where they would like to dive and we encountered no more poorly-filled tanks. The duration of the second dives remained at a maximum of 35 minutes, however.
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