Howdy all,
By the way, thanks so much for the wonderful comments from all.
Here's the fist of two posts on my diving experiences while on-island. Once again please keep in mind my usual disclaimer about these being our experiences and that your own results may vary considerably...
That being said
Diving in Sint Maarten
This report is mostly aimed at those who wish to know about the diving I did while on SXM (or just off of it) It’s split into two parts so it will fit on the forum!
Part one…
A little background… (little??)
At the ripe old age of 10 I lived in Adelaide, South Australia and we spent three weeks in mid-summer of 1970 vacationing in a little town called Tumby Bay. Tumby had an aging large wooden pier of about 600 feet in length to the south and a smaller aging wooden pier of about 300 feet in length a few hundred feet north of the main pier. In between the piers were a few acres of pure white sand bottom sloping from about 25 feet in depth up to nothing at the shore. Beyond the sand bottom were seemingly endless sea grass and weed beds. In those weed beds lived a species of giant fish called the Southern Flathead. I sometimes think of people I meet today in terms of the fish I’ve seen and I’ve seen a lot of Southern Flathead recently. A great big bottom feeder with seemingly no life until you try to get to know it whereupon it sticks out a bunch of nasty spikes and swims away to be grumpy somewhere else. Ever met anyone like that? Sure you have. He’s ugly and grey-brown, too… In the sandy area between the piers frolicked some of the biggest black stingrays I’ve ever seen (even to date). These things seemed as big as Manta Rays and I used to play with them all day long. I loved them and they got along pretty well with me too. I saw a local kid named Zombie (I’m not kidding) step on a ray one night when he and some others were walking through the water to some sea grass beds apparently trying to cut off their toes on the razor clams (life can be pretty slow in these rural towns). The ray whipped its tail up and stuck its spike deep into Zombie’s calf. This was pre-Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin days so we all laughed mighty hard while we were cutting the spike out of this very embarrassed kid’s leg under the moonlight while he bled into the South Australian ocean waters, not far from a place called Dangerous Reef, one of the two primary breeding grounds for the Great White Shark.
…oh yeah, it was also before the release of “Jaws”…
Shortly after or before Jaws, a movie called “Blue Water, White Death” was filmed in the very waters Zombie was presently bleeding into. It was a pretty good film.
I got certified to scuba dive right after that trip when I was eleven years old in 1971 (there were no technical age restrictions then so the 12 year old rule didn’t apply) and I have loved diving ever since. Some years I dive more than others but I still love it no matter what. I worked at a local bicycle shop to earn the money to buy my equipment. I started my diving doing it solo and have done at least half of my more than fifteen hundred dives this way. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be extremely dangerous to dive alone and I really don’t want to start up that whole anxious discussion, but I’m actually very careful about it and can probably still free ascend from more than 60 feet (like I did for the Navy), which is about the limit I’ll solo dive without redundant equipment. I’m very independent and I don’t much like being told what to do or to have to fit in with the lowest common denominator of the capabilities of divers I don’t particularly know well when we assemble in a group in places like Sint Maarten.
Sonia and I went to Sint Maarten to be together at most times and to enjoy the tropical water in our own way at other times. She likes to sit nearby and listen to the waves, smell the tropical breeze and just soak in the incredible color of the waters. She, in the minds of some, would be called “sane”. I like to get in and under those waters and would be known by those same people and “butt-crazy mad-as-a-cut-snake foolhardy nuts”. So, in fish terms, she is a Sailfish and I am a Bumphead Wrasse.
I chose Dive Safaris (boat diving operator) working in conjunction with The Scuba Shop (dive shop) in Simpson Bay based on some posts I saw on TTOL and further investigation of the sites those “posters” referred me to. Dive Safaris took me out on their regular dive trips and The Scuba Shop rented me tanks and weights for shore diving.
Brenda Yorke ran Dive Safaris and I met her on the Saturday when I showed up at the scuba shop to rent my shore diving tanks and weights. Brenda was in the shop with a slight and attractive young woman who rented me the gear and seemed to regard me as something large, brown and green that just lays by the road on a hot day and is best avoided. I’m pretty sure this lass had no faith in my ability to scuba since I hardly met the typical profile of the people in her world of fit happy youngsters who are always healthy and vibrant. This was one of those moments when I wanted to let her know that the sharks I swam with on a daily basis in DC didn’t need special breathing equipment and ate little children like her as snacks while going about their daily routine but I thought better of it. Maybe she didn’t realize I looked the way I did because I had just been Spirit-ed to Sint Maarten from Washington and had risen at 3:30 a.m. more than twelve harried hours earlier that day, but never mind.
Brenda responded to me with the by now familiar Wary-local attitude that we were experiencing in almost everyone we met (we soon figured this out, though, and I’ll explain it in my post on the Island “as we saw it”). She warmed up as I came back on subsequent trips, though, to the point where I just about asked her out for a date on the last day! Her crew (at least those that I met in three separate days of diving with them) consisted of Paul (the English boat captain and resident nice guy who seemed to be able to tolerate anything), Holly (a recently crowned dive instructor that worked as dive assistant on one of my trips), Rich (another English dive instructor whom I dived with on Thursday) and a German fellow called (I think) Hagar who found it difficult to relate to me (possibly because I don’t really look like I should be going in the water, unless it’s in a very large sarcophagus). He was still pretty cool and the various youngsters who came on the trips got along with him fine since he is, indeed, gorgeous and seems perennially happy. All of these folks fit the image of young dive professionals I’ve seen in various exotic locations all over the world. They seem like fun-loving, happy guys and gals and are usually very patient with the people who are willing to put their lives into the hands of these kids…
Monday, June 25
The dive sites ended up being “The Gregory Barge Wreck” and “The Bridge”.
I showed up at the shop at 7:30 a.m. for the 8:00 a.m. departure since I wanted to get the “lay of the land” as far as their operation and also to drop off my tanks for refilling after shore diving the day before (which I’ll cover in the report on the villa). I met the various other people who were to set sail on that day’s adventure and they seemed like a nice bunch. After the usual sign-in formalities I made my way to the boat and immediately struck up the tune from “Gilligan’s Island” in my head… “No phone! No Lights! No motor car! Not a Single Luxureee… Like Robinson Caruso, it’s as primitive as can beee…” . I don’t mean to disparage this particular operator’s boats. I’ve dived with all kinds of operators on many continents and I think they all order their boats from the same shipwright. I won’t name the place…
Sure enough, the moment we’d slipped our lines and left the dock, the steering failed and we drifted up against a ferry that was called the “Rapid” something or other but didn’t seem like it could rapidly do much of anything. After almost an hour during which the “mechanic” who had apparently actually built the boat came aboard, messed with the steering, produced a “tiller” (a long pole connected directly to the rudder so we could steer manually) and was then convinced to join us all for the morning so the passengers wouldn’t mutiny before leaving the confines of Simpson Bay lagoon, we headed out to sea for a “three hour tour, a three hour tour…”.
The Gregory Barge
After about 20 minutes of cruising and thorough bruising of the hapless Paul’s inner thighs by the steel tiller he was managing using his legs (he was imagining explaining those bruises to his girlfriend, who was off-island at the time – “but honey, it was a tiller on the boat, honest!” – slap!!), we arrived at a dive site about a half mile off of Cupecoy beach called the Gregory. It’s a barge that was wrecked here and lies upside down in about 70 feet of water. The visibility was around 80 to 100 feet and the water temperature around 82 degrees on the bottom. I dove in my old Lycra suit (which doesn’t provide thermal protection but does stop sunburn – yes, it’s actually quite possible to sunburn while diving) until I tore it in half on the second dive. It, like me, was getting pretty old. I tried to buy another at various shops on Tuesday during our island circumnavigation (later post to come) but, strangely, nobody I tried sells these despite the fact that they would be perfect for the conditions. The Gregory is somewhat non-descript but it was great to be in the water and the dive progressed will. There were a variety of fish but not there in any great quantity on the day I went. I can recommend the site as an easy wreck dive in shallow, clear water not too far from Simpson Bay. We had about 45 minutes under water and it always seems like it’s never enough. The topside waters were pretty shaken up with four to six foot, erratic swells running through which made climbing up the dive ladder on the boat “interesting”. However, you either climb the ladder or swim towards Cupecoy and redefine “clothing optional” as you come ashore in the considerable surf. It’s your choice. I picked the ladder and scrambled aboard.
For those of you who haven’t dived off of a local boat before, there’s a peculiar activity you may need to be aware of. Quite often, after everyone has completed their dive, someone will jump back in the water and then cling to the line trailing behind the boat and look off towards the horizon with a strange, quiet look on their face. Don’t join them. They’re doing this because the boats don’t have what is known as a “head”, which is also known as a toilet.
The Bridge
We slipped the mooring and travelled back towards Simpson Bay for about 25 minutes to pick up another mooring about a mile off Simpson Bay at a site called simply “the Bridge”. The story from the crew has it that the CEO of Victoria’s Secret wanted to be able to bring her new yacht into the lagoon and the old bridge wasn’t wide enough, so she paid several million dollars as part of the money necessary to fund a new, wider lifting-bridge. Upon dedication, her captain tried to bring the 300 foot-plus monster into the lagoon only to ground at the canal entrance, so she paid another huge sum of money to have the canal dredged to a deeper operating depth. I don’t know if the story is entirely accurate but it sounds about right for rich people. When I lived in the Fort Lauderdale area between 2001 and 2005 we saw the antics of these mega-yacht folks a number of times and the story might just be true… Anyway, the local port authority gathered up all the wreckage and planned to take it “way out to sea” and dump it. Way out to sea turned out to be a mile or so off shore where they apparently said “okay, this will do” and let it go. In addition to the bridge there are a number of sunken yachts which had lain derelict in the lagoon after Hurricane Luis and were laid to rest to form a pretty interesting reef site. I took my hands-down best dive shot here of a sunken yacht from the stern and I’ll post this along with several others when I get a picture site up and running. The dive was terrific with around 120 foot visibility in about 50 feet of water which was at 83 degrees Fahrenheit on the bottom. This is just the kind of water I can’t find anywhere near Virginia, so I was as happy as a clam. I shot a series of photos of an encounter that Paul had with a giant killer stingray here. The massive beast was undoubtedly there to kill each and every one of us and it probably knew Zombie and remembered me. I can almost hear the cruise ship passenger doing a “discover scuba” dive and seeing one of these and saying “is that the one that killed Steve Irwin???” Paul approached the vicious beast from the snout and laid carefully in front of it for a minute or so. Eventually the nasty creature figured that Paul was some kind of super healthy Transformer and it beat a hasty retreat off into the deep still blue in search of someone less aware that it could strike. We were down for 50 minutes on this dive and ended up doing the shaky ladder dance once again as the seas had not abated.
Now please folks, in the interest of sensitivities, the tragic accident that befell Steve Irwin in Australia was just that, an accident. I thought the fellow was charming and it’s a sad loss, but you won’t be killed by a stingray in Sint Maarten. It just won’t happen. Just make sure you go out with someone like Paul and you’ll be fine…
We made the run back to the dock at the shop and I said my goodbyes to my fellow adventurers and located my trusty tiny Tieros for the terror ride back to the villa to rinse the gear, and myself, and do my only clothing optional stuff on the island, which involved using the outdoor shower every day after swimming (don’t worry, it had a partial door to hide the naughty bits from the viewing eyes of the ever-present Dutch Coast Guard vessel patrolling offshore).
I hope this only whetted your appetite for the next post… Which is coming right up!
Thanks
James
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