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Great Barrier Reef Dive Shop Recommendations


mahdnc
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We will be doing a Great Barrier Reef cruise aboard Celebrity Solstice next year. I am looking for recommendations from anyone on this board that used a dive shop there that they liked. Our ship will be sailing out of Sydney and calling on:

 

New Castle

Airlie Beach

Cairns (ship will overnight there)

Port Douglas

Brisbane.

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We will be doing a Great Barrier Reef cruise aboard Celebrity Solstice next year. I am looking for recommendations from anyone on this board that used a dive shop there that they liked. Our ship will be sailing out of Sydney and calling on:

 

New Castle

Airlie Beach

Cairns (ship will overnight there)

Port Douglas

Brisbane.

 

I did a 3 tank trip with Tusa Dive in Cairns (Jan 2016). Large boats but they separate divers from snorkels. Ended up diving with just a single buddy with no guide. Not deep so very little SI. Just long enough for them to refill our tanks plus couple of mins.

 

Will say you need to be aware of port times. We had 30 minutes from dock time to get back to ship. It was a 15-20 min walk.

 

Enjoy.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

We used TUSA also in Cairns. Big boat with lots of people but fast. The trip out was about an hour and the areas are big. We made 3 stops. My son and I decided to count the number of different kinds of fish on the first dive. I ended up with 67 and him 71, amazing. On our second dive we saw an elkhorn coral field that we could not see the other side of. We had a turtle swim between us for about 5 minutes, saw 2 reef sharks, and swam through a couple of coral arches. We only ran into another group of 4 people once in the 3 dives. We had a truly amazing dives even with the amount(30-40) of people on the boat with us.

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I am currently in the process of posting a trip review of this cruise on the Celebrity cruise board. We ended up diving at Airlie Beach (Celebrity excursion), Day 1 Cairns (Celebrity excursion), Day 2 Cairns (Tusa Dive), and Port Douglas (Quicksilver).

 

Our diving experiences from our cruises in the Caribbean (past 4 years) did not prepare us for planning the diving for our Great Barrier Reef cruise earlier this year. Don't get me wrong, our dives were AWESOME, its just the planning was difficult and my Caribbean experience did not apply. When I say planning, I mean booking with an independent dive boat instead of booking one through the ship.

 

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Here are some examples of the differences:

 

1. It takes 1-2 hours for the dive boat to get from the shore to the outer reef dive locations. At Airlie Beach it took 3 hours to get to the outer reef. The sea conditions can be rough. So a dive trip was an all day affair.

 

2. All of the GBR ports are tender ports and the tendering is long and involved. The tender travel time can take 30-40 minutes itself and the sheer number of passengers (with priority given to those that have bought shore excursions thru the ship) can make getting off the boat and onto shore very long. This changes the planning game considerably (if you want to book a dive operator independently and not thru the ship)--see #7. In some cases, without any priority tendering privileges, it was possible that you could not get to shore until 10 am.

 

3. When our ship overnighted at Cairns, the tenders did not run 24 hours which surprised me. Our plans were to stay on land in Cairns because of this.

 

4. At Cairns there is an additional 20 minute taxi ride to get from the spot the tenders drop you off at (for us that was Yorkey's Knob) to the dive boats in Cairns.

 

5. The dive boats leave early because of #1. It is common for them to want you to check in at 8am which is difficult to make because of #2, #3, and #4. You usually returned to the marina by 4:00 pm.

 

6. Most dive boats are large ranging from 60 passengers to up to 400. They are big operations and will not wait for you if you are late. In the Caribbean, my family of 4 is often 50% or more of the passengers on the small dive boats that we have booked. And so if we were late, our small dive boat operator would wait for us. I think because of the transportation costs involved to cover the long distances, it was impossible to find a small dive boat without chartering one privately.

 

7. Most dive boats will NOT book cruise passengers because of #2, #4, #5, and #6. You might as well tell them that you have ebola.

 

8. Unless you book a live aboard trip, you cannot find a dive boat that purely specializes in scuba customers. You will have a mix of snorkelers and divers.

 

9. There are two kinds of snorkel/dive trips. Ones involving a pontoon and ones that do not. A pontoon (see photo below) is a very large multi-level structure with overhead protection that is anchored out in the reef that your dive boat will take you to. All activities are done from the pontoon which include semi-submersible rides, underwater observatory, helicopter rides etc. There are roped off areas for you to snorkel under the watchful eye of life guards sitting in towers built onto the pontoon. All dive and snorkel equipment is stored and distributed from the pontoon. I have never seen anything like it before--it is mind blowing to me the first time I saw one. It is convenient, but usually there are a lot of people and your diving is confined to the area around the pontoon. The other kind is a traditional dive boat trip where the boat will take you to 2 different reefs on one trip for you to do up to 3 dives. The boat has the big advantage of getting you to different reef locations vs a fixed pontoon.

 

10. If you book your snorkel/dive trip through the cruise line, the dive boat picks you up right at the cruise ship and drops you off there after it is over. This saves you a ton of time. But it is very expensive. At Cairns, a snorkel excursion would cost $319 USD per person. It would cost only $160 USD per person if you booked directly with a company in Cairns.

 

People are welcome to email me at mahdnc at yahoo dot com if they want more information.

 

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Edited by mahdnc
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