Eagle Ray Divers - Highly Recommend!!

[EBFURR]

My son & I took the “introduction to scuba” dive with Eagle Ray Divers in Cozumel in June and I wanted to pass along our impressions. First of all, I will sum up the experience in a word – UNBELIEVABLE!! We were treated like royalty and had a fantastic time. We had heard of Eagle Ray on these boards and found their web site easily with a Google search. At first I was a little concerned because it took Chellie a few days to reply to my inquiries. She always did respond in a most courteous manner to all of my questions. Upon arriving at the dive shop, I found out the reason for the delays. Eagle Ray is a small husband/wife operation. It is basically Chellie, Antonio, and Raul. The beauty of this is that you will get very personal service. With the dozens of cruise ships stopping at every port these days, many of the tour operators run “head count” operations. That is to say that they try to cram as many people as possible on to each tour to produce revenue. This is not the case with Eagle Ray.

 

My son had done an indoor introduction to scuba session at home, but neither of us had ever done a true scuba dive. There are many intro to scuba options out there, most of which are beach dives. This means that you start your session on the beach and walk out into deeper water. Our dive was an actual boat dive. We spent about 20 min. with Raul in the shop going over the equipment and some basic skills. Then we boarded the small boat and took a very short (5 minute) ride to some shallow water – about 4-5 feet. We then practiced the skills he had taught us for a few more minutes. When he felt we were ready, he said “Let’s go!” and we followed him into about 20-25 feet of water onto a beautiful reef. There were hundreds of fish and assorted plant/animal life forms to see. Raul looked for crabs, eels, etc. and would point them out to us. The colors were awesome and the whole experience was fascinating. We dived until our tanks were down to about 1000 psi and then surfaced. Our maximum depth had been about 30 ft. The boat picked us up and returned us to the shop. We could have gotten another tank of air foe a small charge and continued the dive, but we had to go meet Mom & Sister.

 

These guys really love their jobs and it shows. They are very pleasant and helpful people. They also do custom dives for experienced divers and Antonio said that if you have about three days, he can get you certified. I would give Eagle Ray my highest recommendation. We are returning to Cozumel next year on a cruise and this is the only shore excursion that I plan on repeating. If possible, we may try to get certified before the cruise so we can go on a “real” dive with Eagle Ray.

[ScubaMare]

All I can say is, "GO FOR IT!" We did Discover Scuba with Eagle Ray Divers a few years ago. We did the first tank and absolutely had to do a second. That was all it took.

 

We were hooked on diving and wanted more. We still had 5 full days left in Cozumel so we signed up to do the PADI Open Water Certification Course while we were there. We would get up in the morning, have breakfast, bum around, meet Antonio around 1 or so for our instruction. Every day we practiced our skills at Paradise Reef. Beats the heck out of a swimming pool! we usually wrapped up the day in the late afternoon, giving us plenty of time to still enjoy some free time. We'd clean up, have dinner, study our books, hit the sack early and do it all over again the next day. By our next to the last day on the island we were taking our written test and doing our OW Cert. dive.

 

We're now certified divers and do all of our diving with Eagle Ray Divers. We found them to be extremely professional and service oriented. And, it's so obvious that they love what they do and that they love their island. That sort of attitude is extremely infectious. Anyway, we were fortunate in finding a shop that we love. There are other great shops on the island, I'm sure. But we stopped looking when we found ERD.

 

So, I say GO FOR IT!!! Get your certification and dive, dive, dive. Wait till you go to 80 feet and see sea turtles, grouper, nurse sharks, and the mountains of coral. It's a totally different and beautiful world, that's for sure!