Tahiti Diving Questions

[Southwest]

I have read that along with the diving certification I need to have some kind of note from my doctor indicating I'm in good health. For those of you who have recently been scuba diving in Tahiti and the surrounding islands, did you find this to be necessary? Does it have to be something formal or notarized or anything? Also, what are the great dive sites I should be sure to go to. We'll be on the Tahitian Princess this fall. Thanks.

[Spikesgirl]

however, no one ever asked to see ours. Our docotr just scribbled somehting out and signed it. We also checked with our local dive shop with regards to pre-existing conditions(which included ear surgery). They suggested that we let our divemeister know before hand, which we did. They didn't seem to be worried about it. I would suggest that you do the same if you are concerned or suffer from something like high blood pressure. Princess was pretty exact about what was and wasn't acceptable, but I think it's more just to cover their butts in case someone has trouble., but also to make sure that you know the risks as well

 

Charlie

[deepwater]

I'm also interested in the best dive tours. We are on the Cook Island itinerary. Would appreciate hearing from anyone who could recommend either a Princess tour or others, and the islands that are the best for diving. Thanks.

[tuknshak]

We dived five times in Tahiti in May on our Honeymoon cruise. Four times was in Bora Bora and once in Moorea. We did our four Bora Bora dives thru Princess and it was a great dive outfit who took us out. We brought all our own gear but they seemed to have fairly new and well maintained gear for you to use. We went thru Bathy's Club in Moorea (located at the IC Moorea) and had a wonderful time with them. We actually bought the 25 minutes underwater DVD movie they took of our dive as well. Some notes on things we learned...

1) The night dive in Raitea requires you have multiple dives to 100+ ft logged. We booked this dive so we could do the sunset cruise in Bora Bora and ended up with no sunset cruise because we had to change to the Bora Bora night dive which we were informed is less advanced and at that point the Raitea sunset cruise was booked.

2) Bringing your own gear was nice and we would do it again in a heart beat.

3) We only brought our PADI certification cards and log book. Only the shop in Moorea looked at our pervious dives and the shop in Bora Bora just wanted our certification card.

4) If your finances allow take a better underwater camera then the disposable ones or the one they sell on the ship. We couldn’t this time but it was the one thing we thought we could skimp on and really wish we hadn’t. Our pictures form our Kodak disposable cameras are ok but nothing special.

5) A couple of the dives Princess offers in Bora Bora are the same dives just named different. The afternoon one-tank dive on day 1 is the same location as one of the two two-tank dives they offer the morning of day 2. We signed up for both these thinking they were different and they ended up taking us to roughly the same dive areas. If you want to do the two-tank dive do the ray dive on day 1 so you don’t end up at the same dive sites. Thankfully we had the same guide and he noticed we got on the same dive again and took our group to a slightly different area so it wasn’t completely the same thing over again.

Overall we really enjoyed our diving in Tahiti and look forward to having the chance to return one year and do more diving there.

[deepwater]

Thanks so much for the info on dive sites. That's just the kind of thing I was needing.