Life is slowly improving and I should be back again in December! Yippee!!
Life is slowly improving and I should be back again in December! Yippee!!
Member since:23.08.2002
Reviews:53
Members who trust:56
I learnt to scuba dive out in Montserrat in Spring 2001. I learned with local dive school Seawolf, run by Wolf and his wife! As with many of the smaller non-tourist locations, he has another job as the local veterinarian!
I now dive with him as a fully certified diver, and pay $40 per guided dive, which includes all my equipment and tank. If I tag along on a training dive or a resort dive, I pay only $30 as I am not being guided. There are lower rates for hiring specific equipment and he runs a range of PADI courses, from a resort dive to Dive Master training.
The main idea of this opinion is to tell you a little about the dive sites that I have visited on Montserrat, what they are like, the life you are likely to see and maybe convey a little of the experience to you.
There are 2 main sites that I have dived on Montserrat, Woodlands, where I have been diving 6 times, and Little Bay, where I have been 5 times. Everytime you go, you see more and more!
WOODLANDS
When you dive at Woodlands, you walk into the sea off a lovely little beach. If you are there at the right time of year, you can see where the turtles have been burying their eggs! There are also little crabs that live in holes in the sand, and as you walk towards them, they scuttle off into their holes and hide!
There
is a bit of a walk from the carpark down to the beach, only about 50 metres, but it is along a stoney path, so I would wear sandals down to the beach, if you don't have dive boots. It is perfectly safe to leave your sandals on the beach while you dive, as crime is very low on Montserrat, and anyone who is mad enough to steal my smelly sandals is perfectly welcome to them!
It is a pleasant sea entry, although if there has been a storm recently, it can be more of a surf entry! You have to run in between waves! For those that don't know, it can be great fun while you are carrying heavy full air tanks!
Once beneath the surface, it is a different world! There is a bit of a tunnel (with no roof) that you can swim through that leads to the reef. The rocks are covered with sponges and corals and there are always plenty of fish lazing around in there. The first time I ever went diving here, I found myself surrounded by myriads of coloured fish in this tunnel.
Once out onto the reef, you can see all the different shapes and colours of corals, sponges and green sea plants. These are surrounded by all the little fish that live on them. If you listen you can hear the crunching of the parrot fish eating away at the coral. It was also at this location that I heard whale song. I just hung in the water, trying not to breath too often so that I could listen to it. I could have just listened for hours. The feeling that I was in the same ocean as these magnificent creatures. They were probably a few miles away, but it was beautiful and haunting!
As for the sea life here.. well it is abundant. There are tiny little fish that you can barely see, large coloured fish that you can spot a mile off. Black spotted triangle shaped fishes, which have little fins that whirr at the sides of them, a bit like the side fins that sea horses have. Puffer fish, the ones that swell up and stick spikes out all over them when threatened. Stingrays, crabs and even morays eels! I have also seen a Barracuda here and the gorgeous long thin trumpet fish, which hang in the reeds so that you cannot see them!
The highlight of one trip to this reef, was when we saw a small turtle. We didn't get too close to him, but he was rather beautiful and was only about 50 cm long!
The added bonus of this reef is that if you are experienced divers and have plenty of air, you can travel along to the next reef, Runaway Ghaut Reef, and have a look around there too.
This is a fairly shallow dive, with the maximum depth around 45ft (14-15 metres). This makes it a good snorkeling site too. However, you can see so much more and in so much more detail when you are diving this site. I have had friends snorkel while I was diving, and they were amazed at the increase in detail when they swam down.
LITTLE BAY
This dive is again a beach entry, although it is a little easier to get in after a storm! This reef is just south of the harbour where the ferry comes in. You enter from the main beach and swim south beneath the water.
You swim over a huge deposit of large boulders, where little fish feed in the gaps and hide behind them waiting for you to pass. As you move further in, again to a maximum depth of 14-15 metres, you swim past many corals, sponges and sea grass. Many of the fish that I saw at Woodlands I saw here too, like moray eels, trumpet fish, puffer fish and triangle fish.
More exciting and unusual things that I have seen here are; an octopus that swam back into his hole! A sea snake eel, which is harmless but had me worried for a little while. It was so brightly coloured! I spotted plenty of flounders, which are impressive, because if they don't move, you cannot always spot them. They are so well camouflaged on the bottom of the sea! I have also been surrounded by a school of Sennet Fish, which are from the Barraccuda family, it was awe inspiring! There were so many fish.
The two main places to go to on the Little Bay dive are the Tower Coral and the garden eels. The garden eels are very impressive. From a distance, they look like sea grass, but as you get closer, they disappear into their burrows and you realise that they are eels! They are very beautiful, and if you move in very slowly, you can get quite close before they disappear.
The tower coral is a large beautiful coral, which is very large! It is covered in all sorts of life and is the focus for many of the fish living in that area. It really has to be seen to be believed. You can spend the whole dive just swimming around this one place, there is so much to see. The fish range from tiny fish a few millimeters long to large coloured fish up to 12 inches long! There are these huge sponges, which are shaped like an urn, where you can look into them from above and find all sorts of fish and underwater detritus.
OVERVIEW
Montserrat has many beautiful reefs and marine wildlife. The local dive school helps preserve the wild life through education and organising reef clean ups at least once a year. The reefs have suffered due to over fishing by the locals, and by being blanketed with volcanic ash from the eruption, which has been washed into the sea in the south.
Over the last 2 years, I have seen the reefs flourish again and the sea life grow back. The fishes have become larger and more prolific, the corals have flourished and the reefs have become more interesting to dive, just over the last 2 years.
The added benefit of Montserrat is the warmth of the sea. I dive there in a swimsuit and t-shirt. It is so warm that a wetsuit is unnecessary and a dry-suit would be unthinkable! If you are down there for a long dive and don't move around much, you may feel the cold, but I have never had any problems as long as I have been moving.
I highly recommend a dive in Montserrat, should you get the opportunity to visit there. The sea is warm, the sea life beautiful and exquisite.
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Sounds lovely. I'm not quite sure where Montserrat is, though. I'm just back from the Carribean and did some lovely diving there, however, now it's back to dry suit diving in the freezing Scottish waters!
Elainebaba 20.10.2002 00:17
How nice, not far from Trinidad eh!
Avril
carolscotland 19.10.2002 11:55
Its one of my life's ambitions to go diving, (and to go into space!). Carol:)
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