COZUMEL TRIP REPORT 25 MAY - 01 JUNE, 2024

by Ginny De Mattei

Cozumel never disappoints. I think that’s why we keep going back year after year.  The resort, Iberostar, has everything we want on the property.  Buffet dinner every night and specialty restaurants to choose from.  Alcohol is included and we are always discovering the latest best drink.  Is the food great – no – but it’s very good and the buffet has so many selections that there is something for everyone. Themed dinners include Asian, Italian, Mexican and International. 

They didn’t have shows in the evening every night but they did have them on several nights.  This resort used to have really great shows, but that hasn’t been the case in the past several years.  They usually have live music in the lobby.  Everything is open air.  

Dressel Divers takes great care of us.  We had our own boat and we were divided into two groups with two divemasters.

 I only saw one splendid toadfish this year (last year we saw many), but I saw a seahorse and two pipefish, which I had never seen there before. The visibility is 100+ feet on every dive and the current was very gentle this year.

The usually suspects were turtles, shark, lots and lots of reef fish and the biggest lobsters you’ve ever seen in your life.

My personal favorite dive is Punta Sur. The pinnacles are enormous. I liken it to diving the Grand Canyon.  But we did dive the C-53, which is the only deep water wreck in the area.  The ship was deeming with juvenile sardines, so much so that it made it almost impossible to see what was ahead as we navigated the interior of the ship.

Mexico takes great care in preserving their reefs. Periodically they close reefs for diving to reduce stress on the corals.  They used to allow reef-safe sunscreen, but now allow no sunscreen at all on the dive boats.  No gloves, pointers or knives.

Topside we cheered on Anthony when he participated in their Olympic pool games. Ravi won an Olympic medal in bocce, which he proudly wore the rest of the week. 

Iberostar and Dressel Divers make this is a fun-filled, great diving holiday.  On top of that, the price that we get for the week, including 12 dives, is unbeatable at any other resort. I personally am looking forward to going back soon.

January 28, 2021

Maldives March 2021

DIVING IN THE MALDIVES

If you are into macro, Maldives is not for you. Big fish are the stars of the show here – white and black tip sharks, nurse sharks, gray reef sharks, whale sharks (though we didn’t see any), manta and eagle rays, tuna and giant trevally. A lot of the diving is deep (80 – 95’) and the currents are often stiff. A reef hook is mandatory.

There are no coral reefs as we know them in the Maldives. Maldives is a series of 26 atolls; formed by the collapse of volcanos. That said, some very fine soft and hard corals have grown on a few of the sites we dove. One site in particular had table corals as far as the eye could see, growing in rows, as if planted there by a farmer.

Many of the dives involved hooking into a rock at depth and watching the shark show swim by. They did not disappoint. There were sharks on nearly every dive.  One very memorable dive at Alimatha Jetty brought us to a site where nurse sharks come to lay in the sand and wriggle around like puppy dogs to clean their bodies in the sand. There were too many nurse sharks to count and they would come very close to us as we were hooked in to watch them.

Fish were plentiful. Lots of banner fish, Moorish idols, parrot fish, butterfly fish, surgeonfish, sweepers, oriental sweetlips, wrasses, including Napoleon wrasse, chromies, damsels, anthias, pufferfish and many more.

Also plentiful were moray eels. We saw them on nearly every dive, many variations – black spotted, black cheeked (aggressive little bugger who bit one of our friends), white-eyed, and giant eels.  

Another very memorable dive was at the Fish Factory – a tuna processing plant that dumps the heads and carcasses of the tuna into the sea, which attracts more kinds of fish than you can imagine, It was there we saw many, many eels – sometimes five in one hole together. It was also there that we were treated to a sighting of a guitar shark.

If you are into sharks this is definitely the place for you. Just know that the diving will be deep and the currents will be strong at times.

Ginny DeMattei

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