Dive Logs

Back at long last in the Turks and Caicos Islands.  Have been looking forward to diving on West Caicos again. 

Unfortunately, the current was very strong, the visibility very poor, probably due to the strong NE/E winds of the last few days.

Still it was great to be back underwater, Geoff trying out the replacement camera, which did not appear to be flashing.

The Turks and Caicos Islands form a southerly extension of the Bahamas chain of islands, although politically separate from the Bahamas and still British.

The archipelago is renowned for its wall dives with drop offs from 40 feet to 4,000 feet. All the main dive sites along the west coasts of Provo and West Caicos are wall dives marked by well anchored buoys, located in 40 to 50 feet of water, which made it ideal diving for us. We would moor Dream On to one of the dive buoys, dive and move on to the next. Musical buoys when there were a number of dive boats out from Provo who have priority. Fortunately by early afternoon, the dive boats return to base, enabling us to use the dive buoys as an overnight mooring.

The diving is different to anything we have previously experienced in the Red Sea. There are more pelagic visitors and even the reef fish are larger. The corals are more massive with few of the delicate stag horn corals found in the Red Sea. The corals are more adapted to a rougher environment with strong currents. Huge barrel and tube sponges and large gorgonians dominate. Colours on the reef are also different; blues, yellows and browns predominate, with the occasional lilac or purple coloured sponge.

Each dive is spectacular, presenting a different vista and never disappointing. Caribbean reef sharks, a hammerhead, eagle rays, turtles, huge morays and tens of large inquisitive groupers. (You will have to take our word for this as we have run out of 'O' rings for our underwater camera housing!). Our boat provided the local barracuda chief a base from which to watch the action.

We were fortunate that at this time of year, the prevailing winds are easterly and the wall dives on the western side of the islands were sheltered. Our dive compressor behaved flawlessly enabling us to refill 2 tanks within 30 minutes.

French Cay  On the southern shore of the Caicos Banks, south of the Isle of Providenciales, south of Sapodilla Bay

North West Point  Along the western coast of Providenciales

West Caicos   South west of the main island of Providenciales. West Caicos is uninhabited at the present time although a huge marina, hotel and resort complex (Ritz Carlton) is under construction. Along the western coastline the wall is 500m from the shore. There are eight diving site buoys, spread every half mile. Each one is unique with a name that describes the underwater terrain.

There are many other dive sites around the Turks and Caicos; North Caicos, Middle Caicos, Grand Turk to mention a few. Hopefully we will be back next year.

Rum Cay

Conception Island

Cat Island

Abacos

The winter weather pattern in The Bahamas is for a series of regular weekly cold fronts to pass through on their way southeast from the United States. This has required us to find protected anchorages for two to three days each week while these pass. The winds during these frontal passages have reached 35 knots. This pattern results in good weather "windows" of around three to four  days for moving further south so we have been very much behind schedule. Also the water has been quite cold up to the middle of March, but as we reached further south this is improving.

On the Banks side of the islands, the water is too shallow to make a worthwhile dive and on many occasions it has been too rough on the deep Exuma Sound side to safely anchor the dinghy. Most of the diving action is at the entry to the cuts between the islands, but here the currents are very strong and diving is only safe at slack tide.

However, the weather is now improving, the water is getting warmer, we are becoming more confident in finding interesting places where we can take the boat, so hopefully we will soon have a diving page on this site.

We bought new Zeagle Stiletto BCDs and 2 additional high pressure dive tanks to add to the 2 already on board. The compressor was rebuilt before we left Fort Lauderdale, so we are ready to go. 

Rum Cay: We managed to find the one surviving place mat from the defunct dive resort restaurant which shows the best dive sites around Rum Cay, reportedly some of the best diving in The Bahamas. Unfortunately these were printed without GPS coordinates, so we set off in Dream On to locate a particular reef by use of the depth sounder. This proved to be more difficult than anticipated. However, we anchored well offshore in 35 feet, with the depth sounder showing a significant drop off. It was not the reef we had hoped to find and the coral only started at 20 metres.

In a subsequent dive on some shallower coral, we managed to drown the waterproof camera. So there are no dive photographs for this page.

Conception Island: A national park with a 300 foot wall to dive. We joined up with John and Mikki Powers from the yacht Wanda for this dive. We went round in two dinghies and moored to a mooring buoy which has been installed there to protect the reef.

The reef started at 18 metres and the main coral heads continued down to over 30 metres. We were immediately inspected by a large Caribbean Reef Shark which spent the whole dive with us. There were large coral heads, some with tunnels through from the shallower sand leading to the deeper west wall. There was a good selection of fish, but visibility was not great. Due to the depth it was a short dive.

Cat Island: We took the dinghy out of our mooring in Hawk's Nest Creek and moored to one of the dive site mooring buoys over Twilight Reef, just off Hawk's Nest Point on the southwest corner of the Island. This was very similar to the Conception dive in that the coral heads start at around 18 metres. No sharks on this dive probably because of poor visibility. A good selection of fish and coral.

Abacos: Although The Abacos claims many good dive sites, any that are over 8 metres are on the Atlantic shore, where it is impossible to anchor Dream On securely. Also, if Dream On were anchored inside on the shallow banks, there would still be no secure anchorage for the dinghy while diving. To dive safely on the Atlantic shores requires at least three people, so that one can remain with either the boat or the dinghy.