October 2012    Download the Entire Issue (PDF)

Vol. 27, No. 10   What's this?

Maiden Voyage on a New Dive Boat? Forget It

especially if you want Nitrox and air conditioning

from the October, 2012 issue of Undercurrent  

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If you get a special e-mail from a liveaboard fleet advertising exclusive, discounted rates for a new boat or a boat being moved to new waters, just hit delete. Over the years, we have received endless complaints from divers eager to jump on something new, only to find that the boat sailed without the required dry dock work being completed, or the crew is new to the area, or Nitrox has not been installed, or rain pours through the roof -- and so on.

Case in point is the Carib Dancer, formerly the Cayman Aggressor, which made its debut in May with trips to the Bahamas' Exuma Cays. Michael Joest (Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) was on the fully booked maiden voyage and says, "The AC didn´t work well the first few days, so I preferred to sleep on deck. There sometimes was a strange smell coming out of the heads, but they managed to get rid of that with bleach, the Nitrox compressor didn´t work, so no chance on N-dives. The welcome and information on how to handle things was a bit short, 'what if' procedures were mentioned in 10 seconds only, nobody wanted to look at my log book or c-card, which I found a bit strange. All guys working on the boat seemed to be only slowly getting used to their jobs again. The food was three-star, but they offered gluten-free stuff for me. It was a maiden cruise, so naturally all kind of problems appear out of nowhere, which I had no problems with."...