Dive Review of
Red Sail Sports/Renaissance Hotel in
Aruba

See Bonaire entry.

Dive Conditions

Depth and time strictly enforced for the first two dives because it was a
very large group of 14 divers having varying skills requiring us to stick
together in a very tight pack.  The DM's should have split us into two
groups.  

[None]  

Overall Rating

Because an imminent strike from Hurricane Rita had closed the Houston
airports, Continental shut down all flights to IAH and I was unable to
return home from Bonaire and so remained on Aruba until a return flight
could be secured.  There are three words that really don't belong together:
"Stranded on Aruba".  I made the best of it for four extra days,
choosing to dive with Red Sail, which I would not do again due to generally
indifferent attitudes.  By contrast, diving Aruba after a full week of
diving on Boniare is not a fair comparison.  When I realized that I wasn't
going to get off the island anytime soon without re-routing through New
York or New Jersey (or Amsterdam), I signed up for three dives scheduled
for the next day and the brightest spot was the third dive which was on the
wreck of the Antille.  For this dive, there were two dive masters and three
divers which was a significant improvement over the morning dives that
indluded 14 divers in one large group.  The wreck is on a relatively
shallow sandy bottom and is enormous, providing habitat for a variety of
life including moray, jacks, sargeants, many common garden eel and jawfish
at the bottom and much more.  This alone was worth the time and inclination
to spend some extra time on Aruba.  As an epilogue to being stranded, the
Continental supervisor really went to bat for me and, exercising his
authority to grant a reaccomodation fee, bought my ticket home on American
Airlines via Miami or else I would've had to wait until the following
Saturday to catch the next scheduled Contintental flight back to Houston. 
My thanks to Eric at Continental.  Aruba is nice for the beach, shopping,
cruise boats and glitz but for diving I'll go back to Bonaire. 

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