Pro Divers, St. Kitts, Caribbean

Dear Fellow Diver,

While planning my honeymoon years ago, I purchased a Fodor's Caribbean travel guide. The now dog-eared volume, while well out-of-date, still remains my first resource (well, Undercurrent too, my editor reminded me) for deciding my "next" Caribbean dive vacation. Over the years, I've marked up its island finder with three ink colors of checkmarks, arrows, strike-throughs, and bullet-points, and I circled the four- and five-star islands. St. Kitts, at four stars, has always on my radar, and I finally visited in May. It's a tourist-oriented, sandy-beach, good-restaurant kind of destination, with, I am pleased to say, interesting and easy diving, including fishy wrecks, volcanic structures and nice reefs. While perfect for a diver with a nondiving spouse, mine has been my good underwater buddy for many years.

In about 40 feet of water, the River Taw wreck was so good that we requested a second visit. I captured video of four octopuses tucked away inside pipes, in tight spots in wreck wounds, and in a deteriorated school bus' suspension coil spring. A squadron of squid came by, and the wreck's stern was home to a huge barracuda whose long white teeth startled me when I put my head into the dark wreck. So many lobsters inhabited a deteriorated bulldozer, it looked furry from their antennae. Being in construction, I attempted to get a photo "seated" in the 'dozer wreck until I realized a good-sized spotted moray made it home. A huge school of Southern Sennet, which some divers falsely identify as barracuda, finned in unison past our awestruck dive group.

To choose a shop before I left home, I called both Kenneth's Dive Center and Pro Divers St. Kitts. My call to Kenneth Samuel came at a bad time for him as he answered yelling, "You're not listening to me!" followed by (repeated) walking directions to heed more accurately. Unfortunately, my call was made exactly while cruise ship divers were trying to find his operation. He calmed down quickly after I yelled back that it was he who was "not listening to me." My next call to Pro Divers St. Kitts was answered nicely by owner Auston Macleod, who, speaking kindly of his competitor, told me Kenneth was a very nice fellow and must have been having a really bad day. Nice guy, that Auston. As it was a coin toss, I booked with Auston. At least he didn't yell at me.

They picked us up from the Marriott at 8:45 every morning for the 15-minute drive to their covered, two outboard 36-foot catamaran (no head), Kuriala, docked in Port Zante Marina, near the cruise ship terminal. Some cruise ship divers joined us divers who were booked for the week. The Kuriala carries about 20 divers, with a water bin for cameras. The dive boat was loaded with aluminum 80s. They stored our gear at night, and after our first day, they had set it up for the two-tank morning dive before I arrived. Boarding was a swift process, even for the newbies; we were out of the marina quickly each morning and in the water between 9:30 and 9:50. The only dive boat to beat us to the sites was the liveaboard Caribbean Explorer, which had moored offshore. During the surface interval, Auston, the captain, and the deckhand Jay, a nice young man who recently arrived from Guyana and just got certified, swapped out tanks.

Auston is a Scot raised in the Caribbean as his father was a hotel manager. He's a friendly, professional guy who runs a tight dive operation hands-on. Wife Margot, a Kittitian, manages the operation, answering the emails and handling the bookings.

This was to be a vacation with diving, so I booked a room at the St. Kitts Marriott Resort & The Royal Beach Casino at Frigate Bay, mainly to enjoy the expansive oceanside beach, but not the casino, which I avoided. The Marriott is a large and lush property with many pools, bars, and restaurants, a decent fitness center, and an elegant spa. But it is showing its age. Some common areas of the open-air hotel were blocked off due to falling ceilings; rusting conduits showed in ice-machine niches; removed light fixtures were stored in walkway work areas; and cleaning carts had damaged the column tile bases. But the staff's attitude and service outweighed the property's physical decline. The nice beach, well populated with cabanas and chaise lounges, had artificial break-water "reefs" and good snorkeling. And the guests were interesting, including members of four cricket teams warming up for the 2024 World Cup tournament.

On most dives, I saw reef sharks, some at arm's length, all nonaggressive females, from sevenfoot grandmothers down to two-foot pups. At the Vents, volcanicproduced hot water poured out from a shallow depression on the bottom. I could see the hot water distortion of the sea and put my arm in the source of the gushing hot (fresh?) water. I studied a large barrel sponge that had disintegrated and reduced to a pile of mush, a natural phenomenon, Auston later explained.

Auston was always the first in the water and the last out every dive, but we could pretty much do our own thing as he had to keep his eye on cruise divers. One young couple joined us for a two-tank dive. The wife had trouble with her gear and couldn't figure out her computer during the surface interval. She was, however, an expert in donning her cat ears dive cap and taking dozens of selfies. Another vain and vapid young woman didn't realize until the boat was underway after the second dive that she had lost her camera. Auston returned to the unmarked dive site, dropped in alone, and miraculously returned with the inexpensive dive camera in under 10 minutes. He dives with his computer in gauge mode so he doesn't lock it out every day.

The M/V Talata wreck is a broken-up freighter with steel plates scattered about the bottom. A large green moray calls the Talata home, and made free-swimming rounds unbothered by the bubble-blowing intruders. Yellow-headed jawfish, sans eggs, popped up from the sandy bottom, and peacock flounders and juvenile drumfish were among the many other wreck inhabitants. When I spotted a seahorse, I proudly signaled "seahorse" at the same time as did Auston. It turned out that we were both pointing to different seahorses a foot apart. The Talata wreck covers a large area and there was much fauna to see amongst the strewn-out debris field. When the first diver reported 1,000 psi, we returned to the boat, and I lingered, surfacing before I hit 500 psi, a requirement, then climbed aboard via one of two ladders with the crew there to help. The water was between 81°F and 84°F, and visibility was good, varying between 50 and 100 feet.

Several visits to different parts of Brimstone Shallows Reef during the week were enjoyable. Without moorings, a fluke anchor is deployed on Auston's "secret" spots, compiled over his 30 years of owner/guide experience, so it is impossible for the liveaboard crowd and other dive operations to visit. Sharks were seen on every Brimstone visit, with one anointing me with a drive-by crapping, a first for me! On our first visit, I saw a big and beautiful queen triggerfish, which was not a common sight on St. Kitts, and there were a few parrotfish; it was later explained that they are both popular food items for the locals. During a dive on Brimstone Shallows South, Auston pounded a lead weight on a flat rock, resulting in frantic shark activity as they rushed in to see what the commotion was. We also dove Finger Reef, which went deep on both sides. All reefs were "Caribbean" healthy with corals -- I saw plenty of live coral and no bleaching -- sponges, fish, invertebrates, and, unfortunately, lionfish. Auston is a first-class fish finder and constantly pointed out subjects for the dive clientele and underwater photographers.

I'm planning to dive Malta and Truk Lagoon (Chuuk, Micronesia) in 2025, so I took the PADI Deep course with Pro Divers' Instructor, Terry Crookes, an affable Brit who has been living in St. Kitts for some time. I completed the online course at home and made the four requisite deep dives on St. Kitts on three nonconsecutive days. While I am confident in my skills honed during decades of diving, I was still ecstatic about absolutely nailing the navigation test on the 130-foot-deep featureless bottom, where the water dropped to 79?F. Terry was a great instructor, a pleasure to dive with, and provided entertaining surface interval banter.

During one of our 45-minute surface intervals, as they passed out bottles of water and fruit-flavored seltzer (no snacks), Terry and Auston recommended Marshall's Restaurant for dinner. The discussion started about lobster for dinner as one of the annual repeat patrons brought a goody bag and was big "bug" picking during our dives as they were in-season. Auston called from the boat and made a reservation for that evening. We were greeted like regulars, seated at the best table, and enjoyed a phenomenal meal with a table visit from the Chef/ Owner, Verral Marshall. The restaurant is in a hill-top neighborhood, where we spotted our first wild, though nonnative, monkey, and provides beautiful Caribbean views through the lush tree-top canopy. Our visit was so notable that we reserved a table for our last night of vacation. The seafood Coquille St. Kitts, cracked conch, and house-smoked marlin were fantastic starters. Jerk lobster pasta, grilled jerk pork loin, and surf and turf, with lobster, of course, were equally delicious.

Directly across the road from the Marriott, I discovered an Indian restaurant named Tiranga. With a deep appreciation of Indian cuisine, I found the food was excellent. I also visited The Strip, a collection of touristy bars and restaurants along a road on the Caribbean side of Frigate Bay. The mostly worn-down, loud music, fried food, and tourist-graffitied dives had some appeal but not much. Notables were Mr. X's Shiggidy Shack and Vibes Beach Bar, crowded with large, loud, and over-served female tourists if that is indeed your vibe. I also enjoyed a good dinner at Ah'len Lebanese with good-looking sushi offerings as a second restaurant under one roof. Unfortunately, I found the falafel the furthest from the best I've ever had, inexplicably. All the Frigate Bay bars and restaurants were within walking distance from the Marriott, but the trek lacked sidewalks and lighting, though we felt quite safe among the friendly residents and tourists.

I did a total of zero tourist activities beyond diving and instead spent afternoons lounging on the beach and drinking ice-cold Carib beer brewed in Basseterre. I avoided the St. Kitts Scenic Railway, a narrow-gauge railway initially constructed to transport sugarcane from the plantations to Basseterre for processing. I was told that while the rainforest and ocean scenery is fantastic for the first 15 minutes, it gets old quickly during the 4-hour slow train ride and bus completing the loop around the island. I also passed on visiting Brimstone Hill Fortress, the "Gibraltar of the West Indies," opting instead to visit its namesake reefs. In lieu of visiting Old Road, the site of the first permanent English settlement in the West Indies in 1624, I did purchase a bottle of exquisite Old Road Rum, the best sipping rum I've encountered. I also did not venture to Nevis, the birthplace of Alexander Hamilton, the other island of the two-island nation, which also has 4-star diving per my aforementioned matrix. It took me a long while to finally visit St. Kitts and Nevis. I had to leave myself a reason to return, I suppose.

-- R.A.M.

Our undercover diver's bio: "I was exposed to diving at a young age by my father and Jacques Cousteau on TV and got certified before university. Aside from dry-suit certification in Silfra, Iceland, I avoid cold-water diving, preferring the Caribbean, Micronesia, Hawaii, and the Philippines, always accompanied by my lovely wife/buddy. We recently had the honor of hosting a family return dive trip to Bonaire with 15 family members with 13 divers minus the impetus. Thanks for the diving thing, Dad, I miss you."

Divers Compass: Bradshaw Airport (SKB) is an approximately 4-hour flight from NYC's JFK on American Airlines. There are direct flights to St. Kitts from USA cities . . . Pro Divers' website says, "St Kitts is too small for us to maintain a fully stocked retail store," and if they had any space, I never saw it or was I even offered a tee shirt to purchase . . . They don't provide nitrox, but they offered good rental gear . . . The PADI Deep Diver course was $440 (4 dives included) excluding the online training . . . Two-tank dives are $110 with your own gear; $450 for five days . . . Marriott Resort View Guest Room for seven nights ran $2,400, no meals . . . Breakfast buffet was great but expensive at $35. No afternoon or night dives were available, and Pro Divers does not dive on Sundays. https://www.prodivers.com