Trip Report - Caribbean Explorer II

I was on the hunt for a last minute trip to the Caribbean for early January and had heard good things about Saba from some other local divers, so I decided to give the Caribbean Explorer II a go. They were running a great deal for the liveaboard and flights were pretty inexpensive since not many people were traveling immediately following the holidays. The Caribbean Explorer II does week long one-way trips from St. Kitts, to Saba, to St. Maarten and then the next week is the reverse. My itinerary started in St. Kitts, so I flew there from Boston via Miami on January 6th and back from St. Maarten via JFK on January 13th.

The boat

Overall, the boat is a decent size, but my room was super tiny even by liveaboard dive boat standards. I lucked out and ended up without a roommate, but it would have been really uncomfortable to have two people in the room I was in. The beds in my room were a queen bottom bunk with a twin top bunk and only barely enough space to walk between the bed and the wall. There was very little storage in the room, so I slept on the top bunk with my large suitcase on the bottom bunk.

The rest of the boat was comfortable with plenty of space on the camera table and a shelf on the dive deck for safely charging batteries. There was plenty of space on the sundeck, bow, and dining area to chill out, read a book, or identify some critters so there was no real need to hang out in my room. The food was good and plentiful, which is important with all the calories we’re burning doing 5 dives per day!

The Caribbean Explorer II!

The diving

The dive schedule was pretty typical for liveaboards that run five dives per day: breakfast, 8am dive, snack, 11am dive, lunch, (possibly nap), 2pm dive, snack, 4:30pm dive, dinner, 8pm night dive. Naturally, I did all of the dives because I’ve never missed a dive on a liveaboard - I couldn’t bear to miss something amazing!

We entered the water via giant stride with a 4 or 5 foot drop off the side. After you enter, they will lower your camera to you on a rope. The big drop is doable, but got pretty annoying after the first couple dives. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s a big, loud impact and not the most pleasant way to start the dive. Exiting is via ladders hanging in the water, so no problem there. Even in January, the water was between 79F and 82F, which was lovely.

St. Kitts Dive Sites

We started in St. Kitts where there were a number of wrecks of varying sizes and shapes to check out. Dive highlights for the St. Kitts portion included:

• Night dive at River Taw wreck, which featured mating octopus and several massive stingrays on the deck at the bow of the ship.
• “The Kindergarten”, which was a shallow area on the Paradise Reef dive site with tons of small juvenile fish and sparkling sunshine
• A tiny mantis shrimp in a coral head
• A new-to-me branching anemone
• Saw a cryptic teardrop crab!

Saba Dive Sites

On Wednesday, we made the transit over to Saba for several days of diving there. The underwater topography mirrors the surface topography - it is very rocky with some large pinnacles. We did encounter some surgy conditions and sub-par (for the Caribbean) visibility, but there was some weather nearby. Highlights included:

• Diamond Rock and surrounding area: this is a huge rocky spire that sticks out of the water and the surrounding area is really cool. We swam in a circle around it and into a sheltered area in the middle. I also watched a frigate bird chase down the terns returning to their nests after fishing and harass them until they dropped their food.
• Mating colorful lettuce leaf slugs
• Turtles all over the place, including some very close encounters
• Reef sharks at several sites
• Several nurse sharks including some close encounters

Over the course of the week, I did experience my first two dinghy pickups ever. The first dive, we were trying to navigate out to the spot where we had seen a few reef sharks on the dive before. The divemaster missed the spot, so we kept swimming in search of it over some deep coral patches. We kicked for 45 minutes ascending to stay out of deco - this meant we were 20 or 30 feet off the bottom for most of the dive, so we didn’t see anything at all. The group ran low on air before we got back to the big boat so they sent out the dinghy to tow us back.

On the second occasion, we dropped off the boat and hit some current which took us out from the boat. We had a few nice turtle encounters and then headed back toward the boat. Before we got there, we hit some really strong current in a bit of a canyon. I kicked against it for a bit but I wasn’t making much progress and was burning through air. I spotted another dive who found a mooring line to hang onto and did my safety stop there and signaled to the boat that we would need a pick up. Over the next few minutes, groups of divers popped up all over the place and I was glad we had a line to hold onto. The dinghy crew took our BCDs so we could hop in the boat and then took us to the tagline where we rolled off and pulled ourselves to the boat. This was a pretty decent dive, but the current was brutal. Only a handful of divers made it back to the boat without pickup.

Conclusion

Overall, this was a fun trip! We had a great group onboard, which meant that dives were chill and surface time was enjoyable. Our divemasters Julian and LT were great - both of them shared my enthusiasm for finding weird stuff, so they were always on the lookout and would point out whatever they found. It wasn’t my favorite boat and we didn’t have the best conditions, but it was great to get away and see some new places and critters. Now for the pictures - prints of many of these images are available on my store, but if you see one here that isn’t listed, let me know and I can add it!